Welcome to Upstream!

UpStream represents the culmination of a lot of hard work and rich collaboration between the team at Business Researchers, Inc and several leading clients with big marketing performance management challenges.  We are excited to share this work in the form of a new SaaS offering that for the first time brings together a sophisticated statistical model for revenue attribution with a powerful set of planning tools that lets you use this information to plan your marketing investments with an accurate picture of expected results. 
The team at Upstream is an eclectic group that specializes in combining advanced data analytics techniques with pragmatic application-building skills to give customers a competitive edge.  Over the last 3 years, much of our client work has been with the marketing arm of large consumer brands who face some of the toughest and most exciting challenges we've seen.  They are using many different marketing channels to reach customers who may buy their products via a number of order channels - retail stores, call centers, eCommerce sites and affiliate relationships. 
In working with these customers we've learned two things that have been packaged into Upstream.  First, understanding what campaigns are driving what revenue is a huge pain point. Companies have concocted a variety of approaches to tie marketing investments to revenue results.  As statisticians, we decided to let the data tell us, rather than hypothesizing an intuitive but unfounded algorithm.  We've used some pretty cool techniques to get better answers. (Look for more on our thinking here in subsequent blog posts from some of my colleagues.)   However, what use is better revenue attribution if you can't use it to better plan your marketing?  So we have integrated it into a set of powerful planning tools.  We think they are the best planning tools on the market today and offer great value even without our revenue attribution model.  Combining the two is almost magic.
We'd love to know what you think, and while we have Upstream as a SaaS solution for this problem, we remain consultants at heart and are always excited to tackle new challenges.