Web Analytics & E-commerce (EN)

Day 2 @ XChange Europe 2012 in Berlin

The second day at XChange started with a new round of huddles. I was part of the huddle led by Isabelle Mouli-Castillo from Dell on “How to measure your site efficiency when it is not just about conversion?”.

 
Participants were both interested by lead generation-type and e-commerce-type sites. The conversation started on customer experience measurement, which can be measured by specific tools like eTracker,OpinionLab, Clicktale, Sessioncam, Kissinsights. These tools may also be used to assess the Net Promotor Scores.  3 main things may be performed with qualitative tools: 1. Brand awareness measurement, 2. User experience and 3. Broad site survey (interests, needs, demographics, etc…). One participant shared that they are using a 5 point scale in order to understand the customer journey : Search -> Get Inspired -> Get information -> Order -> After Sales. Micro-conversion points are defined for each of these 5 points. The discussion moved next on E-support, where it is difficult to find meaningful KPIs. Time spent on site, dwell time, repeat visitation may be used, but it is difficult to relay these metrics with user satisfaction and site efficiency. It is also difficult to relay consumption of content to conversion for high-end products. Search usage is important to measure self-help site sections.  In general, conversion rate shouldn’t be analyzed without segmentation based both on visitor profile and visitor behavior. Off-line conversion for web sites may also be measure with click-to-call and click-to-chat features, as well as specific telephone numbers for the websites. One participant shared that one of his customer is using different 800 numbers on product pages in order to track their efficiency.

 
My second huddle was led by Alex Emberey, Thomas Cook, on the topic “Social Media Today: Tools and Metrics”. Social Media may be measured by using reach as the first step of the social conversion funnel.  Reach is an interesting metric but not really useful, since a tiny minority of your followers are seeing your tweets on Twitter (about 16 %). The number of likes and fans are also used as a proxy for benchmarking with the competition. Fans worth depend on how your acquire them, how you engage with them and what they do. The issue is more on how are we resonating with people on Facebook, Twitter, etc… than the actual number of fans. Metrics that should be shared across platforms: content amplification (RTs, shares, etc…) than can be compared with competitors. It remains difficult to measure the long term impact of Facebook. Social media needs also to be put into consideration in the attribution models and we need to understand the impact of social actions in the longer customer journey. The issue with installing monitoring tools is that there might not be any comment and interaction with content produced by marketers. You have to look at the audience you want to attract, because there might be bad traffic and some comments may not be worth at all. One of the biggest challenge is to get a significant sample. You spend a lot of time to weed out non-significant comments and contributors. More easy to mine the data when you own the community that is of interest to you. Direct clicks are not necessarily representative of all traffic and you need impressions to balance it. Finding correlations between quality of social traffic and economic value is the right way to approach social media performance. A few metrics: applause rate (% of likes), amplification rate (% of shares  / RTs) and conversation rate (% of conversations). As analysts, we have also a duty to sanity check on the atual importance and impact of social media compared to the rest of the business. If we stop doing social marketing, what will we loose? We need also to recognize that social Web is not just Facebook, it’s the way people are using the web today.  One of the key things is to understand what you are doing now and how it is impacting your business.

 
During the lunch break, an informal meeting took place with the members of the European Special Interest Group of the Digital Analytics Association. Geddy Van Elburg provided an update on the EU privacy regulation.http://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/?page=sig_european

 

