A Pioneer in its Industry MMA Launches Portal

Application

  • Avista DSS (Decision Support Service) Portal

Description

  • Customer-based Portal for MMA’s subscribed companies

Business Needs

  • Unique and innovative self-service portal experience
  • Client side customization
  • Intuitive, consistent interface
  • “Real time” simulations and analytics

CLIENT BACKGROUND

Marketing Management Analytics (MMA), a unit of Aegis Group, is a marketing mix modeling industry pioneer. MMA’s customer base includes several leading global marketers in the areas of consumer products, retail stores and financial institutions. Since their inception in 1989, they quickly became known by clients for their consistent development of cutting edge methods for quantifying the sales impact of advertising and other marketing mix components. MMA was among the first to implement the methodology for quantifying diminishing marginal returns for advertising, and has modeled more than 1,000 brands and products for Fortune 500 companies.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Companies are continually faced with more options on where to spend their marketing dollars. In addition, marketers now require greater accountability and the need to show ROI for their marketing investments. With the changing marketplace and corporate environment, MMA needed a competitive advantage and wished to create a new revenue stream which utilized their proven analytics systems and put them in the hands of their clients.

SOLUTION

MMA launched Avista DSS in 2005 representing the industry’s largest investment in on-demand marketing services. A self-service customer portal, Avista provides marketing managers at Fortune 500 companies with 'what if' scenario planning and optimization of marketing and media plans.

When MMA asked IBM to recommend a business partner to help their development effort, Prolifics was brought in to work on the Avista project. MMA looked at several solutions including Oracle/BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere Portal before choosing WebSphere Portal. MMA’s desire was to create a portal based on J2EE technologies and open standards, with reliability and a robust application server, not just content aggregation like BEA Plumtree and Microsoft SharePoint. Customization of the portal for customer branding and creating an intuitive user experience was also important for their audience. IBM fulfilled these requirements and its integrated product platform made it the logical choice.

Prolifics, MMA’s technology partner, helped develop Avista, with key features including dashboards, key performance indicators, alerts and reporting within the portal. Avista also provides a customer reporting tool allowing clients to create their own reports and dashboards. The portal integrates with SAS to present data and images within portlets.This solution allows MMA to provide an ASP model to these customers, that can also be seamlessly integrated into the customer’s internal portal, such that the customers retain their own branding, security model and personalization.

Since Avista’s launch, MMA has created a significant gap between themselves and their competition. Feedback from their clients and industry recognition has solidified their reputation as marketing innovators. Clients have reacted positively to the ability to have ongoing data updates, recent and current look at performance and corrections throughout year. Avista was selected by Gartner as one of nine “Cool Vendors in CRM Marketing and Analytics, 2006” and has been written up in both the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Avista DSS is paving the way for MMA’s mission to become the “marketer’s desktop.”

"Prolifics brings tremendous value to MMA with their deep knowledge of the portal application, top-notch Java skills, and strong partner relationship with IBM.”
— David Skinner, Senior VP of Product Development and Consulting