Agenda Las Vegas 2020

Livestream on June 1-4

From market research to direct mail metrics to web analytics to Big Data, the job of “marketing” has changed dramatically over time. We have arrived at a fundamental shift in marketing that is as impactful as the advent of the Internet: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

This workshop introduces marketing professionals of all ranks to the theory, the language and the practical application of these disruptive technologies.
This workshop will not teach you how to be a data scientist.

It will teach you enough about the language and implications to speak cogently with your colleagues, and determine where to apply this innovative technology first. You will also get a firm grasp on how these new tools will change your job and what you can do to remain relevant in tomorrow’s marketing department.

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Jim Sterne, Co-Founder of the Digital Analytics Association and author of 12 books on online marketing and analytics, sets the stage. Jim explains the rules, lays out the expectations, and gives you your marching orders. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show? Not even close. Tune in, turn on, and hang on with both hands!

Many of us have bought a lottery ticket just for fun. Or maybe when there’s a big jackpot. How we play the Lottery is one thing; why we play the Lottery is another. If you sell Lottery tickets, you need to understand both so you can communicate most effectively with the right message in the right place at the right time. Neil, back by popular demand, divulges how the Belgian National Lottery created behavioral segmentation models for their online customers to understand opportunities for upsell, cross-sell, and reactivation. Neil dives into combining attitudinal and behavioral data to build communication strategies based on an individual’s playing behavior, allowing the Belgian National Lottery to be more relevant and timely – and effective.

Marketing advantage is all about your data and access to reliable data for all members of your team from any location quickly, easily, and securely is key. ETL remains the thorn of the digital analytics rose so Bob offers up lessons learned and operational insights into getting the most out of unified datamarts for use in marketing planning, implementation, analysis, and reporting. Need to master your data for holistic evaluation and confident, informed decision-making? Of course you do.

From Behavioral Analytics, to Enterprise Reporting, to Voice of Customer and now In-Store tracking, Gary has spent almost three decades pushing the frontier of analytics. Along the way, he’s failed at almost every aspect of doing, explaining, and operationalizing analytics which leads to a lot of wisdom. Gary looks at some of his key learnings along with what good, state-of-the-art analytics looks like today. He offers up what not to do (and, yes, some of what to do) when tackling Customer Journey Mapping, integrating Voice of Customer with Behavioral Data (digital or in-store), building behavioral segmentations, analyzing Customer Lifetime Value, doing (or forgetting about) cohort analysis, setting KPIs, building enterprise reports, organizing your teams, and talking to C-Suite executives. This is an entire analytics PHD in 30 minutes.

Gabi and Leah share their radical approach to building data culture at  high-growth companies, fueled by their belief that data is often the least important part of building a data-driven organization. If, for example, you woke up tomorrow and your organization’s data was suddenly perfect and every single employee was a SQL expert, would anything change? Would your colleagues know how to identify the most impactful problems, or ask the right questions of their data? Simply making data accessible isn’t enough; you need to create an active community of employees who are empowered and motivated to use data to solve problems. They tell the tactical story of how their grassroots data innovation program grew from ad-hoc onboarding support to a global network of data evangelists, and some lessons learned along the way.

Taking a proactive approach to governing your analytics and marketing tags can provide huge benefits for the accuracy of your implementation, which ultimately boosts your credibility. This session will offer ways you can become your company’s data quality guru with Release Validation and catch analytics errors before they happen, including how to: Address data quality issues before they reach a production environment, with less risk and cost, Focus on implementing tag governance in early development environments, such as staging, dev, and QA, instill a culture of proactive tag governance.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” goes the saying and it’s true for experimentation in any size organization. Anil bolsters his deep knowledge by reaching out to the most experienced testing and online marketing experimentation practitioners to reveal what companies large and small learned from mistakes made along the way. He brings back answers to the most common questions:

• Who were involved?
• How do you involve other groups and get them on board?
• How do you get C level support?
• Where do you start?

Whether you use Data Studio, Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau, R, or (most likely) some combination of platforms, data visualization is a core mechanism for communicating with your stakeholders. The difference between a mediocre illustration and an excellent visualization is whether a stakeholder struggles to internalize the information and fails to put it to use or understands and acts upon it. Tim walks through the neuroscience and psychology that underpins data visualization best practices in. He’ll gift you with platform-agnostic, effective, tactical tips that put you in the data illumination driver’s seat.

Hundreds of Bachelors and Masters Degree programs, Certificate programs, and bootcamps have sprung up to teach the science behind Data Science, including machine learning algorithms, statistics, and coding in python, R, and SQL. Yet data scientists quickly discover that it takes more to be a data scientist than knowing the science and data doesn’t always cooperate with the analyst! Dean describes five things that are critical to success in building predictive models and creating solutions with machine learning in a business context that are rarely taught in school. Real-world examples show how these principles matter operationally. Hint: as cool as Gradient Boosted Trees, Random Forests, and Deep Learning networks are, none of these principles are related to algorithms.

Vidya’s analytics journey is one of passion, grit, and hard work. Vidya demystifies the common jargon associated with Data Science, pointing out digital trends and their impact on your career. Capturing, integrating, storing, and mining data are the nuts and bolts of gleaning meaning. But all of those steps are undergoing massive changes in the face of Machine Learning. Learn key strategies and tactics to help direct your choices of tools, techniques and career paths.

We use data to fill the gaps left by the limits of our 5 senses. As it is for sight or hearing, it’s a real handicap when data is low quality. Declan has worked with many companies on implementation projects and data quality at all levels. Declan shares his experience by offering 5 key tips to ensure data quality. These simple takeaways will empower you to offer reliable data for decision making to your stakeholders, whilst also giving you the keys to set up trusted and sustainable data governance in your organization.