My last huddle was on "Democratising Data – Replacing Static Reports with Bespoke Visualization Tools" and led by Tom Betts, Financial Times. The conversation started with a testimony of the implementation of a 30-people team dedicated to data analysis and reporting with different roles and sub-teams: business analysts (making strategic information obvious, liaison with business units, subject matter experts -> listen to business goals and translate into measurement objectives), reporting sub-team, analysis sub-team and implementation sub-team. The discussion continue on the best way to deliver information. One participant shared his experience with role-based view, in order to provide personalize views of data. Visualization is a mechanism of communication with the objective to drive end-users’ interest. Better visualization helps to drive conversation with the business. While vizualisation can help communication, but it can also be bad with cuttered graphs. Mantra : “reports are not meant to answer questions, but to raise questions for in-depth analysis". A participant mentioned the work Hans Rosling on data vizualisation and recommanded to watch the following video : http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Then, a debate started on the extent that data access should be democratized. Some participants raised the issue that end-users don’t have necessary the context to understand and get insights from the data. If people had access to more data, what would be the first place where they would look at? Democratizing data is making people discuss about the data and leveraging it as an asset. Democratizing insights vs data. Purpose is for people to ask questions. Democratization of data may be necessary if the analytics function is distributed inside the organization. Telling people about their data and what can be done about it. Sharing the power of data instead of the data itself. Data should be made available to internal clients who own them and can understand them.

 

The conference finished with a feedback session with Gary Angel, as well as a vote on the location for next year: Berlin, Paris, London, Dublin, Amsterdam or Majorcca. Berlin and Amsterdam seemed to gather the most votes!

Congratulations to the Semphonic, AEP Convert and Rising Media teams for organizing this great event ! Lots of opportunities to discuss, to learn and to meet with peers from different countries!

Day 1 @ XChange Europe 2012 in Berlin

The first XChange Europe conference started in Berlin on May 29^th, 2012 with a welcome reception gathering 100+ attendees from Germany, the United Kingdom, Danemark, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Spain, Netherlands, France, India, Australia, Canada and the United States of America. XChange Europe is an initiative by Semphonic, a leading US Web Analytics consulting company, with the local support of AEP Convert from London and Rising Media from Munich.

 
XChange is a conference tailored for Web Analytics geeks and specialists, with a focus on discussions instead of Powerpoint presentations. In fact, there are no Powerpoint presentations at all and the conference is organized around 90-minute group discussions called "huddles". The groups are made of Web Analytics specialists working for advertisers, consulting firms and software vendors. The rule is that it is not the place for selling products and services.

The conference is organized inside the Scandic Hotel with dedicated conference rooms, right in the center of Berlin and near the Potsdamer Platz.

 

On May 30th, the XChange conference officially began with a panel discussion led by Gary Angel, Semphonic's founder and CEO, and with an impressive cast of speakers: Peter Pletsch, Quantitative Analysis Manager at Allesklar.com, Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen, Customer Analytics Director at Nokia, David McBride, Analytics Director at Comcast, Web Analytics Director at Financial Times.

The discussion was mainly around the topic "How to make the leap from web analytics to big data (datawarehousing and cloud) ?". Here is a summary of the key points discussed:

• David McBride, Comcast: the rise of video of demand as a service at Comcast fostered business needs to understand the user behavior around this new strategic service. Hence, it was easier to get budget for the creation a customer database with cross-platform integrationlike video on demand. New resources with database skills were required at the Web Analytics team.


• Tom Betts, Financial Times: the growth was organic around the need to be more customer-centric for better targeted advertising rather than product-centric. By analyzing data at customer level, it was possible to get actionable insights who generated revenue, as well as excitement and the need to invest more.


• Peter Pletsch, Allesklar: in order to get more specific information tailored to business needs, it was necessary to build a datawarehouse and to develop a front-end in Excel. Using Excel was of great help to build people acceptance.


•  Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen, Nokia: the move from web analytics to big data was made easier thanks to a pre-existing central datawarehousing solution, where web data was only a data source. The team was put together from scratch and organically, with a focus on data scientists' skillsets.

In closing, Gary Angel asked the panelists on the role of web analytics tools moving forward vs datawarehousing. While there is a strong tendency to use Web Analytics tools for data collection and to build custom reporting with customer-focused KPIs directly from the datawarehouse, datawarehousing's interfaces are less friendly for end-users, especially for Web-focused analytics questions. Therefore, Web Analytics tools have still a role to play in order to democratize access to Web data, while data warehousing solutions will be more used by specialists for advanced analysis.

After this panel discussion, all participants were split in 5 huddles of 20 persons. During the registration process at the conference, it was required for each participant to express attendance preferences regarding the topics suggested and a personalized huddle schedule was delivered at the beginning of the conference according to priorities expressed.

