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Posit Connect

R in Digital Marketing Production with Extendo and ixpantia

Written by Gloria Rodríguez Ramírez, Head of Data Science, Paul Fervoy, Founder and VP of Business Development, and Carlos Pravia Jácamo, Founder and Head of Digital Marketing, at Extendo.
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Extendo(opens in a new tab), operating as MiWeb(opens in a new tab) in North America, is a digital marketing organization that specializes in data-driven marketing strategy. As large platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon dominate the digital marketing space, the Extendo team wanted to deliver beyond traditional descriptive analysis of platform data, and offer predictive insights that were based on serious data science.

“We came to understand that we needed to evolve our data analysis and the products of this analysis to include predictive analysis that could use advanced statistical methods to impact not only our clients’ decision-making processes, but be used as models to directly affect changes in their marketing processes.”

As a result, they teamed up with Posit Full Service Partner, ixpantia, to architect an environment with Posit Connect that utilized Shiny app visualizations for their clients’ digital marketing needs, improve their data modeling skills, and craft scalable and repeatable DataOps workflows between their data engineering and data science teams. Hear their conversation on how they made it all possible, and what’s in the future for Extendo’s digital ecosystem.

"Rather than creating and connecting each piece of the architecture, Posit Connect standardizes this process and allows our team to focus on designing solutions rather than managing the architecture.”

Paul Fervoy
Founder and VP of Business Development

The Challenge

The Extendo data science and data engineering teams understood they would need to have a clearer understanding of the digital marketing ecosystem and the data sources and structures most commonly employed by their clients. They realized that the intersection of their data science and data engineering teams would require new workflows and tools, and a closer relationship to the public cloud providers to collect, transform, and activate their clients’ data strategies.

Ultimately they came to understand that to win in this space, they would need more robust tooling and to become proficient in DataOps, ixpantia’s take on serious data science(opens in a new tab), and that this would require outside help.

The primary issues were:

  • Problems delivering their service vision of actionable insights
  • Problems complying with new GDPR privacy environments
  • Problems with developing their own competencies for Serious Data Science

Our Solution

“Posit has facilitated our growth as a team, providing us an orderly and scalable environment for our data engineers and data scientists to work together. Our clients have benefitted from this process as the data products we deliver are better built and better withstand the test of time.”

ixpantia was the change agent for the Extendo team. In terms of learning best practices with Posit, ixpantia:

  • Taught the philosophy of DataOps for serious data science: creating and documenting projects, the value of open-source tooling, reproducibility, and version control.
  • Designed and taught them about the microservices architecture most suited to their work in deploying data products for digital marketing.
  • Taught them robust new architectures and code for developing interactive data visualization applications that use Shiny and Posit Connect.

Why Posit Connect?

With ixpantia’s guidance, the Extendo team adopted Posit Connect and serious data science practices to make their analyses more credible, reproducible, and scalable. With Posit Connect, the team is able to deliver interactive data products to a variety of clients while maintaining a unified code base that allows them to manage and scale these products effectively and efficiently.

"We have matured from offering digital marketing campaign reporting and visualization and simple exploratory analysis services - to now providing advanced inferential statistical analysis to improve digital strategy and marketing operations as well as developing and deploying data products that enable us to activate our clients’ data in a production environment. Today, we are capable of creating data models that affect essential digital marketing production processes and impact our clients’ ability to improve customer experience and satisfaction. In this role, we are allowing our clients to make Marketing a core function of their business strategy."

Carlos Pravia Jácamo
Founder and Head of Digital Marketing, at Extendo

About Extendo

Extendo, operating as MiWeb(opens in a new tab)   in North America, is a data-driven marketing production firm, specializing in the collection, identity resolution, transformation and activation of its clients’ data strategies. Its team of data and cloud engineers, data scientists and market data analysts are experts in digital channels and the use of data in marketing platforms. Extendo creates maturity in the governance and use of data that allow CMOs, CIOs and their teams to develop innovative strategies that promote value exchanges with their customers.

About ixpantia

At ixpantia, our passionate and experienced data scientists and business consultants work with organizations around the world to empower them to innovate with a data-driven approach. From our headquarters in Latin America we support our customers and help their teams develop data products and deploy them to production.

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