Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Uncover was founded to revolutionise the field of marketing mix modelling - helping companies harness state-of-the-art data integration and AI to measure the return on their marketing investments, optimize their use of media, and track the effects of pricing changes and promotions in real time.
Challenge
Marketing mix modelling (MMM) first came to prominence in the early 1990s as a set of techniques for analysing, forecasting and optimising marketing planning. Today, it plays a central role in marketing strategy at most large consumer packaged goods companies, and is increasingly being adopted by the telecommunications, financial services, automotive and hospitality sectors too.
One of the key advantages of MMM, compared to other commonly used marketing analysis techniques, is that it is purely a statistical approach and doesn't rely on user tracking. This makes it a great fit for companies that care about their customers' data privacy, and for those that want to invest in types of marketing campaigns and media that are not as easy to track as digital ads.
Traditionally, the main providers of MMM have been specialist consultancy firms, which charge high fees for their services. As a result, MMM has been regarded as a premium service that only the largest companies can afford. Uncover's mission is to revolutionise the MMM market by building a platform that can bring the same level of marketing intelligence to businesses of all sizes.
At the heart of the Uncover platform is a query engine that allows analysts to define sophisticated ways to interrogate and visualise marketing data as it streams in from multiple sources - including sales and CRM systems, market and economic data, and even weather forecasts.
"With our competitors' consultancy-based approach, they might run a big MMM project and deliver a final report after six months," comments Georges Boris, Chief Design Officer at Uncover. "With our platform, we can deliver new insights weekly, and at a fraction of the cost. To do that, we need to be able to develop queries that identify the factors that really impact our clients' marketing campaigns, and run those queries reliably and repeatedly to track how things evolve over time."
To ensure it can always deliver the timely, accurate insights its clients need, Uncover's query engine has to be completely bullet-proof. That's why Georges and his team decided to use Gleam.
Solution
When Uncover started out in 2020, the company decided to use different programming languages to build the frontend and backend of its new platform. The frontend, which provides the web interface and data visualisation capabilities, was written in Elm, a language that is designed to completely eliminate the types of coding errors that could cause a system to crash. Meanwhile, the backend, which provides the data integration and query processing capabilities, was written in a language that didn't offer the same level of automatic error detection and couldn't provide the same guarantees.
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