Tableau Slices Data Manipulation Time


Because Tableau is powerful and easy to use, our analysts can rapidly uncover and deliver important insights that improve our clients' campaigns. In today's marketplace, that time saved may be Tableau's greatest benefit.

Customer Profile

The Martin Agency is a leading advertising, branding and marketing agency ranked by Advertising Age as the #3 agency in 2008. Headquartered in Richmond, VA, the company provides strategic planning, creative development (online and offline) and media planning and buying through its media arm, Ingenuity Media Group.

Customer Case Description

The Ingenuity Media Group, as with most marketing and advertising agencies, relies heavily upon measurement capabilities to gauge how external audiences perceive their clients’ online advertising and interactive media, the overall success of campaigns and, most importantly, quickly identify and correct any issues with a campaign. Speed, accuracy and flexibility are vital to the creation of useful reports, and how they are presented helps showcase the Ingenuity Media Group’s work by quickly identifying which brands and campaigns are effective or, alternately, what changes need to be made to increase their effectiveness.

Producing these analyses with Ingenuity Media Group’s traditional processes, however, was an extremely time-consuming task. In order to produce reports for its clients, analysts had to spend hours processing data and converting it into visual form. From there, they created an Excel document and converted it to a PDF, before finally sending the information to the client. With this method in place, preparing weekly, bi-weekly or monthly reports took hours. Ingenuity Media Group needed a tool that would aid in data manipulation to create useful and easy-to-understand reports for its clients.

The Solution

Since deploying Tableau’s intuitive visual data analysis solution, the company is able to more quickly and accurately analyze data for its clients in order to identify campaigns and media that are underperforming. Now, armed with Tableau’s ability to access data from any source, ease-of-use and advanced visual analysis capabilities, the Ingenuity Media Group has been able to drastically reduce the amount of time spent on creating analyses—reports that previously took more than five hours to produce now take 45 minutes.

tableau data manipulation

“We needed a more efficient way of analyzing important data points for our clients,” said Ben Winkler, VP/Director of Interactive Media, Ingenuity Media Group. “Now, we can immediately identify patterns and trends that would not have been evident in our previous reports. The more quickly we can flag those important trends, the faster we can act to enhance and protect our clients’ brands.”

In addition to decreasing the time required to compile and analyze reports, Ingenuity Media Group analysts are able to dig deeper and view client data in different ways, providing more in-depth and valuable visualizations.

“By taking advantage of Tableau’s visualization capabilities, we are able to display more relevant information to our clients in more meaningful ways,” said Winkler. “And our employees, in turn, are able to become more efficient with their time and do more with the information they have. Our clients are very pleased and impressed with our decision to implement Tableau.”

For More Information About This Case

Contact: visualanalysis@tableau.com or call (206) 633-3400 x1