At Target, creating relevant guest experiences at scale takes more than great creative — it takes great data. In this session, we’ll explore how Target’s Data Science team is using first-party data, machine learning, and GenAI to personalize marketing across every touchpoint.

You’ll hear how we’re building intelligence into the content supply chain, turning unified customer signals into actionable insights, and using AI to optimize creative, timing, and messaging — all while navigating a privacy-first landscape. Whether it’s smarter segmentation or real-time decisioning, we’re designing for both scale and speed.

In a rapidly evolving advertising landscape where data, technology, and methodology converge, the pursuit of rigorous yet actionable marketing measurement is more critical—and complex—than ever. This talk will showcase how modern marketers and applied data scientists employ advanced measurement approaches—such as Marketing Mix Modeling (frequentist and Bayesian) and robust experimental designs, including randomized control trials and synthetic control-based counterfactuals—to drive causal inference in advertising effectiveness for meaningful business impact.

The talk will also address emergent aspects of applied marketing science- namely open-source methodologies, digital commerce platforms and artificial intelligence usage. Innovations from industry giants like Google and Meta, as well as open-source communities exemplified by PyMC-Marketing, have democratized access to advancement in methodologies. The emergence of digital commerce platforms such as Amazon and Walmart and the rich data they bring forward is transforming how customer journeys and campaign effectiveness are measured across channels. Artificial Intelligence is accelerating every facet of the data science workflow, streamlining processes like coding, modeling, and rapid prototyping (“vibe coding”) to enabling the integration of neural networks and deep learning techniques into traditional MMM toolkits. Collectively, these provide new and easy ways of quick experimentation and learning of complex nonlinear dynamics and hidden patterns in marketing data

Bringing these threads together, the talk will show how Ovative Group—a media and marketing technology firm—integrates domain expertise, open-source solutions, strategic partnerships, and AI automation into comprehensive measurement solutions. Attendees will gain practical insights on bridging academic rigor with business relevance, empowering careers in applied data science, and helping organizations turn marketing analytics into clear, actionable strategies.