Cascade: Campaign, Promotion, Cell and Pack Hierarchy

In Cascade, marketing campaigns are managed by splitting the tasks into four tiers, Campaigns, Promotions, Cells and Packs.  This structure is hierarchical, with a campaign containing one or more promotions, a promotion containing one or more cells, etc.  Each tier of the hierarchy may have an open ended set of attributes defined for it.

Campaigns

Campaigns are used to group together related Promotions.  Typically, a campaign may be used to administrate all the promotions used for a particular purpose - for example launching a particular product.  However, campaigns can also be used in any convenient manner for the user – for example all promotions run in a particular month.  FastStats supports navigation and reporting by campaigns.

A campaign can have attributes assigned to it which will apply to all its promotions, but other than that doesn't have many other settings.  Campaigns can however have a user defined name and workflow status.

Promotions

The Promotion is considered the main unit of work within Cascade.  A Promotion contains a set of Cells which define which records to use in this Promotion.  Within the Promotion, any record that appears in more than one Cell will only be counted in the Promotion once (i.e. it will be "de-duplicated", with the duplicate record being removed from the 2nd and subsequent Cells that it appears in).  Once a Promotion has been Run, a Cross-Reference result will be available to show how the de-duplication process has worked.

As well as being able to de-duplicate between Cells, records can be de-duplicated across FastStats tables, if the correct configuration has been used.  In the example holidays FastStats system, there is a Household table and a Person table (where all the people that live in the same house are associated with the same household record).  Cascade can be configured to use "Top Level Processing" so that if two people that live in the same household are selected in a promotion, then either both people can be promoted to, or only one of them (de-duplicating by household).  If the two people are in different Cells, then the person in the first Cell will be chosen.  If the two people are in the same Cell, then an arbitrary decision will be made on which person to pick and which to remove.

As with a Campaign, a Promotion has a name and workflow status.  It also has a user defined code which can be specified to be output and reported on.  A Promotion also has a promotion date.  When a Promotion is Run, this date is stored in the communication history in the Cascade SQL database.

Promotions can also have the following information defined:

Attributes: Promotions can have an open ended attributes set to store user specified data. (Including Seeds and Output see below)

Response Definition: To enable responses attributable to the marketing of the records in a Promotion, a definition needs to be provided of what a response to this Promotion would be.

Schedule: Promotions can be set to Retrieve, Run and Output automatically at a given frequency.

Nths: Promotions can be limited to only output a certain proportion of records.

Costs: Promotions can have fixed and variable costs associated with them.  Fixed costs are set for this Promotion and are added to any other fixed costs associated with Cells and Packs.  Variable costs are defined at Promotion level, but don't actually apply to the Promotion itself.  Instead, these variable costs are inherited by a Promotion's Cells and Packs and will apply per record.

Email Response Definition: This option when activated allows you to track the current responses to your promotion.  This option is currently only available to Pure360 email broadcast users.

Cells

Cells are the building blocks that make up a Promotion, with each Cell containing a targeting rule.  Cells are the point in Cascade at which a FastStats selection is used to specify the records to include in a Promotion.  Cells are ordered within a Promotion so that if a record is specified in more than one Cell, the record will be used in the higher priority Cell and will be removed from the lower priority Cell.

Cells can also be defined as "Include" or "Exclude" Cells.  An Include Cell is used to include records in a Promotion in the normal way.  An Exclude Cell can be used to exclude certain records from a Promotion.  Because of the Cell ordering mentioned above, an Exclude Cell can be used either as the first Cell to Exclude records from the Promotion entirely, or as a middle Cell.  In this case, records in the Exclude Cell will only be excluded from Cells that appear lower in the hierarchy than the Exclude Cell.

Like Promotions and Campaigns, Cells can have a name and status.  They also have the following:

Attributes: Like all parts of Cascade, Cells can have an open ended attributes set to store user specified data. (Including Seeds and Output see below)

Source: This is the selection used to specify the records in the Cell, and whether this is an Include or Exclude Cell.

Response Definition: To enable responses attributable to the marketing of the records in a Cell, a definition needs to be provided of what a response to this Cell would be.