 

The first huddle discussion I attended was led by Isabelle Mouli-Castillo from Dell on "What could go wrong? How to change the culture of the company to test before implementing any change". To respect privacy of the discussions, I will only summarize the main topics discussed in huddles with no mention to individuals and companies. The huddle started with a strong contribution from an optimisation lead, who explained that he managed to get traction on testing within his company by focusing on answering to business questions instead of red vs green button testing. The size of the panel, 2 million visitor a month, was also of great help to build excitement around testing. How to prioritize questions and testing requests? Academic research can help funnel actions with web psychology. Personas also help prioritization around segments. The Net Promotor Score can also become a personalization criteria. In one company, testing requests are split in two categories: strategic validation and revenue generation. Surveys with strategic areas on users' perspective can also become an input for priorization. Some companies use also a matrix for evaluating and prioritizing requests. One participant emphasized the need to make tesing fun and not just work with team rewards when testing is successful ("gamification"). When testing involves multiples countries, a participant advised to use the organization cultural dimensions from Pr. Geert Hofstede in order to group countries. I raised the issue of testing in a multichannel environment, where conversion can also happen on other channels (retail, telesales, etc...), and it was recognized as a real problem that will be solved with big data integration.

 

My next huddle was led by Gemma Munoz, Mind Your Analytics and Matthias Bettag, Semphonic, on the topic "Competitive Analytics: Does a Predictive Model Give Your Company a Competitive Edge". The discussion was around using Web Analytics to predict outcome and business results. After some discussions, a need was felt by one participant to define what we mean by Predictive Analytics. Opinions were quite diverse on the subject and we had to use Wikipedia to get a clear and comprehensive definition: "Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from modeling, machine learning, data mining and game theory that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_analytics. Then, there was a discussion on the need to use different models with different user segments, for instance by using the CRISP-DM methodology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Industry_Standard_Process_for_Data_Mining).Since there is a cost associated with Predictive Analytics, a participant raised the question on what is the threshold to consider a prediction as relevant and cost-effective. Also, there is a risk of playing it safe with predictive analytics and pre-defined models, and we need to stay open to big discoveries. In conclusion, everybody agreed that predictive analytics is the most interesting and challengic topic around Web Analytics, and that we all need to become more accurate with models and statistics, in order to be able to trust data.

 
My last huddle session of the day was led by Ross McDonnell, Walt Disney Company, on "Getting the measurement foundations right". The huddle was organized in a methodological manner with an in-depth review of the main Web Analytics stages: Business Requirement gathering -> Measurement framework -> Tagging Requirement -> Q&A -> Reporting. What was very stricking in this huddle is that we all face the same issues on both sides of the Atlantic and that there are no magic solutions. Most requirement gathering are failing because no direct connection with customers point of view. Tag management system may alleviate some implementation issues, but not all of them. Regression testing for Web Analytics is horrible on web sites that change very week. Spidering tools are of a great help to automate testing but manual testing is still needed on critical scenarios. Emphasis was also made on the need to engage teams early and to determine objectives for campaigns and websites before they are released. Report fatigue was also discussed, where some customers throw reports away and prefer to focus on analysis on case-by-case basis. There is no point of sending reports if no action should be taken. If there is no story in reports, it is just noise. Regarding training, it was mentioned that it is difficult to train used on tools and it is often easier to train them around reports.

 
The day ended with a fantastic cruise along the canals and river in the center of Berlin. This was a great way to continue conversations, to meet new peers as well as to discover this great city from an other point of view!

Day 2 @ Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 in London

After a rainy Day 1, the sun was back for the second day of Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in London!

 

John Mellor, VP of Strategy and business development, Digital Marketing, introduced the morning keynotes. Going back to the concept of the Digital Self, companies, products, brands, events have their own digital selves. According to Mellor, our role as digital marketers is to create relationships between digital selves of brands with digital selves of individuals. Marketers become a sort of digital match makers. Unlike individuals who can chose to be on Facebook or not, brands do not have a choice. Their digital selves exist by themselves. The choice is whether you participate or not. Relationship first companies are obsessed with the 3^rd and 4^th purchase and use digital to tie everything. In the next five years, the focus will be in sub-networks, niche networks giving the ability of consumers to better define who they are. The landscape will become more complex and diverse. We need to rethink approach to marketing and to concentrate our efforts on how to approach this new context, whatever which device and social network wins.

