Case Study: Interactions Marketing achieves real-time, large-scale storm-driven shopper insights with Google Cloud Platform (BigQuery)

Interactions Marketing digs into storm data to analyze consumer behavior using Google BigQuery

Interactions Marketing, a San Diego–based experiential marketing firm founded in 1988 that runs millions of retail events each year with over 45,000 associates, wanted better high‑level analytics to help retailers and manufacturers plan for changes in shopper behavior. The company set out to study how weather events affect sales patterns and shopper behavior and chose Google BigQuery to test a scalable, low‑maintenance analytics approach.

Using BigQuery with Tableau and a hybrid ETL feeding POS and NOAA data, Interactions analyzed 1.3 billion rows in a cloud sandbox that reduced IT overhead and allowed rapid, on‑demand queries. The study identified 28 product categories with sales increases of 20–261% one day before similar storms, revealed sales drops during and after storm peaks, and uncovered new, actionable insights into consumer behavior while delivering significant time and cost savings.

Interactions Marketing

Giovanni DeMeo

Vice President of Global Marketing and Analytics