Nths: Like Promotions, Cells can also be limited to only include a certain proportion from the specified selection.

Costs: Also like Promotions, Cells can have fixed and variable costs associated with them.  Fixed costs are set for this Cell and are added to any other fixed costs associated with its parent Promotion and any child Packs.  Variable costs can either be defined for this Cell (to then be inherited by the Cell's Packs) or be inherited from the parent Promotion.

Email Response Definition: This option when activated allows you to track the current responses to this Cell.  This option is currently only available to Pure360 email broadcast users.

Packs

Each Cell is further broken down into Packs.  A Cell must have at least one Pack before it can have any actions performed on it.  Packs are used to break Cells down into statistically valid test groups that can have different properties associated with them.  A percentage of the number of records selected in the Cell is specified and these are randomly sampled from those records.  For example, you could break a Cell into a "Standard" Pack and a "Incentivised" Pack, giving the Incentivised Pack only 5% of the records from the Cell.  This Incentivised Pack may then involve a mailing with a money off voucher or other incentive, whereas the Standard Pack may only contain advertising.

Packs can also be specified as "Control" Packs.  This allows the responses or sales generated from marketing activity to be compared to "Background" activity that would occur without marketing.

Packs also have a name and a user defined code.  This code should be used on the communication associated with this pack so that responses can be tied back to the communication sent out.  This then allows response rates, etc to be calculated per pack.  

Packs can also have the following information set:

Attributes: : Like all parts of Cascade, Packs can have an open ended attributes set to store user specified data. (Including Seeds and Output see below)

Response Definition: To enable responses attributable to the marketing of the records in a Pack, a definition needs to be provided of what a response to this pack would be.

Costs: Like Promotions and Cells, Packs can have fixed and variable costs associated with them.  Fixed costs are set for this Pack and are added to any other fixed costs associated with its parent Cell and its parent Promotion.  Variable costs can either be defined for this Pack or be inherited from the parent Cell or Promotion.  These variable costs will then be applied for each record in the Pack.

Email Response Definition: This option when activated allows you to track the current responses to this Pack.  This option is currently only available to Pure360 email broadcast users.

Attributes

Attributes can be defined for Campaigns, Promotions, Cells and Packs and can be used to define behaviour within Cascade in addition to storing user defined information (see your FastStats administrator).  Generally, an attribute defined at a Cascade node will apply to all its children unless the same attribute is redefined further down the hierarchy.  For example, if the "Foreground" attribute is applied to a Promotion, then this will be the colour used for that Promotion and all its Cells and Packs.  However, if one of the Cells in the Promotion also has the "Foreground" attribute set, then whilst all its sibling Cells and their Packs will still "inherit" the colour from the Promotion, the Cell in question and all its Packs will use the newly defined colour.

The following predefined attributes can be set; you will find some of these are under their own panel headings:

OutputFileType: Allows the user to specify the output file type (CSV, SDF, XLS, etc) for this pack from a list of allowable types.

OutputSequence: Allows the user to choose from a set of predefined output fields templates.  For example, the Cascade administrator may have defined a "Postal" sequence that contains the name and address fields for each record.

Foreground and Background: Allows the user to specify an override foreground and background colour for the row in the Cells and Packs grid: The Foreground colour is also used for the arrow displayed in the Cascade Explorer.

OutputFiles: Allows the user to enter a comma separated list of output files that this pack should be copied into.  Note that all output sequences and output file types must be the same, and must be either SDF or CSV.  If you specify the output files at more than one Cascade hierarchy, then the list is added to, rather than the normal override behaviour.

The administrator can also specify other attributes of type "Text", "SourceCode" or "Seed" which will appear in the attributes list for users to enter values for.  

The values of "Text" attributes are stored against the Campaign, Promotion, Cell or Pack they were entered for, but no special processing is applied for them.

If the user enters values for "SourceCode" attributes, then a new column will be added to each output file for the Cascade item with a heading set to the name of the attribute.  Each row in the file will then have the value of the attribute in the appropriate column.

Finally, "Seed" attributes will give the user a choice of administrator defined "Seed sets".  These are sets of URNs that will be added to the selected records for each pack that inherits this attribute.