 

Giles Warner, Partner, Deloitte Consulting, Marketing & Insight, presented the next keynote on the topic: “The Evolving Digital Landscape”. According to him, it is an exciting time of digital explosion,  yet some old truths remains:
- consumer tech defies the economis headwinds,
- the 100 $ smart phone reaches its first half billion,
- it takes two to tablet: 10 % of tablet sales to homes who already have already one,
- so many apps and so few downloads: 2 M applications available, but only 20 % brand applications downloaded more than 1 million times,

Companies must embrace new media and integrate with traditional marketing to engage with consumers :
- consumers own at leas 8 devices,
- traditional media remain vital,
– new media complements,
- online recommendation more important than advertising.

Mass media is a conversation starter, while digital media is a conversation keeper.

3 categories of critical ecommerce capabilities:
- critical mass: product search, site performance, social presence,
- on the verge : mobile shopping, market place offerings, personalisations,
- next wave : social engagement, insightful and actionable analytics, consumerisation of B2B.

 

Rob Giglio, VP Worldwide Retail and e-commerce at Adobe, "dogfooding" presentation was on how his team uses Adobe's products to optimize conversion on the adobe.com site. In 2009, the web site was generating $275 M in revenue and had a 2,2 % conversion rate.

A web site redesign was decided in 2009 to address individual business needs, as well as to enhance the online experience and improve the conversion rate.

First, a decision was made to use Adobe CQ and Test & Target in order to localizing at the content level. QA is now provided at the content level instead of at the local version level.

In terms of personalisation, the focus was made of the following areas:
- first page personalization,
- purchase experience,
- recommandations,
- express checkout

For instance, different check out processes are being presented to the end-user depending on their status (regular, student, teacher, etc...). Also the recommandations engine is used to push related products in the purchase journey. Recognized customers signed in from any Adobe web site have also express checkout. Test & Target is also being used to personalize promotional offers.

After the redesign of the web site and the optimization efforts, the revenue should reach $500M this year and the conversion rate is 5,5 % today on Adobe.com

With the goal to reach $1B of yearly revenues, the next big steps for Adobe.com are:
- truly localizing the site,
- expand relevance for each digital self,
- maximize value and customer loyalty.

Nils Müller, futurologist & CEO at TrendOne, concluded the morning keynotes with a time traveling journey on 2021, with current lab technology. The keynote was mind-blowing and dense and is worth watching on a video when it will be available. According to Müller, there are 5 stages of development for the Web:
- 1.0: web of content attention
- 2.0: web of communication involvement
- 3.0: web of context immersion
- 4.0: web of things connectivity
- 5.0: web of thoughts communications

Over the years, we should evolve to an hybrid reality with digital data, like for instance: contact lenses that recognize faces (and can pull automatically social network data!), devices controlled with thoughts, voiceless phone conversations, etc...

 

Back to reality, I attended a breakout sessions titled  “Adobe Discover 3.0: Bye-bye page pathing, hello sequential analysis” with Giuseppe Sessa, Consulting Manager at Adobe and Tim Lott, Group Programme Manager at Adobe.

The presentation was organized around real-life uses cases with Discover 3.0, which is complimentary to Adobe SiteCatalyst. Here is a summary of the new features of Discover 3.0:

- new fallout reports: ability to do sequential analysis across any dimension and events (creation of a segment with persons who have viewed the internal campaign),

- new visualization of marketing channel interactions across visits,

- integration between Test & Target and Discover: creation of segments based on Test&Target variables,

- easier ability to create pivot tables with table builder,

- ability to copy to clickboard with individual colums and to send by emails,

- ability to define a common timeframe at the project / workspaces / reports levels, but it is still possible to define at the report level,

- time can be used as a dimension,

- custom calendar settings in SiteCatalyst are now taken into consideration by Discover v3.

