Optimization Partners
Empowering Enterprises with Smart and Effective Analytics

Profits in the retail sector are plummeting. Stores are shutting down, and malls are emptying. The depressing stories of brick-and-mortar stores dissipating in the wake of online shopping’s skyrocketing popularity keep coming. In an era where heavyweight incumbents like Amazon and Google continue leveraging analytical data-driven marketing to create sustainable moats against the competition, many pundits predict that brick-and-mortar stores might lose footing against their spending and technological might. However, Bart Flaherty begs to differ. Having amassed years of experience and credibility through various data science and agency leadership positions, Flaherty believes in the power of innovation to thrive on change.

In an ambitious bid to help small to medium-sized business and enterprise clients innovate and solve their most pressing issues and optimize their sales and profits, Flaherty founded Optimization Partners. The company specializes in PR, marketing, sales, and e-commerce, by empowering customers with AI-powered technology platforms, solutions, and predictive analytics. “We’ve built a platform and an approach that help brands compete on a level playing field with the big data and technology companies like Amazon and Google,” says Bart Flaherty.

Optimization Partners is governed by a mission to enable brand owners and manufacturers to fight and win against the robotic algorithms that dominate e-commerce platforms in this new retail world. Flaherty with his team have developed an analytics platform and data management solution—the Vendor Analytics Management (VAM) platform—that heavily focuses on e-commerce, marketing, and public relations. The platform helps users find new and unique ways to gather and interpret data for developing insights more responsibly and responsively to keep up with the pace of e-commerce. By intersecting data, technology, experience, and insight, Optimization Partners assists in influencing consumers and customers along their path to purchase.

At their core, the efforts of Optimization Partners revolve around leading companies to operate on “insights, not instincts.” Their seasoned data science and analytics team deliver wisdom at the enterprise level, helping clients achieve the same plane of data integration as their larger Silicon Valley tech counterparts, along with the ability to mine tremendous amounts of data in real time with its VAM platform. “We have powerful machine learning analytics that sits on top of the data to parse out the cause and effect relationships that drive our clients’ online business,” illustrates Flaherty.

Companies approach Optimization Partners with diverse pain-points—starting from strategies to win big and faster in connected commerce or e-commerce and zero in on the right size for digital media, to knowing how online activity affects their brand and underlying brick-and-mortar business.

We’ve built a platform and an approach that helps brands compete on a level playing field with the big data and technology companies like Amazon and Google

Optimization Partners has answers to each of these questions. In essence, Optimization Partners’ comprehensive analytics platform includes a big-data integrated database, marketing, PR consumer research tool, sales campaign planner, what-if simulator, ROI, and effectiveness analytics. The company’s business intelligence portal consists of four major components. First, demand forecasting assists in sophisticated business scenario planning. Campaign monitoring enables business partners to monitor all the activities that are taking place in the marketplace, while performance monitoring allows clients to track their sales. Lastly, the ad hoc data access component connects the data and databases directly to the client’s ERP systems and enables them to extract data reports in standard formats easily.

What makes Optimization Partners second to none is its rich expertise and experience in e-commerce and analytics. “We are a single source for integrated, aligned, and trusted e-commerce data. We organize and quality control data, making it easy for our clients to interpret insights that can be used by their sales, PR, and marketing teams,” explains Flaherty. “We are not just data scientists and statisticians; we are also e-commerce marketing, PR, and sales practitioners who bring highly relevant solutions to the data science and analytics space.”

To highlight the efficacy of Optimization Partners, Flaherty cites a case scenario where they used their machine learning platform to build predictive models for a large consumer brand. The models provided a predictive coefficient, or r-square, of 93 percent helping Optimization Partners to deconstruct the client’s brand volume against baseline sales in a given programmatic scenario. As a result, Optimization Partners was able to deliver guidelines that helped their client be aware of how much they needed to invest in optimal ROI levels for their budget, and also identify saturation points so that they did not suffer from diminishing returns in their payback. The process helped their client significantly reallocate their marketing and sales budgets.

Optimization Partners is currently investing in the American east and west coast with further plans to tap their new frontier in marketing, PR, and sales, which is expected to be a significant opportunity for PR and brand experience companies. The VAM platform recently incorporated effective and unique ways to handle the big data associated with social media and word-of-mouth marketing.