Stone Ward, Lyon Partner to Parse Data

Brett Parker

Millie Ward views her marketing agency’s 21st-century data science partnership with Lyon College through a fanciful 19th-century lens: Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass.

“If you think of every customer touch point in a marketing proposition, that is also a data point,” the Stone Ward president said in a phone interview last week. “If you put all of those data points together, it’s like solving a puzzle.

“Back in the day, you thought of a detective as Sherlock Holmes. Now, for a marketing agency to be a detective for a client, examining every clue to understand where the best opportunities lie, you use data to do all of that.”

In the partnership, announced this month, Stone Ward will give students in the Batesville liberal arts college’s new data science program access to real-life raw data anonymized by the firm’s data analytics team.

They’ll get hands-on experience with real data, and can earn academic credit through “micro-internships” with Stone Ward. In return, the agency gets the college team’s focus on analyzing client data and offering marketing recommendations for those businesses, said Brett Parker, the agency’s director of media and digital services.

“We take analytics very seriously at the firm, and whether or not you’re in marketing, everyone now is saturated with analytics, but they’re not sure what to do with it,” Parker said, predicting that the partnership will allow the firm access to “some of the brightest minds” studying data in Arkansas, and that some of those minds could likely join his analytics team eventually through the internships.

Bringing along talent is a Stone Ward hallmark, said Parker, who came up through the firm’s Camp Reality internship program. “I started here 11 years ago as an intern, and now I’ve kind of made my way up to director level, which is a testament to the leadership here in developing young careers.”

Ward called the partnership an extension of Stone Ward’s philosophy of giving college students “a real life experience to sort of sample what it’s like to be in the advertising and marketing business, what it’s really like, not just what they’re learning in their studies.”

Ward and Parker said the partnership idea originated with Stone Ward.

“We saw a while back that Lyon College was going to be the first private university in the state to have a major dedicated to data science,” Parker said. “And we got really excited about that internally, seeing an opportunity right in our backyard.” The team will be working closely with Lyon’s new data science professor, Torumoy Ghoshal.

Ward’s marketing analyst, Matt Stewart, noted that “2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, and that volume is just overwhelming.

“And part of helping our clients is educating our future data analysts. We wanted to empower the students to be able to deal with real-world models, so that they help build up businesses now and in the future,” Stewart said.

Ward likes to say that marketing will always be part science and part magic. Boiling down all those megabytes into sales opportunities is where the science comes in, Stewart said. “At the end of the day, real people are needed to develop marketing strategies and objectives that make use of that data.”

According to a memorandum of understanding between Lyon and Stone Ward, students will use the consumer information in several ways to help clients, including choosing media channels for advertising certain products, assessing company performance, and determining effective pricing for particular products or services.

Melissa Taverner, provost of the 660-student college, which has gone all-virtual this semester, sees the partnership as a “really unique opportunity for students to deploy and to apply the things that they’re learning in the classroom in a real-world internship or micro-internship situation.”

The college has a new major and minor in data science, and Ghoshal “actually has experience doing analytics for companies as they decide how to do advertising,” Taverner told Arkansas Business. “That was all independent of Matthew Stewart reaching out.”

Taverner, who was named provost in early 2018, talked the idea over with the faculty and saw possibilities. “Our students are learning a particular skill set that’s incredibly valuable. And it becomes real to them when they can actually deploy those skills and analyses in a real-world situation.”