Background
Launch’s client has been using a training technology to educate workers about regulation and compliance issues, avoiding the need for a manager to do days of on-the-job training for each worker.  Thus far the technology has been used in a single vertical — one that’s ideal for the technology — with great success.

But is the best direction to expand into a related vertical int he same industry, into another industry, or even into another country?

Description of Work
Advance Analysis was hired by Launch Marketing to segment potential vertical/industry, size each using key metrics, explore international markets at a high level, and list all companies in the best verticals and industries.  Top companies in each were sized using number of locations and employees.

Advance Analysis was able to provide the above information in report form, and present it, within a 10-hour limit.

One tried sued me when I asked him to explain an incomprehensible invoice (the judge dismissed the suit when it was filed).  This was after calling my client’s Web site, the one he was working on, a "piece of crap" and, through email, ranting graphically about a wide range of real or imagined issues.

Another kept telling me for weeks that she was 99% done with a Web programming project that I eventually discovered she’d only just begun.  I have to think that her work samples weren’t hers.  But the stunning part of this was that her references were another woman’s references, someone who actually could program, with the same first name.

A third (an excellent programmer by the way) gave me some free nights at a Reno resort which was, I guess, his way of making himself feel less guilty about quitting my job in the middle to take on a higher-paying job.  I also found out that he’d used the same bizarre excuse with me that he’d used with a number of former clients to explain why work was delayed: his neighbor was backing up and ran over the programmer’s dog’s leg and, trying to avoid the rest of the dog (?), backed into the programmer’s car!

The vast majority of my contractors have worked out well enough, but I’ve only the past few years really figured out how to consistently hire responsible, hard-working vendors from Craigslist.org:

There are two really key qualities that predict a good contractor.  All of the other ones like big-name client experience, gushing recommendations, a very long client list, decades of experience, English language proficiency, and hourly rate, don’t seem to discriminate great contractors from good ones.

I always ask for a traditional resume.  By this I mean a resume where all time since finishing education is accounted for and where education is listed.  When I just get a link to an online overview of recent jobs or when someone overlooks this request I’ve found the contractor to be irresponsible.  People who have traditional resumes tend to have worked outside of just programming, to have some real world experience, to have been forced to be responsible.  Those who don’t but are willing to put one together tend to be hard workers.

I don’t hire anyone who can’t give me 2-3 references who have had really almost exactly the same work done that I’m hiring the programmer for.  I also try to ensure everything makes sense about the reference.  Not a friend or relative.  Got to know the programmer.  Tried to hire the programmer as an employee.  Anticipates hiring him or her again as a contractor.

When I have the luxury there are two other qualities I look for: I ask to meet in person with the contractor, usually at a café.  When the person is on time or early they almost always end up getting work done on time and sticking with the project.  I look for a clear-thinking contractor, even at the expense of some depth of thought.  This tends to predict contractors who don’t get in over their heads…who know what they can handle and what they can’t.

I hope this is helpful.

Background
MGM Grand’s online division was in limbo.  It offered gambling games, but being restricted to pretend money it couldn’t really compete with the offshore gambling Web sites.  And by combining gambling with tours of facilities and offers it was at a competitive disadvantage with some other Vegas casino Web sites.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis working for Boomers and Beyond (then Riff Raff Communications) helped to develop a strategy to tie together the gaming and offers through emails targeting gamers with hotel and casino offers (and offers based on game performance) and informing former guests about both discounts targeted to their visit and the way in which online gaming would help them become more comfortable with new casino games.

Advance Analysis developed an entire email-sending system that would work with hundreds of thousands and even millions of emails, organized into different campaigns, and allowed for monitoring of the bounce rate, open rate, and click-through rates, all in real time (using an feature of IIS that allowed log files to be stored in a SQL Server database instead of text files).

Working in Boomers’ office space, together we were able to view results and tweak the subject lines and the content of emails based on the results from an earlier batch to improve the click-through rate during the campaign.

Another innovation at the time was the ability to send out flash emails where the flash was housed in a table with an animated gif background, allowing anyone with or without flash to view the animation.

The point fo the campaign wasn’t just to expose potential visitors to new offers and discounts but also to learn which offers and discounts were the most appealing…and how to best present them.

