OMMA NYC June 9 Summary

Following yesterday's post with the raw notes, here's a summary of what I observed / learned at OMMA Metrics & Measurement -- short, since Joe Mandese already did such a great job writing up the day.

This was the first OMMA conference of its kind.  It attracted a great and appropriately diverse (advertisers, publishers, agencies, vendors, advisors) field of expert panelists, and it was well attended (couple hundred folks + in the audience I think).  So it was a target-rich environment for taking the pulse of the marketing analytics field.  At the same time, as the first of the series, it blended a number of audiences and objectives that in the future may end up in different conferences (or at least tracks of the same one), which made some things a little hard to follow at times, for different reasons.  Nonetheless, worth the time and money.  If you missed it OMMA is doing the same thing again soon in SF.

Of course it's always easier to hear validation of what you believe:

• the importance of having clear questions / hypotheses in mind before you embark on analysis -- this was always important, but it's ever more so now when the data sets and the tools to manipulate have the budget-busting power of Tsar Bombas (which, coincidentally and thankfully, never entered service) compared with what we had even ten years ago
• the large degree to which the technology options outstrip the qualified people to use them
• at the same time -- a point made on different panels by ClearSaleing's Adam Goldberg and Razorfish's Vivian Zhu -- the fact that [my words] "the scary stats and SQL aren't going away, and marketers who think so are swimming against the current"
• analysis within individual channel silos is getting acceptably sophisticated, if still hard to benchmark due to a lack of standards. However, integration across them for attribution and consequent (and ultimately much more valuable) global optimization is hard, especially as you move from mix- to campaign- and eventually to customer-level actionability. (IMHO the key here is to do the actionability math first -- what are the benefits and costs of moving from mix-level to customer level tweaking? -- then fit the cost and complexity of the analysis to the opportunity.)

Couple of other observations about the conference:

• While it's always entertaining to see vendors go at it on stage, it's also a bit of a waste, because the real issue is rarely that one is purely superior to another, but rather the specific questions / conditions for which each is suited.  So I had mixed feelings as I watched Josh Chasin (comScore) and Adam Gerber (Quantcast) duke it out over whether measurement or addressability was better (an overly simplistic summary of the panel on Audience Measurement, but hey, it's what I remember).
• More stories and more pictures would have been nice.  What we did get was good; in particular, Compete CMO Stephen DiMarco's presentation (ppt glitches notwithstanding) was a model in this regard.  His illustration of the "slow-roll" launch of the Blackberry Storm / Bold launch, and its use of multiple web sites / presences (including, controversially, conversion on partner sites), was instructive.

So, the pulse: 

• This -- in the end, better decision-support and accountability -- is clearly where the action is in a global marketing sector that still runs into hundreds of billions of dollars despite tough times.  
• It's brothy, late-Paleozoic days still (hoping that doesn't mean the recession is the digital equivalent of the Permian Extinction!), with analytics infrastructures facing uncertain evolutionary futures as the things they measure change. "Confusing!" as one panelist put it.

The two themes add up to opportunity.  We see the solution as scaffolding to help make sense of it all.

Postscript:  Josh Chasin's March 12 post on comScore Voices, and the Gian Fulgoni white paper linked from it, were helpful to understanding the Audience Measurement debate further.

Postcript #2: Josh Chasin explains his OMMA Metrics and Measurement panel comments further.

Comments

[Stephen DiMarco]

Cesar, thanks for the recognition. You would have really loved it if you could have seen my infocharts. I am going to circulate the deck around to attendees in the next few days!

[Josh Chasin]

Hey Cesar, a couple of things.

First, oddly enough, I'd like to second your comments about DiMarco's session. He always does a good job, and I'd have liked to have had Compete on the audience measurement panel, instead of relegated to a sponsor slot. I think the panel would have benefitted.

Second, and another surprise, I agree with you regarding vendor smackdowns, even though I was forced to be a party to the one you reference. I'm Chief Research officer at comScore with 29 years of audience measurement experience, and I always want to come away from a panel having provided some thoughtful debate and discussion about issues. I tried to do so in answering audience questions. But when confronted with a competitor's Chief Marketing Officer who fires off his first marketing sound byte while introducing himself, I end up in a tough spot.

The feedback I got was positive... but like you, I had mixed feelings about the panel.