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In this case study, we explore how Pencil migrated from Looker Studio to Holistics, enabling transparent customer-facing analytics with password-protected shareable links, templatized dashboards, and democratized self-service access across the organization.
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.
We believe in being transparent with our customers; we want them to be able to view the data that we have available to them and visualize that. We want to share a transparent view into actual usage and consumption inside their workspace, so they can actually see the actual ROI (return on investment). Yet, with Looker Studio, it quickly becomes very restrictive in how we can share data with our customers because it requires everyone to have a Google account.
- Douglas S., Head of Product at Pencil
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.
The experience with Looker Studio was slow at scale and clunky to share outside the company. We also have too much dependency on engineering and other technical people to go and enable the rest of the business teams to get the data that they need and be able to present it.
Three months after migrating to Holistics, Pencil could point to concrete improvements.
Holistics, in comparison to Looker Studio, is a lot faster and easier to work with; our data team has been very excited about moving over because a lot of the blockers that they experienced in the past have been kind of solved now. [..] We use Holistics' password-protected shareable link functionality a lot to give our customers insight and transparency into their usage, and it has been a really great experience and something that we hear really good feedback about.
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.
We're at this stage now, as a company, maturity-wise, where data becomes more important in order to make informed decisions. And also being able to evaluate the decisions that have been made to try to understand what to do next. Everyone at your company should know the metrics that matter to them to have a positive impact on the company.
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.
We want to know how many exports are taken out of Pencil based on the generation. Generation is consumption, which leads to some form of creative output, so the export is almost our way of validating that the creative that was produced was good enough for the customer to take it out and use it in the market.
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:
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.
Holistics is very efficient when you use it the way it was intended to be used. Coming from Metabase, I always love the ability to just query my own data and just visualize it. So for me, it's been a little bit of retraining my old way of doing things. With Holistics, I don't have to write so many queries over and over again to kind of have the data accessible to me. I wish I had known an approach like what Holistics offered earlier instead of being so stuck saying "no, I wanna write all of my queries myself, and only I know what type of data should be pulled and how and when." Holistics has democratized the ability to get the right data at any given point and then visualize it in a very simple way.
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.
The people at Holistics are very supportive and invested in our success using the tool, which felt like something that we also believe in as an organization.
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.
I really like working with the team, from the discovery and sales conversations all the way to getting into the tool. In every step, we got support from the product team on how to use it and how to think about structuring our data to make sure we get the most out of Holistics. It was also a big factor in why we chose Holistics. The team was invested in our success just as much as we are with our customers.
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.
So we use the sharing link functionality a lot with password protection. Sharing that with our customers and kind of giving them that level of insight and transparency into their usage of the tool has been a really great experience. They're able to actually look at their own data and have the global filters on there so they can explore the data themselves, which has been really helpful for our customers to feel like they're actually in charge of their own success and have full visibility into what's going on.
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.
Being able to have the conversation centered around data that is shared and accessible at any given point is really useful to our team.
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.
The simplicity of setting up template dashboards in Holistics is amazing. Previously, if a customer requested a dashboard, our data team had to build it manually for each of them. With Holistics, they can set up dashboard templates, and hook that to their database. Every time a new customer is onboarded, they can automatically create a new dashboard for that customer.
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.
We can now look at the data and can see some of your initiatives and programs that we're running paying off. Actually being able to see it black and white in the data is a really rewarding part of the job. And sharing that with the team becomes this really motivational moment for the entire company where we can celebrate together.
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.
I think a lot of people get really excited about the simplicity of building visualizations themselves. When we have our template, business users come in, and they kind of see what's possible, and they feel comfortable enough to go and try to visualize something themselves. They have the datasets ready for them. We're having more democratized access to data with Holistics, so everyone within the business is actually able to take a look and understand what is going on under the hood of the business and see the impact of initiatives that are being driven across the board.
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.
I think in the beginning what we learned is, as an organization, you really want to invest in time with everyone to get comfortable with the tool. Otherwise, there's only a small portion of people that know how to operate within the tool, and you're actually not enabling the rest of the company to realize the value of the tool. So we want to ensure there's training and there's regular meetups for anyone who has questions or concerns. And then try to disseminate information as widely across the company as possible to enable as many people as possible to become well versed and comfortable within the tool itself.
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.
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