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Andrew Pole had just started working as a data expert for target
when a few colleagues from the marketing department stopped by
his desk one day and asked the kind of question Pole had been born
to answer:
"Can your computers figure out which customers are pregnant, even
if they don't want us to know?"
Pole was a statistician. His entire life revolved around using data
to understand people. He had grown up in a small North Dakota
town, and while his friends were attending 4-H or building model
rockets, Pole was playing with computers. After college, he got a
graduate degree in statistics and then another in economics, and while
most of his classmates in the econ program at the University of Missouri
were headed to insurance companies or government bureaucracies, Pole
was on different track. He'd become obsessed with the ways economists
were using pattern analysis to explain human behaviour. Pole, in fact,
had tried his hand at a few informal experiments himself.
He once threw a party and polled everyone on their favorite jokes, and
then attempted to create a mathematical model for the perfect one-liner.
He had sought to calculate the exact amount the beer he needed to drink in
order to work up the confidence to talk to women at parties, but not so
much that he would make a fool of himself.
But those experiments were a child's play, he knew, that how Corporate
America was using data to scrutnize people's lives. Pole wanted in. So
when he graduated and heard that Hallmark, the greeting card company, was
looking to hire statisticians in Kansas city, he submitted an application and
was soon spending days scouring sales data to determine if pictures of pandas
or elephants sold more birthday cards.