By Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
What a day! I spent it at the eMetrics conference in San Jose. It was really nice to see Jim Sterne continuing to evangelize the growth of the industry, to proselytize that this ‘this is our time’ as an industry, and as individuals, to step up and lead the maturation of our industry. It’s been great for me to have a chance to meet up with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for and don’t get to see every day like: David Alston, Douglas Karr, Anil Batra and I’ve had a chance to meet people that I’ve not had the chance yet like Jason Burby, Sean Powers and Richard Sim.
In all, it’s hard to find a more targeted audience that has the know-how, the experience, and the passion for analytics that this crowd does. At the same time, I was disappointed not to see more of our industry influencers here. It appears that the economy has taken it’s toll as I was told by the eMetrics staff that and that many attendees backed out at the last minute. Regardless, I was glad that I attended.
At events like eMetrics we talk about taking a step forward as an industry, together. Yet not everyone’s actions speak the same voice. In my observations I’ve seen some unfortunate behavior that I believe has the potential to kill the industry from the inside out if it isn’t culled. A few weeks ago, Omniture’s CEO Josh James called competitors in the industry ‘nuisances.’ Here in San Jose, Omniture decided to not wear our sponsored lanyards in favor of their own. I’m not sure if it is company policy or just in bad taste by the team in attendance but it is my opinion that respecting your competition means embracing them when it is appropriate. At an industry conference shedding something as innocuous as a sponsored lanyard in favor of your own is an unfortunate act.
I for one respect my competition. Their ideas, their capabilities, their people. For example, I love what Google is doing with APIs. I wrote about it on my blog. I applaud Google Analytics’ community evangelist Avinash Kaushik for publicly complimenting us in twitter and on our blog in a position piece about Webtrends Social Measurement and the sentiment tracking. It’s time we realize that if we don’t grow up and work together our industry will suffer as a whole. Standards, benchmarks, best practices, and models are our real challenges. Not so much each other. We still have market share to reach before we need to worry about a grudge match.
Today we offered the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3) to provide a framework and objective criteria for assessing the strategies, skills, tools and best practices that support the successful measurement of all digital marketing activities. The other industry models focus exclusively on web site measurement. The Webtrends Digital Marketing Optimization team developed the model based on 15 years of experience helping top brands build successful measurement programs. We’d love to talk more with everyone about the DM3. We’d love to support work that our partners and competitors are doing to push this industry as a whole forward. What initiatives are you working on that you’d like to see more Webtrends support? What initiatives do you think we as an industry need to get behind?
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I find your comment about Josh James hilarious. Internally per Josh there is a "No A-hole" rule - he fires whomever acts like one but this is mostly per questioning his conjectures. What has always fascinated me about him is that he himself is an a-hole to his own customers and the industry in general. Including agencies, competition and whomever may question his commentary and conjecture.
It is good to be a competitor to spur innovation – Webtrends, is a case in point, who has bettered themselves dramatically in the last year. But spurning standards, innovative ways to improve and standardize tagging or coming up with better ways to implement seems to help not only the elephants but also all marketers and creates the Social network which in turns creates better and overall innovations across the entire marketing industry. Which eventually revenue going to one company or silo is not a sustainable model anymore. Google gets this and is highly generous as well as many other run by people that are 20-30yr. old vs. 30-50. – I am in the latter category but believe in the former.
Marketing isn’t silo’d anymore and is becoming more and more difficult and the vacuum in Orem are not all PhDs that can figure this all out by themselves even if their arrogance portrays this as the case. Razorfish recently published a document talking about the social object formulated around Social object theory. If you ask me they are spot on and if you look at Omniture and the rest of the analytics tools(which are really just reporting tools) they are lacking in their maturity. Current marketing mix modeling is shot at the agency level and generic marketing analytics tools are really just at a Level 3 maturity. These tools are next to impossible to implement and maintain to keep up with as compared to all the other tasks a marketer has to perform daily basis to just deploy their marketing and make Executive level decisions.
So my point, collaboration at an alliance/standards or association level to get the elephants to level 5 and everyone else to piggy back because their offers fill in gaps of automation predictive data decision making processes therefore, make marketing depts. have an easier time to use the TOOLS as simple abstractions vs. tedious time consuming nuisances which at the end of the day the is what Omniture’s tools do and the arrogance out of Orem and the executive team there is absurd and spawns distaste for them as a whole.
Hi Jascha,
Not wearing the lanyard is just taking the competition too far.
Did you sit in on the mindmeld bonus session on the last day? There was a lot of community feel and talk around where the industry is going and what the vendors, waa should do to move it forward. The consistent themes were the need for independent research, sharing best practices among industry practitioners, and vendor transparency on metrics calculation etc.
There was also a lot of debate on marketers in analytics vs. technology people in analytics.
Sri,
Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to stay but I'm very happy to hear it went well.
To your closing point I believe we have to strive to get the the discussion away from 'marketers or technologists' and just to business owners.
It's a dramatic shift from today but I know we can get there.
Jascha
@kaykas
Post a Comment