Intelligence functions built inside corporate HQs of multibillion-dollar brands.

Three times in my agency career, a client has wanted an intelligence function operating from inside its own walls, and three times I’ve built one for them. Each took a different shape.

The Unilever North American People Data Center was the most developed of the three. Unilever’s UK business already had one serving Europe, and the US side wanted its own. I sold the engagement in, designed the operating model, hired and embedded a four-analyst team inside Unilever’s HQ in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, and we ran the operation for roughly two years. By the end, we’d delivered 195 projects across 13 categories and 42 brands. Then we led the transition to a permanent Unilever-employed team.

Target's Guest Central was the largest of the three by headcount and the most operationally ambitious. A multi-disciplinary team of up to twelve people, with near 24-hour coverage, operating from the executive floor of Target’s Minneapolis HQ. We used it to plan around major calendar moments like back-to-school and Mother’s Day, to react to brand opportunity moments (the “Alex from Target” moment is the one that still gets cited), and to move on crisis moments like credit card breaches and negative product reactions faster than the company could otherwise. It also worked as a cross-functional catalyst, getting teams that hadn’t been working closely enough into the same room around shared work. Target ran the operation; my team supported them in doing it.

The TELUS Nerve Center came earliest, in 2012, when social listening was still a new discipline. A two-person operation built around a dashboard of real-time conversation across the telco category, including a TELUS-branded version of the Harlem Shake at the height of that internet moment. Cutting-edge marketing intelligence for its time.

The common thread was that each client wanted intelligence sitting close enough to its leadership and marketing teams so it actually changed what they did next.