New Analytics Firm Offers Expert Support

In the US, The Modellers co-founder Dr. Chris Diener has returned to his roots with a new company, The Analytics Team, offering a 'pure' analytics service model to clients in internal and external MR teams.

Salt Lake City-based The Modellers began life in 1998 as an expert support agency helping research and consultancy clients with advanced analytics services. By the time it was acquired by Omnicom Group four and a half years ago, The Modellers had broadened into a full-service agency, creating tensions with some of its original clients - in recognition of this it soon launched a distinct division, ModHub, with Diener as Executive Director and providing agency clients with choice modelling and segmentation, including big data analytics.

Diener left Omnicom in November 2012 to join analytics and research firm AbsolutData as SVP and part of the leadership team, then spent the last eighteen months as EVP and GM at Santa Monica, CA-based Murphy Research. Earlier he also worked as Managing Partner at King Brown Partners and as an SVP at US full service firm LRW, and was the first Director of Marketing Science at Colmar Brunton in the 1990s.

His new venture, The Analytics Team, Inc., will provide high quality traditional multivariate analytics from maps and driver models, through chaid and segmentation, to MaxDiff and choice modeling or choice-based conjoint - along with database, social media, and marketing analytics helping MR teams to integrate all their data. Diener says The Modellers was originally pitched as 'the company that could solve your toughest problems - sort of the pinnacle of advanced analytics', whereas the new firm recognises that now 'Most research firms don't need the ultimate complex solution. And many of the existing needs are more standard'. Clients or partners now want 'to differentiate based on unique, innovative solutions and custom-fit insights... to build their own brands and potentially design their own signature or hallmark services'. The company will also train people to design and apply analytics tools, such that 'there is a time when they will use us less and rely more on their internal resources'.

Diener concludes: 'We are hero support. We are like Q for Bond or Edna Mode in The Incredibles - we outfit our clients with new capabilities and solutions to win more work - and make them look good in the process'.

The new firm is online at www.analytics-team.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.