Background
The East Bay Regional Park District was thinking ahead: its most recent ballot effort succeeded, but just barely, after three near misses.  The Park District’s missing, and what it needed funding for, is to buy land that would otherwise be developed, and turn it in to park land or leave it empty as a noise/pollution/etc. barrier. 

Thinking about the election in 2008 EBRPD wanted to be sure to raise money, and it wanted to find out what it could definitely ask for and get, but it also wanted to start to communicate all of its benefits to the all Alameda and Contra Costa county residents.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis developed a discussion guide, carefully plotted out geographies to ensure proper representation, developed a screener, and hired a recruiter.  Then conducted all of the interviews: most in-person but some by phone when in-person wasn’t realistic.  Finally, Advance Analysis put together a report on the findings along with recommendations, assisted by Adams Consulting.

The findings were presented in multiple dimensions of likes and benefits of the parks, with final messaging from Madison Sproul based on the research.

Background
The California Department of Health Services wanted to add an online channel to its broad initiative to encourage teens to take steps to avoid getting pregnant.  Boomers and Beyond (then Riff Raff Communications) was hired by CDHS’ PR agency – Hill and Knowlton – to design the site (itsuptome.org).  The vendor H&K originally used for programming got behind schedule and over budget after the first month of work.

Description of Work
H&K decided to move the programming over to Boomers and we were able to knock down costs to the other vendor’s original estimate by locating a less expensive dedicated server and re-organizing the work so that similar jobs were done together instead of basing the work order on the site map.  At the same time we were able to add games to the site as well as a number of other interactive approaches to educating teens.  The site launched on time and on budget.

A background in niche marketing to seniors was actually very valuable in developing communications that didn’t fall into stereotypes but hopefully came across and genuine and useful.

Background
As the capitation amount for Medicare HMOs began to fall behind the actual average costs HMOs were incurring they began to look for ways to save money in their marketing.  One way was to use a predictive model of buyers to limit mailing.  The hope was that an HMO could mail to 50% of the prospects but still get 80% of the members it would if it mailed everyone.

Some HMOs were also interested in delivering different messages to different segments of customers.

Others wanted the ad agency to develop attrition models to guide pre-attrition communications and offers.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis developed predictive buying models for Medicare HMOs in Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Georgia, Wisconsin, California, and elsewhere…a total of 14 state BCBS companies.  Cluster analysis was developed for two companies to allow more customized creative approaches.

We were lucky that we were able to get access to the results from the modeled direct mailing in most cases.  We found that some models did well while others did not.  New Jersey’s model was the first, developed by an outside vendor of the ad agency, and did not do well because of data problems.  Wisconsin’s was the last and their market was changing too fast for the model to be at all valid.  More stable companies such as BCBS Georgia benefited significantly from the models and saw response rates and joining rates jump substantially.

In addition to learning the lesson that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mail in one market situation with a model developed from lists mailed in another, it became clear that certain variables were consistently highly predictive of behavior while other expected ones were not at all.  For example, in predicting who would join Medicare Supplemental plans the number of people in the household was often the strongest predictor: aging parents who had support from adult children (lived in larger households), it appeared, were much less likely to buy a Supplemental plan, once income was held constant.

The other valuable lessons that came from this experience were: (a) how important it is to understand all of the data elements fully, (b) now important it was to factor in the number of mailings each recipient got, and (c) how valuable breaking down the process into logical steps could be.  In this case it was very useful to develop separate models of "responders" and "joiners".  A model representing the difference between those who joined and those who didn’t even respond was often minimally predictive:

• For example, one BCBS plan had a premium brand connoting trust and quality, but their Medicare Supplemental product was actually the least expensive and carried the fewest benefits in the market.  So, the responders were on average high income and highly educated, but most didn’t join because when they learned about the product they realized that they could afford something better.
   
• The joiners were the lower income subset of the responders, resembling the full list pretty well and thus very difficult to identify through modeling.

Although the two models weren’t very useful for improving acquisition, understanding the responding and the joining processes separately was incredibly valuable as a diagnostic tool and led to a change in how marketing was conducted at every level.

