• People, Not Cookies: Concerns about cookies, consumer privacy and “do not track” have become the biggest issues for stakeholders across the industries. Publishers, advertisers and technology providers all recognize the potential for major impacts on their businesses. One key idea that sometimes gets lost in the details is that advertisers are focused on tracking people, not cookies. That makes sense as people are the ones who consume the content, purchase the products and like, follow and friend brands.Cookies are also falling short in a multi-platform world – they can measure silos of activity for individual devices or browsers, but face challenges in tying it all together. This fundamental fact is beginning to shape the debate about tracking as much as regulatory factors.
• New Approaches to Multi-Platform Tracking: As marketers seek a unified view of consumers, they are adopting new techniques to ensure that they can accurately track the lead that starts on a PC and converts on a tablet or phone. Email addresses, log-in information, and device identifiers are effective means to unify cookies to create persistent profiles of people as they shift channels and switch devices.There is also excitement about emerging technologies that use algorithms to enable more sophisticated cross-device measurement. The software isn’t quite ready for widespread use, but early adopters are experimenting. We recommend companies clarify their objectives and ensure strong linkage with business strategies as they consider deploying new tools.
• Consistent Metrics for Video: As tablets become the primary video screen for many users, the need for consistent metrics has never been clearer. Advertisers who seek convergent ad buys across TV and digital face different pricing and business models and have difficulty understanding their holistic effectiveness.  Hybrid measurement platforms that include panels, meters, and census digital tracking have, so far, proven most effective at gauging audience overlap.Additionally, the gap between traditional TV industry metrics like gross rating points (GRPs) and digital video metrics like Unique Vistors (“Uniques”) and Impressions needs bridging. The end game for digital video is a unified view of reach and frequency, but it will take some time to get there.
• The Funnel Is Dead: What’s increasingly clear is that the traditional marketing funnel is dead. Drew Burns of Adobe pointed out that consumers simply don’t follow a linear process through content to conversion any more. Instead, they hop around from channel to channel and device to device. The journey from awareness and interest to intent and action looks a bit like an airline route map these days, with consumers using any variety of jumping-off points to access the content, products and services they want. The challenge for marketers is to make sure that all the “destinations” and “connecting flights” are coordinated and consistent with high-quality content and compelling offers.

Layers of the Digital Media Experience
A challenge in the industry today is reconciling the traditional online experience with the mobile and social experience – these two have long-operated in silos. With the increased interactions and overlaps, companies must learn to see through the lens of consumers.

Social & Mobile
Social and mobile – two powerful forces, ripe with opportunity for innovation, growth and engagement. The most successful companies will be the ones that create rich media experiences that tie together social and mobile.

Many Meanings of Social
Social media has many layers and different levels of activity, from simply maintaining a Facebook page to managing an active Twitter account. As Kevin points out, it’s crucial for businesses to realize that the user is in the driver’s seat with choosing how they wish to be engaged.

Is Social the New Search?
An interesting point Kevin made is the question as to whether social has become the new search. His observation is that individuals are switching from search to social as a primary means of accessing information and content.

“The Mozilla decision was viewed as a victory among privacy advocates, many of whom believe the industry is blocking progress on developing a browser-based Do Not Track standard, a project centralized within the Worldwide Web Consortium.”

On the other hand, opponents of these initiatives, such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau, describe Mozilla’s plans as “harmful to the ad-supported internet across a number of dimensions.” And these opponents are not out of the woods yet, as it appears that plans to block third-party cookies by default in Firefox could still be in the works. In the meantime, we will watch how things unfold as the company continues further tests on this new patch. For our thoughts on the Do No Track controversy, check out this video featuring Ken Harrop and read some key takeaways on a “life after cookies” here.

Golf: Even the most traditional sport’s most traditional event has undergone a data-driven transformation, as this story shows. Golf can teach analytics pros a great deal about finding the right equipment and “grouping” to achieve their goals, as Ken Harrop highlights here.

Basketball: This post highlights the debate going on in the NBA about hard metrics vs. intangibles. On the one hand, it’s “Revenge of the Nerds,” as analysts begin to quantify things like interior defense. Meanwhile, former coaches cry, “it’s not a video game.” That’s the same cultural battle going on at many different companies.

NFL Draft: From identifying potential busts and using “urgency indexes” to prioritize drafting needs, NFL teams are using increasingly sophisticated tools and processes to figure out their best options for improving their team through the draft. These are the same types of tools most business executives need. And as Infinitive CEO Denis McFarlane points out here, fantasy football fanatics may have an edge over many of their counterparts in other industries.

