Automate Essential Insights

Merkle needed to solve a myriad of problems centered around getting customers to the “why” of what they are seeing in their dashboards. They needed a solution to analyze and provide insightful, guided intelligence without requiring analysts to manually write out reports. This solution also needed to be easy and intuitive to use in order to drive adoption of the dashboard. They turned to Wordsmith because of its native integration with Tableau and ability to extract and translate insights in real-time.

Wordsmith Meets Archie

Currently, Wordsmith is available within Merkle’s Archie platform. Archie is a centralized analytics reporting platform built using Tableau for media and CRM. Hundreds of users with different business needs use Archie’s data visualizations to scale insights. Wordsmith’s ability to translate the underlying data into insights for these users helps to free up time for analytics, while reducing time-to-insight.

Increased Efficiency

Before introducing Wordsmith, analysts would spend 30+ hours every month pulling together basic summary statements and supporting data visualizations for weekly reports. With Wordsmith, these reports and insights have been automated, eliminating the requirement for analysts to manually repeat their efforts every week. As the Archie platform scales to a wider customer base, Merkle estimates they are freeing up hundreds of man hours every month by leveraging Wordsmith to create dashboard commentary. Analysts are now able to spend this time working on deeper analytical questions and additional projects.

Merkle found that the addition of Wordsmith greatly assisted with adoption of the dashboard and reduced time-to-insights. A key driver of this is Wordsmith’s ability to update narratives based on what the user clicks in the dashboard. Thanks to its seamless integration with Tableau, Wordsmith is able to surface deeper-level insights that are not visually present in the dashboard, but that are present in the underlying data. This combined with Wordsmith’s ability to update in real-time as users interact with the dashboard provides a level of depth and interactivity not previously possible.

A Budding Partnership

With one successful go-live completed, Merkle is already evaluating additional ways to expand its usage of Wordsmith’s natural language generation capabilities to build a data culture and benefit its customers. While Merkle is currently focusing on using Wordsmith to help automate key insights across core media and CRM reporting at scale, they plan to apply it to some of the more advanced analytics offerings like attribution, media mix, and scenario planning.