 

During the lunch break, I met Aseem Chandra, VP of Product Marketing at Adobe, with other French bloggers to discuss the recent announcement of the "Digital Analytics Package". This new package enables users to have access to the following applications: SiteCatalyst v15, Discover 3.0, Datawarehouse, Genesis, ReportBuilder and Adobe Tag Manager. It has to be noted that there is no-user based pricing and that it is based on server calls, which is a great advantage for Discover and ReportBuilder which are usually billed on a per-user basis.

The minimum commitment for this package is 500.000 server calls per month and the minimum yearly cost is between $10K and $15K. This new package is available immediately on a global basis.

For more info, check out this press release: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201205/051512AdobeDigitalAnalyticsPackage.html

What’s next with SiteCatalyst ?
- predictive analytics and marketing : DNA on all product line,
- virtual analytist technology : looking at correlation and anomalies of data in an historical perspective on hundreds of variables.

What's next with Adobe Insight?
- statistical models based on historical

What’s next with Datawarehouse ?
- ability to copy queries

 

In a breakout session titled “Predictive Marketing: no PHD in statistics required”, Bill Gassman, Research Director at Gartner, presented his vision of predictive analytics: finding little things that don’t mean a lot at first, but can help to predict patterns (example : insurance policy, fraud, churn, etc…).

In the supermarket world, different models are being used to organize shelves with different buying patterns. In Web Analytics, we rarely look back on how we did versus the forecasts. Like in supermarkets, some models will be good for some parts only.

With more data, we can better predict consumer behaviours (social + search + clickstream + call center + data agregators + location = score).

The different stages of analytics maturity are:
1. descriptive & diagnostic analytics (Information), 
2. predictive analytics (Insights),
3. prescriptive analytics (Decisions)

According to Gassman, Adobe is working on packaged predictive analytics, with pre-determined data understanding, automated data preparation, rapid modeling. Predictive analysis will then be integrated with automated processes, like for instance recommandations and Test & Target.

 

One of the last breakout sessions was a panel titled “Analytics action heroes: learn digital kung-fu from analytics masters” with Brent Dykes,Evangelist, Customer Analytics at Adobe, Eric Crossfield, Web Analytics at John Lewis and Adam Greco, Senior Partner at Web Analytics Demystified. The panel was organized around the main topics of Brent Dykes' book titled "Web Analytics Action Hero".

Web Analysts should have two main objectives:
1. understand what is important to the business
2. have the company to act on improvements

Web Analytists should be moving from "Setup Land" (KPIs, tagging, reporting) to "Action Land" (optimization). "Setup Land" is like the parking lot of Disneyland (=action land). Analysis is the ticket to "Action Land".

According to Adam Greco, analysts spent too much time in "Setup Land" and data quality issues. Good web analysts need to make sure that they can trust the data (tip: use ReportBuilder to identify issues in data collection).

For Eric Crossfield, web analysts should have a wide range of skillsets:
1. knowing digital marketing
2. having the technical understanding
3. being able to manage stakeholders

Usually, Web Analysts don't have the time to do enough analysis and need to prioritize what's important to the business. Five key factors that influence priorization:
1. business goals
2. ability to influence
3. potential impact
4. level of effort
5. context

HEROIC analysis approach:
- Have a hit list
- Evaluate data and its context
- Recognize opportunities
- Obtain deeper insights
- Inspect monetary value
- Choose the best option 

 

 

Congratulations to Neil Morgan and his team for organizing a great event around digital marketing and digital analytics! Many thanks also to Adobe France for gathering a great French blogger team with Carole Da Silva, Edouard Austin, Florian Giudicelli, Fred Cavazza, Laurent Evain and myself.

