Introduction
John has worked at the forefront of marketing and data analysis since 1999. He has worked with Fortune 100 advertisers and scores of agencies, measuring the effectiveness of advertising and improving marketing performance. At Data Insights, John has worked with prominent companies such as Tableau, eBay, LinkedIn, General Mills, Microsoft, the Sierra Club, Kraft, and a host of smaller clients. John regularly lectures business school students at the undergraduate, MBA, and Ph.D. levels. John is the director of data science for Central Control, an online media experimentation platform. As of 2025, John has joined the faculty at the University of St. Thomas in the College of Engineering as an assistant professor of data science. Prior to St. Thomas, John was a Clinical Professor of Marketing at the University of Montana for 10 years. At the University of Montana, John was the creator of the MS in Business Analytics program.
Prior to these current jobs, John was Research Director at Microsoft Advertising and, before that, Principal Analyst at aQuantive, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $6.2B (and then later written off for a lot of that value). While at Atlas and Microsoft, John was a principal researcher on "Engagement Mapping", the first multi-touch attribution product in marketing technology. He was the inventor of the GRP & Reach Forecaster and co-inventor of Optimization Advisor, the Microsoft Optimization tool. He has authored numerous advertising white papers at aQuantive and Microsoft.
John received a Ph.D. in Statistics in 2010 from the University of Montana with a focus on applying the tools of statistical learning to the challenges of large online datasets. As part of his dissertation, he used Cox Proportional Hazard Models with Time-Varying Covariates to estimate the influence of marketing touchpoints on eventual conversions. He received his M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Washington focusing on Optimization Theory and a B.A. from Middlebury College focusing on Mathematics and Ultimate Frisbee.