MandM: Lightning Fast Value From Data Science With Dataiku
MandM uses Dataiku’s deployment infrastructure and MLOps capabilities to amplify the impact of their modest data science team, delivering impactful use cases across the company.
Learn MoreThe data and analytics team has been a part of online marketplace company Mercado Libre for nearly a decade and currently consists of 400 people divided into different teams according to their function.
On one hand, there are the verticals that support the most important business units within Mercado Libre, such as fintech and commerce. There are also the horizontals responsible for facilitating capabilities to the entire data team and to all of Mercado Libre. They own administration and development of data tools, generation of new data products, data governance, and data culture.
Today, Mercado Libre has more than 2,000 data scientists (some of them sit within business units) who impact its business with over 100 initiatives on a daily basis. When it comes to Generative AI, Mercado Libre held a hackathon that resulted in over 200 ideas, 10 of which are already being explored more seriously.
With an already sophisticated analytics and AI practice evidenced by the information above, discover how Mercado Libre is driving innovation and growth via a very specific initiative designed to enhance the discovery of potential new customers: Lookalikes.
What Is the Lookalikes Tool and How Does It Work?
Every day, the marketing and business teams send many communications (across email, real estate, and push notifications) to acquire new customers, prevent churn, and generate cross-sell opportunities. To accurately perform these actions and develop impactful contact strategies, Mercado Libre needed a deep understanding of their users’ profiles, in order to optimize overall campaign conversion rates.
The key use case the Mercado Libre team uses Dataiku for is the development and implementation of their Lookalikes tool. The application serves both users without experience in development or analysis as well as those with expertise in these areas, offering them valuable tools for execution.
Specifically, Dataiku enables Mercado Libre to leverage an initial user base to generate a predictive model that identifies the most representative characteristics of these users. This type of predictive model (also known as a lookalike model or similar audience model) allows the team to anticipate who could be potential users in the future, facilitating targeting marketing efforts and improving customer acquisition strategies.
End users were involved in the project’s evolution, providing feedback that was instrumental in guiding the enhancements and updates of the project. Dataiku’s capabilities enable the team to tailor the Lookalikes application specifically for use with Mercado Libre data, simplifying implementation for users and providing them with a user-friendly interface for autonomous and hassle-free testing.
The Right Value Proposition to the Right User at the Right Time
Before Dataiku, the process of achieving the use case resembled a variety of methods commonly used at Mercado Libre, primarily based on machine learning, to generate marketing audiences. However, Lookalikes offers a distinct approach by rapidly cloning target audiences using comprehensive customer insights, providing a 360-degree view.
As the application of Lookalikes has progressed, it has garnered increasing adoption due to its ability to deliver superior results within a reduced development timeframe, even for users who are not data scientists. This surpasses the current metric value of campaigns, indicating its effectiveness in enhancing marketing strategies.