 

MORE ON THIS TOPIC:

- Day 1 @ Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 in London, by Nicolas Malo on nicolasmalo.com

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA 2012 – It’s a wrap!, by Neil Morgan on blogs.adobe.com

- Adobe Summit Storified!, by Adobe Team UK on blogs.adobe.com

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA 2012 Highlights, by Adobe on YouTube 

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA: Deloitte Sees 'More Computers Than Cushions' In Consumer's Den, by Michael Nutley on CMO.com

- Rory Sutherland, Arianna Huffington and a priest - Adobe Digital Summit 2012 reviewed, by Owain Cleary on thedrum.co.uk

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit London 2012 : Snapshots from London, by Edouard Austin on live.orange.com

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit London 2012 : The Digital Self, by Edouard Austin on live.orange.com

 

Day 1 @ Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012 in London

For the first edition of its Digital Marketing Summit in London, Adobe has chosen the charming Battersea Park, right on the South Bank of the Thames, with joggers and tennis players nearby. 1,700+ attendees from 36 different countries gathered for keynote and breakout sessions on digital marketing, digital advertising and digital analytics. I was pretty lucky to attend the first day with a group of vibrant French bloggers.

At Adobe, the Digital Marketing division makes up a total of 1 billion dollars of revenue (25 % of total Adobe revenue), with a 20 % year-over-year growth.

 

Brad Rencher (@bradrencher), Senior Vice President & General Manager for Digital Marketing at Adobe, was the Master of Ceremony for the morning keynotes. Brad started to explain the theme of the Summit: the Digital Self.

Digital self is the combination of signals that consumers are constantly emitting: read, buy, post, etc... The more we - as customers - interact, the more deposits we make in the system, the more we expect back from brands in terms of relevance and real-time personalization. The power of digital self is small things that bring big meanings. This is the contract that we should hold with consumers. At the end of the day, the consumers will be the judges of how well we do as marketeers.

We keep sending signals on Spotify, Yelp, Linkedin, etc… Signals depict the picture of who we are. Privacy is taking a critical role. Transparency and ability should be provided to customers in order to protect their data. Privacy is a global issue. Adobe is agressively developing best in class solutions around privacy. For instance, the Adobe Tag Management solution has just been enhanced by integrating Evidon technology, so that control can be given to users on how their data is used online.

Personalization remains the focus of what we do in digital marketing.

In Adobe's vision, the Digital Self has gone from academic to actionable, with 3 core elements:

1. Data: at the core of every digital system

2. Content: elements that bring experiences to life

3. Optimization: making content relevant to the end user in milliseconds.

Adobe focuses on 4 main areas for its digital marketing solutions:

1. building personalized experiences

2. managing digital advertising

3. monetization

4. cracking the code on social marketing

Analytics is the basis and living data for all 4 areas, as well as what bring the web to life.

 
 
After this introduction, Chris Popple, Managing Director at the Royal Bank of Scotland, shared some very interesting insights on how to better manager customer experience and relationship in the digital world:

1. Combining transactional data with digital touchpoints: each interaction is an opportunity to decide whether this signal should be reused in another channel or not.

2. Making a difference by listening to consumers comments and complaints on social networks

3. Appointing "Journey managers", who own the customer experience from end to end for key patterns.

 

Regarding the latest innovations, several demos and announcements were made during the morning:

• Adobe Digital Index: tablet devices will generate more web traffic than smartphones by early 2013 and consumers find browsing websites on tablets nearly as engaging as on PCs. You can check out the full report here.

• Adobe CQ Cloud Manager:  a Software-as-a-Service application that provides enterprises the ability to easily and quickly launch marketing initiatives in the cloud, as well as deep integration with SiteCatalyst. More info here.

• Discover v3: this new edition provides path analysis on any custom variable.


• Adobe Insight: ROAS by marketing channels, both on and off-line.


• Predictive analytics: acquired in January 2012, Efficient Frontier provides recommandations on how to spend budget on different channels according to budget objectives.


• Adobe Social: creation of a single platform for social advertising, monitoring, management and reporting with Adobe SocialAnalytics + ContextOptional + Efficient Frontier.


• Adobe Cloud Creative Services: all Creative Suite products and new services provided on a service model with 20 GB storage. Enables collaboration with others ; social community around. 49 $ a month. Still able to buy Creative Suite on a traditional lifetime licence model.