Hockey: The consensus is that hockey trails other sports in the maturation of its analytics capabilities. The sport is still in search of its “a-ha” moment, trying to overcome a “counting problem” and needs to “embrace advanced statistics.” Analytics pros will recognize these issues as common to other industries as well.

Soccer: “The beautiful game” is slowly becoming more analytical by asking big questions, like “What are the challenges in making the coaches use analytics?” and “what metrics do we have today?” Those strike us as the right questions to be asked by any company looking to get started or assess current analytics operations. And here’s our view on the growth of soccer in America and how it’s similar to analytics adoption.

See you at the ballpark … or on the pitch, the course, court or rink!

To hear more of our insights on Digital Analytics, join us at the Infinitive Digital BrainFest on Friday, May 3, 2013. More details, along with all the interactive sessions, available here!

SmartCard tickets for fans – the Nats use radio frequency ID technology (RFID) chips in smart cards for ticket holders to offer fans a more efficient experience with special benefits for loyalty. And of course the team gains valuable data and insights such as:

Just how many hot dogs did that family in Row S of Section 138 eat last month, anyhow?

Playing “Techball” – The San Francisco Giants, the defending World Series champions, bake data and analytics into every phase of operations, according to one of their executives:

“The formula is simple: Enhance the fan experience, improve the team’s performance and propel the business forward.”

It looks like we’ve moved into the Moneyball 2.0 era, which will offer business executives concerned with corporate performance management an idea or two.

And as we point out here, the team’s new video capture system tracks every single at-bat and play in the field and:

“[Has] generated about 5 billion records of data in three seasons – more or less the amount of data managed by typical banks.”

Gathering of the Tribes – Forget TED Conferences, the Aspen Institute or the World Economic Forum, we think the coolest conference on the planet is the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, with the SABR Analytics Conference a close runner-up. It’s intriguing to us that many of the research papers and presentations highlighted organizational concerns. Looks like the thought leaders in sports analytics share our view that success is as much about the people as the technology.

See you at the ballpark!

For more compelling insights and unique perspectives, don’t miss Infinitive Digital BrainFest on Friday, May 3. Learn more and register today!

Digital analytics success is less about having the latest, greatest, whizz-bangiest tools and technology, and more about first knowing how to make sense of your traffic and user behavior data and then taking decisive action to drive toward business objectives.

This article makes a pretty clear case for such an approach – which has the added benefit of helping to ensure you don’t waste your money.

Even if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the best analytics products out there … your Web analytics tool is only as powerful as the person using it.

The race car analogy comes to mind here. You don’t buy a Formula One race car without having a team of specialists – a driver, pit crew, skilled mechanics – to optimize the performance. And when you have an owner who appreciates what it takes to succeed, that’s a winning formula.

Further, the most valuable analysis – the kind that tells you why something happened, not just what happened, and presents insights about how to influence user behavior – comes only from:

A certified “analytics ninja,” a person or team of people that can dig through the haystack to find the insights that move the needle.

All of this is especially true when it comes to predictive analytics. To get the most out of your analytics investments, you need to look ahead more often than you look behind.

The bottom line is that skilled people are the true key to success when it comes to analytics. Having a culture that supports analytics-driven decision making is also critical as it allows analytics teams to serve more as strategic advisors rather than report creators.

So the question becomes, how do you know you’ve got a real “ninja” – a truly experienced analytics professional who understands not only the capabilities of your software platform, but also understands more strategic concepts and best practices, like:

• The difference-making importance of robust data governance programs
• How quality beats quantity when it comes to big data
• Most importantly, how digital analytics programs need to map directly back to core business objectives and the overall company mission.

Further, when looking at your digital analytics team, ask yourself if your ninjas are “junior turtles” or truly senior warriors who have led and delivered major strategic initiatives, been through more than a few battles and witnessed firsthand the evolution of analytics.

