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.
I ended up doing a bit more reporting about Target when an excerpt from this chapter appeared in the New York Times Magazine. If you want to read more about my interactions with the company, you can find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