• CMO.com European Edition: launched today and available here.

   

In spite of careful planning and significant investment (100 Mbit/s pipe and 100+ hotspots), the Internet connection was unexpectedly slow during the morning keynotes and the wifi had to be shut down for at leat one hour in order to ensure smooth operation of the demos. It was not planned this way by Adobe, but it was a great moment of realization from the audience on how dependent we have become from the digital world. Later in the day, Arianna Huffington reminded us on how important it is to disconnect from our digital life in order to recharge.

 

In the breakout sessions in the afternoon, Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President and Principal Analytics at Forrrester, made a strong performance on the theme "How to thrive in the era of digital disruption". She started with a parallel between Henry Ford and Mark Zuckerberg, who have both revolutionized their industries. Disruption has always been part of business, but digital disruption is better, stronger and faster. In this new context, differenciating ideas expire quickly and are easy to replicate.

Marketers need to be customer obsessed: age of manufacturing (1900 – 1960)-> age of distribution (1960 – 1990) -> age of information (1990 – 2010) -> age of the customer (2010 - ?). In the age of the customer, empowered buyers demand a new level of customer obsession. Marketeers must invest in interactive tools to become customer obsessed.

How can you differenciate in the era of digital disruption?

1. shift to a customer focused orientation: thinking customer first instead of channel (search manager, affiliate manager, …). Instead : most loyal customers, new customers, etc… Customers specialists instead of channel manager. Metrics : customer engagement across channels instead of results from channel campaigns

2. prioritise multichannel automation and data support-> central hub & automation for optimization

3. focus you agency partners on the three "I": ideas, interactions and intelligence

4. manage digital employee lifecycles, not just hiring or recruiting. Attract (win top interactive marketers into you organization), Nurture : keep existing talent inspired and loyal, Activate : leverage value from former employees. Igniting an interactive marketer’s life cycle at your firm will encourage current and former employees to help recruit new ones.

 

After this presentation, I attended a panel on "Privacy vs Personalisation" with André Germinent, New Technology & Innovation team manger at Crédit Agricole, Meme Jacobs Rasmussen, Chief Privacy Officer at Adobe, David Dean, senior partner & managing director at the Boston Consulting Group and Dave Evans, group Manager, Business and Industry, ICO. All participants agreed on the need to be more transparent on how and why personal data is getting collected. While no one wants to be tracked, everyone wants to have a more personalized and relevant experience. Consequently, privacy and personalisation do not have to be necessarily in conflict, as long as we tell people what is going on. There is a huge gap between the perception of value of data between the marketing industry and end users. The latter should be getting more value if they give more personal data. On the Adobe side, privacy management is currently being built in the core of its products. Whatever the regulations, the bigger pressure may come from customers themselves. If nothing is being done regarding privacy, the current 8 % yearly growth of the Internet economy may be at risk in the coming years.

   

Scott Ulrich, Chief Marketing & Sales Officer at Responsys, keynoted on the “New School of Marketing”. According to him, there are two main types of companies: Acquisition First vs Relationship First. Acquisition First companies are obsessed with first purchase and use digital mainly to drive traffic. This implies cross-channel permission capture, in order to trigger lifecycle programs using web behavior. Automation and optimization become key with this approach.

   

Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief AOL Huffington Post Media Group, performed an unexpected and moving keynote, on the need to learn to disconnect  from technology to reconnect to ourselves. Peace of mind is required to be creative, and sleep is required to have peace of mind. Never sleep with your smartphone next to your bed and buy an alarm clock if you need one.

The day ended with a cocktail and a party until late!

 

 

MORE ON THIS TOPIC:

- Day One at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA 2012 on blogs.adobe.com by Neil Morgan

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit EMEA: Relationship-First Marketing Goes To Head Of The Class, by Michael Nutley on CMO.com

- Arianna Huffington Keynote at #AdobeSummit on Storify by Gabrielle Laine Peters

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit - Compte-rendu jour 1, by Fred Cavazza (in French)

- Adobe Digital Marketing Summit - Jour 1 suite et fin, by Fred Cavazza (in French)