Brian & Jill went up a hill to fetch a bunch of data!
Roots Analytics, an Austin, Texas-based data analytics company, first germinated in the summer of 2021. The company offers a comprehensive digital analytics process, including data collection, management, and visualization. With their diverse backgrounds in analytics and business, co-founders Brian Phillips and Jill Graham have embarked on their own odyssey to make digital analytics usable.
Brian Phillips first made contact with digital analytics in 2010. Beginning with dashboard design and data modeling, his extensive experience in the industry has allowed him to create Roots Analytics as a company that offers cutting-edge data analytics solutions. Before founding Roots Analytics, Brian led digital marketing analytics programs at several Fortune 500 healthcare companies. After building, and rebuilding (and rebuilding again) digital analytics solutions – at each of his prior companies – that, on occasion, helped marketers improve their campaigns, he realized that each of the companies needed the same foundation. And that foundation was hard to build. Before this, Brian dabbled in monotonous government job drudgery, generally changing very little of the world through his idealistic Peace Corps adventures, and briefly had a job bringing frozen pizzas from the back of a grocery store to the front of, well, the grocery store. And he calls himself a data ninja, which seems both pretentious and derivative.
Jill Graham brings over 20 years of experience in marketing, communications, and sales to the table. She’s called Austin home since graduating from the University of Texas, and has worked her way from ad agencies to Fortune 500 medical device companies to consulting roles in marketing and sales. One thing Jill realized is that most industries do not understand how to best use data analytics to make business decisions. In fact, her side sommelier gig has proven it’s more fun to drink wine than to look at spreadsheets!
Jill and Brian both ran into frequent hurdles in building a data driven process in the companies they worked at. They were surrounded by smart people, telling stories about life saving technology at companies which, let’s be honest, had, like, a bajillion dollars. The key ingredients were all there, but none of the recipes turned out right. After working apart for a few years,, seeing Brian foolishly trying the same thing again and expecting different results and Jill building a very, very, very small empire by selling wine to friends, they came back together with the seed of an idea. Let’s first focus on the key business decisions which digital marketing practitioners regularly face, and build our system upon that foundation.
Sure, we all love generalized and inspirational messaging, especially when coupled with pictures of puppies. But you may be asking yourself: what does Roots actually do? Well, Roots:
- Collects your digital marketing data
- Stores that data, and creates data models that enable getting useful information
- Represent this data visually so that each dashboard informs a meaningful business decision
- We own and manage the platforms, we define and deploy the taxonomy, and we scale anything that works for one client to all clients as soon as we can.
Our career backgrounds have naturally led us to first focus on pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Roots is now branching out to other industries, such as consumer goods and technology companies. We are young and small, but passionate and ambitious. We believe most companies are only scratching the surface of what is possible by building a foundational process of data driven decision making; we believe Roots can build and support that foundation in your company.
We love that difficult, messy and generally invisible process of any flourishing digital analytics process. We will cultivate and nourish your data, so you can more easily answer those hard questions.
We like to get our hands dirty in the digital dirt.
Roots Analytics 