Here is our take on the issues at stake, plus a few takeaways regarding the possibility of “life without cookies:”

• Well known brands that are providers of high-value content could potentially benefit from the shift away from cookies, especially if they can charge a premium for their ad inventories. For some properties, such a development could hold the key to returning to higher profitability. However, for lesser-known brands there could be trouble ahead. One of the original value propositions for ad networks was to allow smaller sites to get their hands on advertisers and revenue they otherwise would not have access to. Additionally, advertisers and media buyers don’t want to have to write 57 different contracts across 57 different websites to reach their full audience. That is especially true for national advertisers.
• If third-party cookies go away, or their usage is substantially changed, the impact will be multi-dimensional. These changes will affect every element and stakeholder in the system, including software firms that provide analytics platforms, the groups that shape industry standards for tracking users and firms that provide digital ad solutions. Individual digital marketers and publishers must plan for transition accordingly – charting their own user tracking and data collection practices, refining their data governance and reporting processes, and assessing new opportunities.
• Structural changes like these present all types of firms with an innovation imperative – that is, they must develop better solutions that reflect the new landscape of regulations and customer expectations, not to mention ensuring ongoing alignment with their own business objectives.

The Infinitive Analytics team recently traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah, for the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit. As usual, this was a powerhouse conference, attended by top digital marketers and analytics practitioners. A huge number of digital innovations, best practices, success stories and lessons learned were shared.

You can watch many of the keynotes and sessions here, but in the meantime, see below for our favorite takeaways:

• Overall, this was an impressive conference, with phenomenal content, highly informed speakers and great entertainment (not to mention delicious barbecue at Pat’s). The sneak-peaks into new Adobe Marketing Cloud and Creative Cloud features were hugely helpful, and the panel discussions and breakout sessions provided insight into applying innovative strategies and solving real-world problems. Adam Bain of Twitter presented highly intriguing predictions for what we can expect in the future of digital marketing and online commerce.
• A key theme of the summit was the need to “break down organizational silos,” and focus on organizational change – a critical requirement for success in the digital world. As much as it’s about the data, mastering the “people” and cultural side of digital analytics is still critical, and often overlooked.
• One expert claimed that CMOs might now be in a better position to predict and drive change than CFOs. Because of CMOs’ proximity to and visibility into deep data about customer preferences and market trends, they can best see quickly emerging opportunities and threats, though of course they’ll still need budgets to seize those opportunities.
• Across the many success stories, there was a common denominator that went unmentioned – data governance. It’s amazing how little credit goes to this essential ingredient to digital marketing and analytics success. Here’s our full take on why data governance matters.
• Consumers may have higher expectations about big data than businesses – they want broader, easier and faster access to data. But speed (and especially real-time) may be a double-edged sword for business analysts and decision makers; they must keep up with an accelerated environment, while slowing down enough to not miss the primary points and high-value nuggets that are focused on individual customers.
• The Adobe product suite continues to evolve, with extensive integration and a very powerful interface. It is clear that the focus will be on truly integrated platforms that bring together full views of all customer data, as opposed to narrow “point” solutions that isolate source data into standalone silos. All the sources – search, direct traffic, campaign data, mobile – need to be integrated for holistic views. Attendees were highly enthusiastic about the Adobe vision, but also acknowledged how challenging it will be to make it a reality.
• Last, but by no means least, keynote speaker Salman Khan of Khan Academy was the real star of the show. His presentation about using technology to bring a first-class education to everyone across the world and driving big change through small steps brought down the house. It’s no exaggeration to say he moved nearly half the audience to tears.

The Infinitive Analytics team

]]> http://analytics.infinitive.com/2013/03/22/big-ideas-best-practices-recapping-the-adobe-summit-2013/feed/ 0 http://analytics.infinitive.com/2013/03/02/digital-analytics-tipping-point/ http://analytics.infinitive.com/2013/03/02/digital-analytics-tipping-point/#comments Sat, 02 Mar 2013 11:00:52 +0000 cole http://analytics.infinitive.com/?p=1519 Continue reading →]]> Nielsen’s big announcement that it would begin to count Internet-connected TVs as part of its standard ratings for TV struck us a big deal, especially when paired with Billboard’s decision to include YouTube views in its calculation of the Hot 100 chart. However you feel about “Harlem Shake,” this is mostly good for marketers and publishers alike. While the change won’t have a major immediate impact, the reaction was understandable:

In some media corners on Thursday, the reaction was summarized in a word: Finally. Television executives who have long prodded Nielsen to evolve — and been disappointed before — said they would wait and see how far the company actually goes in counting online views.

Of course, it’s important to remember that:

These problems will only worsen in the years to come as new technologies further erase the boundaries that once existed between television and Internet; newspaper and cable news network; video and article.

Throw in the diversity of devices and content fragmentation, and the challenge for analytics professionals and digital marketers only increases.