How a Marketing AI Leader Made Customer ROI Visible with Holistics

Most AI tools that sell productivity have an ROI problem. Pencil doesn't.

The team at Pencil — the Marketing's GenAI operating system — is well-prepared to prove the ROI of their product. Their answer was radical transparency: to give customers the same truth Pencil sees, down to how usage turns into output and how output turns into cost per creative asset.

Yet what got in their way was another tool with the same promise of empowerment, but a very different reality: Looker Studio.

The teams at Pencil are deeply invested in their customer success, so they couldn't afford analytics that bottleneck on technical help. If every customer question required a handoff to the data team, the feedback loop would stretch, and support would slow down. They wanted customers to access reporting without friction, but they also needed everyone to build and iterate on reports themselves, so the team could stay responsive as the customer base grew.

Yet, Looker Studio was slow to work with and clunky to share outside the company.

Three months after migrating to Holistics, Pencil could point to concrete improvements.

Douglas and his team were already operating at a level of measurement that Looker Studio struggled to support. They were trying to make customer value legible, defensible, and shareable across multiple stakeholders inside the same account, without losing control of what each party could see.

The team is deliberate about defining what success actually looks like for customers and then measuring whether the product delivers on that promise. That intentionality shows up most clearly in how they think about metrics.

Take generations: Pencil customers buy a fixed pool of generations, but generations alone are just consumption. What mattered to the team was what happened after. Exports became the signal. An export meant a customer didn't just generate something, but found it good enough to take into production, which is a really important measure of quality.

As the organization pushed to operate more data-driven across teams, Douglas knew they needed a BI tool that could keep up: fast, self-serve, and capable enough to meet a clear set of requirements, including:

• Collaborative, self-service reporting, so critical customer reporting doesn't disappear when a single analyst is unavailable.
• Self-serve exploration for non-technical teams, so that business users can answer customers' questions without routing everything through technical staff.
• Ease and security of sharing data with external stakeholders. The team wants to provide easy access for customers while enforcing strict customer-level boundaries. "We wanted something that is easily shareable, and can still be controlled down to the customer levels", as Douglas put it.
• Predictable pricing and low maintenance, so the BI layer doesn't become another engineering dependency.

Pencil found all of these capabilities in Holistics, and more.

Before Holistics, Douglas was used to a more ad hoc workflow.

In SQL-based tools like Metabase, every new question often meant writing a new query. Useful answers existed, but they were brittle, repetitive, and hard to reuse across teams. That approach works early on. At Pencil's scale, it starts to slow everything down.

Holistics pulled Douglas in a different direction: define datasets once, then explore many times. It required unlearning some habits at first, but over time, that constraint became the source of leverage.

Pencil puts a lot of weight on customer success. They invest heavily in making data transparent, granular, and accessible to their own customers. When evaluating BI tools, Douglas was looking for a partner that took that same philosophy seriously. They found that in Holistics.

That support showed up early and consistently. From discovery and sales conversations to onboarding and day-to-day usage, the Holistics team stayed involved to make sure that Pencil gets long-term value out of the platform.

One of the clearest changes Pencil saw after adopting Holistics was in how they showed up for customers. Holistics made operational what has always been a big part of Pencil's product philosophy: transparency. Instead of summarizing usage in calls or screenshots, the Pencil team could now put customers directly in front of their own data.

With Holistics' password-protected shareable link, customers could see their own consumption, explore which models and AI agents were driving the most impact, and move through the data themselves using global filters. That visibility made customers feel more in control of their own outcomes.

The shareable link feature also empowered the customer success team.

Instead of explaining what was happening, the team could open a dashboard and look at it with their customers so that discussions became grounded in shared facts: what's being used, where value is showing up, and where adoption might need support. The data was always available, always current, and accessible to both sides.

"It helps our internal team as well when we go and have conversations with customers right up to what is going on with the usage and what models are being used and what AI agents have the most impact," Douglas said.

More importantly, Pencil could do this at scale.

Previously, if a customer requested a dashboard, the team needed to build it manually for each of them. As more customers need access to data, this approach quickly becomes unsustainable, turning the data team into an IT help desk.

With Holistics, the team can define a template dashboard once, and reuse it across accounts. When a new customer onboarded, a new dashboard could be created automatically, already wired to the right filters and permissions.

Even before launching Holistics to the entire organization, the product team at Pencil was already excited.

The ease of building visualizations and dashboards felt familiar. It resembled what they had experienced with Amplitude on the product side, a tool that had already reshaped how the team understood usage and behavior. The difference was scope. What worked well for product analytics could now be extended to the rest of the business. "It made us essentially excited and interested in how we can enable this on a business level", said Douglas.

That excitement showed up quickly once business users started engaging with the data. For many teams, this was the first time their work was reflected back to them clearly and consistently.

Part of what made that possible were changes that felt small on paper but mattered in practice. Compared to Looker Studio, Holistics simply made it easier to let everyone self-serve and get access to data.

This shift happened because forward-looking leaders like Douglas treated self-service as an operating principle, and actually made efforts to build the habits around the platform.

The Head of Product started by making help public.

Douglas set up a dedicated Slack channel for anything Holistics, where people could ask questions in the open and share what they were learning, so that questions didn't get trapped in DMs and the answers could compound. Then he added recurring face time. Twice a week, Douglas and the team ran office hours, a standing place to bring blockers, review dashboards, and resolve issues before they turned into frustration.

He also did the unglamorous work that makes self-serve stick: documentation.

Douglas made sure the workflows Pencil needed most were written down and repeatable, from duplicating templated dashboards to wiring the correct filters, and generating password-protected sharing links so customer data stayed scoped and safe. All of it was a deliberate effort to stop the data team from becoming an answer vending machine. Douglas had seen what happens when every question turns into a request and every request turns into a report: the work gets "very repetitive and quite boring," and the team's time disappears into one-off pulls. Douglas wanted them building pipelines and enriching datasets instead, while the rest of the company learned to answer its own questions.

Pencil is the world's leading Marketing AI Operating System, built to move enterprise brands from experimentation to full-scale performance. We provide the essential infrastructure that unifies the entire marketing workflow — from data-driven insights to production and predictive distribution.

Powered by a decade of proprietary data and over $2.8B in media spend, Pencil enables global leaders like Diageo, Unilever, and Indeed to scale creativity while maintaining total brand governance and measurable ROI. Pencil isn't just a tool; it's the execution layer for the modern, AI-first marketing organization.

https://www.trypencil.com

The Brandtech Group's mission is to be the best company in the world at helping leading global brands drive growth by connecting content, data and media using technology. It was founded in June 2015 by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, with a simple mission to help brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology.

Today it generates more than $1BN in revenue and is the largest global digital content partner for many of the world's biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with eight of the world's top 10 global advertisers and 49 of the world's top 100. Clients include Banco Itaú, Danone, Google, Intuit, LVMH, Microsoft, Morgan-Stanley, Netflix, Reckitt, Renault-Nissan, PayPal, TikTok, Uber and Unilever.