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Proof Delivers Industry's First Business Impact Analytics for Marketing and Communications
[December 06, 2016]

Proof Delivers Industry's First Business Impact Analytics for Marketing and Communications


Marketers and business executives have struggled for decades to understand and agree on the business impact created by marketing and communications. This challenge, already significant for any organization, looms large in companies with complex product portfolios and long sales cycles.

Now available and in use, Proof is the first software platform to accurately compute - versus simply model - both marketing attribution and the true business impact of marketing and communications, including both time lag and the cause and effect of various activities over extended periods of time.

Katie Paine, a marketing analytics pioneer with more than 30 years of measurement and analytics experience, recently wrote in her widely-read newsletter: "Without a doubt one of the most exciting new products I've seen come on the market in the last few years is Proof. When [Proof] first talked to me about the idea, my first thought was: 'the last thing we need is another piece of technology that promises to be the Holy Grail.' However, when I actually got to try the software this summer, I had to admit that it's damn close."

Why Proof is Different

While the recent explosion in martech tools has created a huge cloud of data, many C-suites and board rooms are still looking for a definitive understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships that exist between marketing and measured business performance.

"Proof makes it easy to crunch your marketing and sales data along with other inputs across the business to reveal what's 'moving the needles' that everyone cares about, and how long it takes to move them," said Proof founder and CEO Mark Stouse. "Proof helps business and marketing leaders evaluate the business impact of their marketing investment in a meaningful, data-driven way that requires no data science expertise."

The patent-pending Proof Correlation Engine™ brings together any available marketing and business data - as well as many types of external data - to compute how marketing affects business performance, including sales productivity, customer confidence and trust, employee retention and morale, and many other key areas. Proof also can calculate the impact that one part of marketing has on the performance of another part, and it can compute the headwind or tailwind effect that various external factors - such as economic or reputational issues - have on marketing's business impact.

Proof works with a customer's existing data - including financial, marketing automation, account-based marketing, CRM, advertising, web, social, communities, and influencer measurement - to gauge the impact of each part of the marketing mix on a range of tactical, operational, audience and business outcomes. Via its patent-pending Impact Value Chains, Proof delivers a unique, contextualized view of the ripple effect generated by different marketing investments on various business outcomes.

The use cases for Proof range from basic tactical analysis to strategic business impact. For example, Proof might determine that a company experiences a high correlation between PR coverage and sales velocity. If a company knew it needed to increase deal velocity, they could decide to put more resources toward PR and influencer relations. Part of th genius of Proof is that it also can decipher how long it will take for that investment in media relations to impact sales, enabling a marketing team to predict different parts of the marketing mix much more effectively.



"For years, business and marketing leaders have struggled to understand and optimize marketing's business impact," said Aaron Strout, chief marketing officer and head of the financial services practice at W2O Group, a global $100 million-plus marketing agency. "This frustration is particularly strong in B2B companies where months of time lag make it impossible to simply observe cause-and-effect relationships. Companies have accumulated huge amounts of marketing, customer and business data from many sources, but until Proof, no one has been able to calculate how everything combines over time to impact a particular area of business performance. W2O is excited to be part of this breakthrough." See additional video at https://proofanalytics.ai/testimonials/.

Equally important is that Proof was designed to be scalable from one seat to many. If a company employee purchases a seat, they can connect with all other colleagues inside the same company who also have a Proof seat, creating a secured private network of shared data and insights.


Proof's Origin

Perspective and experience mean a lot, and it's the 10 years of continuous real-world testing and intense collaborations with hundreds of business, technology, agency and marketing leaders that differentiates Proof.

"Our collaboration with business leaders was crucial to our success as we built this system and later this software platform," said Kyle Brantley, a Proof co-founder who leads product management and customer support. "We have worked with Fortune 1000 executives of every stripe because we knew that whatever we created had to work for them in order to be relevant and worthwhile."

In 2005, during his tenure as a global communications leader at HP, Stouse first began to seek perspective on the problem from senior business leaders, including then-CEO Mark Hurd. Later, Stouse moved on to lead large global marketing and communications teams at companies like BMC Software (News - Alert) and then at Honeywell Aerospace. He and his teams continued to work with many CEOs, CFOs, COOs and sales leaders - both in these companies and many others - to frame and test various logic frameworks, or heuristics, that would ultimately "connect the dots" to the satisfaction of the business leaders.

Crucially, the logic framework had to be able to be effectively instrumented so the multitude of relationships could be computed even in large scale situations. Brantley, a former NASA engineer and head of marketing operations and technology at BMC Software, brought a deep knowledge of the technical nuts and bolts of the problem.

"For all of its obvious innovation, one of Proof's most important attributes is that the underlying algorithms we use to compute Time to Impact and Correlation have been mainstays of data scientists and analysts for many years," said Brantley. "Proof has combined these long-proven algorithms with advanced pattern recognition technology to create the Proof Correlation Engine, which automates the calculation of Time to Impact (time lag) and helps customers explore the 'cause-and-effect' relationships that are often hidden in the huge mass of marketing, sales and business data."

Today, Proof has a growing base of early adopters, including agencies and consultancies such as W2O Group, Actual, and PRIME Research. LDWW Group, with clients such as Carnival Cruise Lines, Omni Hotels and Resorts, GameStop Corporation, and the Big 12 Sports Conference, is both a Proof investor and a partner. Fifth Ring, a marketing agency representing global energy and industrial clients such as Aberdeen Harbor, Global Maritime, Al Mansoori, Servion and International Enterprise Singapore (News - Alert), will offer Proof to its clients.

Depending on the needs of the customer, Proof can be purchased in several ways, including consumption-based licenses, individual and enterprise seat licenses, and turnkey Software-Enabled Service delivery (SeS) delivered by Proof or its partners.

Visit www.proofanalytics.ai for more information.

Founded in 2015, Proof is the first software company in the world to deliver what has always been elusive for marketing and communications: a solution that enables individuals and organizations to accurately compute the value that marketing and communications professionals create every day for businesses around the world. The logic framework and system behind Proof has received both industry and corporate recognition, including the 2009 Golden SABRE Technology Award, a 2009 BMC Software Special Innovation Award, and the Holmes Report 2014 Innovator of the Year and the 2014 Diamond SABRE Award for Marketing Analytics.


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