From the start in 2002, the Marketing Analytics Summit has been the place to discuss and share our common problems. These are your people – they understand your situation. Often rated the best part of the Marketing Analytics Summit, sharing your problems with like-minded professionals is your path to answers, a little empathy, and a stronger professional network.

Data visualization is a must, but it’s equally important to engage your audience with a narrative – to tell a story with the numbers.  Narratives are more powerful than raw statistics, more enduring than pretty charts, and are better at influencing decisions and driving change. 

Brent helps you master the art and science of data storytelling with frameworks and techniques to craft compelling stories with data and shows how to take the three central elements of data storytelling – data, narrative, and visuals – and combine them for maximum effectiveness. Isn’t it time you transform your insights and data visualizations into appealing, impactful data stories?

Are you using every tool at your disposal to find the gems of insight that will make you look like a Rockstar and propel your department into the next level? Tracking granular level prospect/customer events – action level tracking – combined with CRM data (appending demographic data, offline behavioral data, etc.) can drive super-advanced learnings. Matt shares how to leverage that data into a machine learning model or take it into Google’s new Attribution beta. He also shows how to tell when you are too deep in the weeds.

For the second time in a year, the boss said he wasn’t sure about the value of analytics, because ‘the business is so simple,’ and, ‘the execs just didn’t get it.’ It’s budget-cutting time again. We had streamlined reporting, settled on KPIs, and helped them get insight they never had before. What’s not to get?? Melinda describes the over-delivering trap she had built for herself, reveals the warning signs she should have heeded, and gives specific instructions on how to get yourself out of the same hole. The first lesson: stop digging! The second lesson will save your job and the third will make you an analytics rock star.

Judah lays out a solid frame of reference for how to think about and apply predictive analytics and machine learning to marketing challenges. After the briefest of conceptual orientation, Judah drops straight into the data, the predictive insights you can surface in minutes, and the immediate actions you take based on the automatically generated models. He’ll even share how he came up with the name “Squark”

Choose From:

• Jim Sterne – AI in Marketing
• Brent Dykes – Data Storytelling
• Dean Abbott – Data Science
• Anil Batra & Melanie Bowles – Testing
• Tim Wilson – Working with Difficult Stakeholders
• Melinda Byerley – Advice from Years in the Trenches

Reinforcement Learning – rewarding the machine for better outcomes – was front and center for Samsung’s email optimization. Venkata developed an agent that intelligently learns from previous campaigns and prescribes target population to maximize engagement (CTR) and thus conversions. Venkata shares how this Prescriptive Engine agent solves the Multi-Arm Bandit problem/Exploration-Exploitation dilemma. 

The customer decision journey resembles the path of a fast pinball game – bouncing from one moment to the next with seemingly no predictable pattern. How can you connect throughout
this journey to inform, influence and inspire on-line engagement and action? Kent shares the what, the how, and the why of using an omni-channel attribution approach to engage with consumers at multiple ‘micro-moments’. Learn how to think small to win big
by understanding; when you should engage, where you can engage, and what kind of message to deliver at those moments to build your digital footprint and create macro success.

• Understand “micro-moments” as part of the purchase path
• Learn how to leverage assets across multiple channels and media
• Develop an attribution program to track the efficacy of your multi-channel campaigns

Learn what this gender-inclusive group is doing to support gender equality in analytics profession. Meet with fellow analysts in a roundtable discussion about issues facing women within this profession – and how we can all work to improve the situation. Men – come to learn how to be a professional ally and improve the working conditions at your organization.

ITP updates, Edge’s new rendering engine, Chrome sameSite cookie changes, CCPA, …Oh! and make sure all of those new dashboard updates are done by the end of the week and give me a cross-tab for seasonality by region pegged to competitive ad spend, OK?thanksbye. While Cory totally commiserates with you on that last bit, he can fundamentally help with practical, tactical insights and advice about tag management turmoil, Do-Not-Track and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act anxiety, and modern browsers and the destruction of an analyst’s dreams. If you work in the weeds, bring your questions.

Meaningful marketing impact relies on cross-functional alignment in strategy and alignment in measurement. This session will showcase new analyses and learnings from the LinkedIn Insights Team to help teams better plan, execute, and measure their marketing efforts.

No matter what tool you use, an A/B testing strategy requires a flow of test ideas to keep the cycle of continuous improvement going. That sounds great, but how do you come up with test ideas that matter? Melanie reveals how to use your available quantitative and qualitative data to find opportunities for experimentation. Learn how to use web analytics, user surveys, heatmaps, user recordings, and heuristics for test ideas that lead to more successful user experiences.

Everyone wants to be a data scientist and build state of the art Machine Learning models. But for most companies, only a small percentage of models actually go into production. While ML can be used for research and discovery, its true ROI is realized when you make real business decisions autonomously.  Kishen describes what to and what not to do when approaching a business problem with an ML lens. He covers steps to take to go from ideation to production and all the fun you can have in between.

After spending a couple of days steeped in lectures, roundtables, workshops, and casual conversations, what is still on your mind? Jim and a few hand-picked experts take the stage to answer your lingering questions. How do I convince my boss? Should I learn R or Python? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Here’s your chance to head back to work with One More golden nugget, or just settle a bet.

“No matter how big your data, you must master storytelling and visualization to influence business decisions.”

Visualization is the new communication medium – not the activity of making charts!  Learn how to apply the foundations of visual language, evoke what people really want from their data, and unleash your creativity.

Develop leadership in the processes, people, and culture around visualization. To make big data successful requires you to build new skills in visualization and change how teams work together.

This workshop is more than amazing ideas you can put into action immediately.  The exercises build your confidence with practical ways to improve your visualizations and make it easy to see insights.

Are you ready to transform how your organization makes decisions and takes action?

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