Image courtesy of New York Daily NewsAnametrix CEO Pelin Thorogood braved single-digit temperatures last week in New York City’s cold snap to meet with industry leaders, analysts and media about the dynamic landscape shaping marketing analytics, along with the release of the company’s Anametrix Plug-in for Microsoft Excel.
Stay Tuned for Survey Results
The week began on a high note with Andrew Edwards, CEO of Technology Leaders and co-founder of the Digital Analytics Association, also on Twitter. The two escaped the frigid air in the historic, 120-year-old Old Town Bar on 18th Street in Manhattan, where Andrew shared progress on the Convergence Analytics Survey due out this spring. The study is being conducted by Andrew and Rand Schulman, Efectyv Marketing partners, along with ClickZ. Both Andrew and Rand are pioneers in the digital analytics space. The survey is their brainchild, and it investigates the impact of new analytics tools in light of the emergence of “big data,” convergence of marketing channels and advances in the underlying analytics technology.
Andrew said the Convergence Analytics Survey attracted hundreds of vendor and practitioner responses, and the team is looking forward to sharing the results at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in New York in March. It wasn’t just the sheer number of responses, but their diversity that was striking, he said. Clearly tools, definitions and use cases around analytics still mean different things to different people. Some of the core questions around what exactly is “real time” and defining a product versus a service are still in flux – as is the perceived difference between marketing analytics and marketing intelligence. At stake is how the entire landscape is being redefined as multichannel data collection and analysis is shifting toward true actionability vis-à-vis the real-time insights discovered. Businesses that embrace the emerging paradigm will become the winners as they more effectively engage consumers and convert them into loyal customers. After all, multichannel data and real-time actionability are a powerful combination.
Analysts and Industry Leaders Echo Marketing Analytics Evolution Themes
Pelin also had a lively discussion with David Card, VP of research at GigaOM Pro and on Twitter, who himself has been tracking the evolution in marketing analytics and marketing intelligence for many years. As some categories are being redefined, new ones are emerging as big data continues to grow and marketers seek new ways to manage it.
Not surprisingly, it’s not just industry analysts who are looking deeply at the changing face of analytics. Pelin met with a major New York-based publisher where predictive analytics is poised to become a game changer. She and the analytics team talked at length about the power of predictive modeling to create a “crystal ball” for marketing. This publisher is exploring ways to use predictive modeling to dynamically forecast subscription rates and content consumption by content type and audience segments to better manage ad monetization opportunities.
Then in a meeting at the top of the Ink48 Hotel at 48th Street with panoramic views of Midtown Manhattan city lights, Pelin met with Jon Baron, the new CEO of TagMan, a leader in tag management. Jon, a co-founder of the company and pioneer in this space, said awareness and demand for “more than simple” tag management are growing, as businesses want to tap into multichannel marketing data more easily and then pass the unified vendor and campaign data to tools like Anametrix. Perhaps even more telling, attribution is becoming increasingly critical in evaluating the marketing-mix effectiveness as consumers engage with brands in more and more locations across in-store, online, mobile and social touchpoints. Multichannel marketing analytics coupled with sophisticated attribution models are needed to power smarter marketing-mix allocations.
Marketing Analytics Attracts Media Interest
Also on the agenda last week were meetings with New York marketing journalists, including Ginger Conlon, editor-in-chief of Direct Marketing News and on Twitter. Pelin challenged the prevailing stereotype in marketing: creativity is “sexy” and data is “dull,” referencing a Harvard Business Review article, calling data scientists the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” In Ginger’s follow-up article, The Battle for Sexy, she noted that you cannot have a conversation these days about the “creative side of marketing without data sneaking into the conversation.” It takes both creativity and analytics, Pelin argues, to make marketing a true revenue driver.
In meetings with other journalists, Pelin found strong interest in the Jan. 24 release of the Anametrix Plug-in for Microsoft Excel. Pelin told Judith Aquino and Kelly Liyakasa, associate editors at destinationCRM and on Twitter, that the product will make it possible for marketers to “understand how your Web data, along with your social and email data, is actually bringing people to your Web site, and how that information may relate to market share data or data from Nielsen or comScore.” Pelin said about 50 percent of Anametrix users rely on Excel for reporting, which has been the most widely used analytics tool for marketers, for better or for worse. Now Excel users will have easy and automatic access to real-time multichannel marketing data directly within the Excel interface.
Pelin also did a deep dive on marketing analytics with Cynthia Clark, senior writer at 1to1 Media and on Twitter, and shared a product demo for the Weekly News Roundup.
What’s affecting you so far this year? Convergence analytics? Big data? Predictive analytics? Multichannel marketing and attribution? Finding data scientists? Simplifying analysis and reporting? Post a comment here, contact us, listen to more experts and practitioners discussing these issues on our SlideShare channel or visit us at upcoming events, such as eTail West in Palm Desert Feb. 25-28.