GBK Collective Further Bolsters Advertising Effectiveness Expertise

GBK Collective, a leading marketing strategy, consumer behavior and analytics consultancy, today announced the appointments of Dr. Randall Lewis, Chief Scientist of Nanigans, and Dr. Justin Rao, Sr. Director, Performance Marketing at Booking.com, to its advisory board, further building on GBK’s expertise in helping clients to measure and maximize their return on marketing investments.

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“Improving ROI for advertising spend and campaigns is an ongoing challenge for brands today,” said GBK Co-founder Professor Eric Bradlow, who is also Vice Dean of Analytics and Chair of the Marketing Department at the Wharton School. “Common ROI and measurement gaps brands face include applying incomplete data, not consistently using randomization, failing to remove bias based on customer self-selection, channel heterogeneity/dynamics and other factors. As strategic advisors, Randall and Justin bring incredible expertise – both in practice and in academia – in applying analytics to unlock stronger advertising effectiveness and measurement.”

Since its inception in 2015, GBK has partnered with dozens of Fortune 500 brands across industries to solve some of today’s toughest business and marketing challenges. The firm also continues to expand its global collective of experienced practitioners providing clients with senior marketing, insights and analytics capabilities to address their most pressing business issues. The addition of Dr. Lewis and Dr. Rao to the advisory board further builds on GBK Collective’s industry leading analytics expertise and the value it delivers to clients.

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“As a former CMO, I know that one of the top challenges for marketing leaders is to measure and optimize investments in advertising and campaigns with confidence,” said GBK Partner Jeremy Korst. “I’m excited to have Justin and Randall join our team to help bring practical, innovative approaches to help marketers filter out the noise and deliver more impactful marketing tactics.”

Randall Lewis, Ph.D. is currently chief scientist at Nanigans, where he measures the causal impact of advertising, develops advanced AB-testing platform analytics, and measures the value of customer interactions in order to help both humans and automated decision systems make better choices. Prior to Nanigans, Lewis worked as Director of Economics at Netflix, where he guided the novel development of a holistic model of subscriber behavior. He has also worked as a Senior Economic Research Scientist at Netflix, Google, and Yahoo!, and has deep experience leading analytics and causal measurement practices. Randall attended MIT as a Presidential Fellow where he earned his PhD in economics with a focus on econometrics, experimentation, and industrial organization.

Justin M. Rao, Ph.D. is a Senior Director of Marketing at Booking.com responsible for metasearch marketing, app marketing, customer rewards and direct marketing. He leads a division of approximately 150 data scientists, marketeers, designers and developers. Prior to his position at Booking.com, Justin ran the data science division at Vrbo (Part of the Expedia Group) and before that he was a researcher at Microsoft Research, where he helped build and manage a team of economists and data scientists that worked across the company to solve technical business problems. He is an expert in experimental design, applying machine learning to marketing and business contexts and causal inference. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from UC-San Diego in 2010.

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