Background
Boeing, which has the reputation for having the very best engineers in the country, takes a particular approach to recruiting and hiring, and has a certain slant to its employment package, which in today’s job market may not be ideal.

Boeing has a very, very (very) objective method of screening job applicants via computer.  But there are some potential drawbacks of this method.

Boeing’s employment package is based on the old-fashioned big employer model which was part of the fabric of the country through the 70s: expecting young employees to earn their stripes and then getting large raises the longer one is an employee.  Apart from starting salary and raises, though, the benefit package is appealing in most ways; there are exceptions such as making contracting financially more appealing than remaining an employee in some cases.

Boeing’s specific recruitment practices are left to employees who do the recruiting and thus vary quite a bit from job fair to job fair and from campus to campus.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis recruited telephone interview participants including engineer and non-engineer employees, non-employee consultants, and engineers employed by competitors after being accepted at Boeing.

The approach to these interviews was to discuss an entire process chronologically from the participant’s exposure to any recruitment (and even earlier: their first opinions of Boeing as early as childhood) all the way through the present, exploring each stage at a cursory level when the participant’s responses matched those of earlier participants and a deeper level when there was a more unique contribution.

Interviews were audio recorded (and all participants had to agree to this first) on the computer using Sony Vegas.  The purpose of recording interviews was that patterns in the response data could be verified by re-listening to interviews.  Vegas was such a great tool because it’s easy to insert notes visually at points in the interview time line in real time, and it’s possible to annotate different files and easily identify all interviews that fall into the same category.  Finally, with Vegas it’s easy to export audio clips (as wma/wmv files) and insert them into a Power Point deck provide examples of the observations reported therein.

Background
Sage Eldercare Solutions is a quickly growing eldercare company founded by a friend.  The site and graphics were designed by someone who eventually was unavailable to work on it.

Eventually a problem occurred: the testimonial bulletin board being was hacked.  At the time Sage didn’t have the budget to pay a Web site development company to do the work and because of the sensitive nature of the site they didn’t want to hire someone off of craigslist.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis fixed the php code that allowed automated "bots" to access the testimonial form and post ads instead of reviews, and later fixed php coding when the site was moved to a new host with a different version of php.  Advance Analysis also provided recommendations to make the site more secure and was hired to follow these, introducing a (customized) captcha.

Because the changes could be fit into available slots – they weren’t incredibly urgent – it was possible for Advance Analysis to do the work efficienty without being on a retainer.

Background
SBCS Medical sells office equipment to audiologists and otologists.  With a major industry convention approaching they needed to have a pdf with a long list of participants converted into an email and printed mail list, and then have emails sent inexpensively.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis had to systematically convert the pdf into a database, even though email address and physical address weren’t in the same location for all members of the list.  Using TextPad, which has an excellent regular expressions search-and-replace functionality, along with Acrobat and SPSS, Advance Analysis was able to produce an accuate list very efficiently.  With left-over time on the project, missing email addresses and physical addresses were located online and added to the list.

One email was sent out using Outlook and Send Personally.  After that project it seemed more cost-effective to use Constant Contact because of the unsubscribe mechanism and the ability to screen email addresses and identify problems.

Background
This cancer research organization’s name does not describe the organization very well, implying a much more limited scope of work than it is involved in, and failing to distinguish the organization from cancer research centers that try to find a cure, when in fact this group tries to prevent cancer: a goal that most survivors and relatives of cancer sufferers will tell you is a more realistic and urgent one.

Description of Work
Advance Analysis developed a survey in partnership with Verve Marketing to test five alternative names.  Then Advance Analysis programmed the survey into Zoomerang, and then adjusted the Zoomerang survey to match the implementation of the same survey through Everywun.  Finally, Advance Analysis did some data processing and hygiene on the Everywun data, combining it with the Zoomerang data, analyzed the dataset to identify the name with the most perceived value, and wrote a brief report explaining the results.

Advance Analysis, because of extensive experience with surveys, was able to advise the client that comparing these five similar names to each other might emphasize the subtle differences, yielding a different most-preferred name than would be found if each name was compared to existing cancer research institutions.  As a result, a number of ways of measuring value were used and, indeed, they were all valuable together in choosing a new name.