Training, Day 2

I’m in the second day of training at Unica’s headquarters in suburban Boston. The product is actually really cool; it’s a tool to understand customer behavior, send messages to them, track responses — all the stuff that you assume that “evil marketers” are doing from their offices on Madison Avenue, but in reality they actually aren’t doing at all. We’ve been playing with sample data — donor information for gifts to a veteran’s organization — and have been running chi-squared automated integration detection models on them, then naive bayne matrices, then neural nets — I’m floundering in a sea of interesting math that I don’t really understand. (We discovered that the average amount of the individual donation was the best predictor for future response rate.) I’m enjoying it, though, and so is Boris Lerner, even if he doesn’t look like it.

Dean Shattuck, in the foreground, works in [My employer] Boston. He rode his new Ducati Monster to the training session, and we all stood around and looked at it over lunch. Then we compared it with a Honda Gold Wing nearby. The weather’s beautiful.

On the whole, not much going on.