Performance marketing agency Merkle has launched a new Performance Marketing Lab that comprises a cross-functional team of data scientists, developers, analysts, media experts, and product engineers. The lab helps connect all available datasets to develop rich, personalised advertising models that lead to scalable and automated advertising across digital channels.

The Lab specialises in maximising customer and brand value through a maturity framework, leveraging a standardised decisioning process that features project design, data collection, data transformation, marketing/experience activation and optimisation.

The Performance Marketing Lab is led by Matthew Mierzejewski. Previously Merkle’s senior vice president, search capability lead, Mierzejewski brings deep search expertise to his new role of managing director of the Performance Marketing Lab.

He will be overseeing a team of experts and Google certified specialists across media, data science, IT, product development and design, market research, and analytics.

“Merkle’s performance Marketing Lab is ideal for advertisers who are sitting on a mountain of first-party data but aren’t quite sure how to put it to work in their marketing campaigns. The Lab helps connect all available datasets to develop rich, personalised advertising models that lead to scalable and automated advertising across digital channels,” said Mierzejewski.

“Brands are often challenged by internal organisational silos that create miscommunication between developers and marketers. The Lab’s collaborative environment offers new opportunities for these brands to integrate and leverage their first- and third-party data assets across their people-based marketing objectives.”

Since the launch, the Lab has helped clients such as Sweetwater, a leading online retailer of musical instruments and professional audio gear, to incorporate various site behaviour attributes into predictive models and provide a better understanding of where to invest their marketing budgets.

“We worked with Sweetwater to take a statistical approach to customer segmentation”, added Mierzejewski; “by modelling thousands of customer signals, we were able to suppress customers who showed a low likelihood to purchase in our digital marketing campaigns. Moreover, we achieved this coupling Google Analytics data to Sweetwater first-party data, and activating on these customer segmentation model in near real-time,” he concluded.