Learnings from Superweek 2020
Last year, I (Lukáš Čech) attended this conference for the first time. If you want to understand the key building blocks of the event, you can read the report from the last year (in Czech).
This year, we were able to strengthen our participation with Hanka Kalivodová and Tobiáš Kučera. We wanted to cover the content from different points of view and also gain more granular insights. It is pretty hard to keep up with the pace of this five day information overload presented by the brightest minds of our industry.
Like last year, we also decided to share our learnings from the conference on a live event at Etnetera that took place on February 12th in our offices. This year, Jindřich Fáborský offered to record the event and thanks to him, you can see the video (in Czech):
If you prefer to read, you can continue with the most important part of this article — the summary of our perception about the content from the conference. This article covers the topic that resonated with me the most.
The Future of Privacy & Industry Ethics
Although I am mostly known to share pretty technical stuff, the topic that resonated with me the most this year was more about how we as Analysts should behave in this new world. GDPR came into effect more than a year ago, although most of the companies still didn’t manage to handle the basics and their consent management is heavily broken as said by Brian Clifton. Legislation is getting updated in the States as well, recently also browser vendors introduced some bold moves in favor of the privacy of their customers. On the other hand they fight with their egos and don’t really coordinate their moves, so the resulting environment is still pretty fragmented as presented by Simo Ahava who monitors the latest progress in this area and publishes the data on www.cookiestatus.com.
Businesses are afraid that they will lose some of the most efficient tactics. Attempts to work around these new limitations have been proven to be shortsighted and somehow counter effective. Our industry is trying to redefine what we should consider legitimate and what should be abandoned as obnoxious. And with that new ideas and opinions we should then educate the lawyers about how they should evolve the legislation. Or should the lawyers be the ones whose will try to understand tech and lead the change? Those were the questions Aurélie Pols was asking.
We should rethink how to evolve digital marketing that often ended up being unscrupulous, deceptive and sometimes also pretty creepy. We should learn from the recent affairs and turn back to users and carefully research how they expect to be addressed by brands. This might mean a major shift or one may even call it a revolution in terms of how the various stakeholders behave in this new world. Some of the bold ideas about how it may work were presented by Astrid Illum and Kristoffer Ewald. We also need more brave people like Stéphane Hamel asking questions, doing research, educating the market about the results e.g. in the form of a Manifesto.
In a way, these initiatives trump the promise of digital to be way more effective thanks to rich data-fueled profiles. Programmatic and retargeting will probably suffer the most. If we are supposed to operate with much less data, it could mean the return to the roots of traditional marketing based on creativity and broader communication strategies. And even when I am surely looking forward to playing with the new shiny toys like server-side GTM, I am also looking forward to the Marketing Festival 2020 to get an idea about what these other people from the neighboring industry plan to do about this.
Final thoughts and some extras
First half of the week was a bit problematic for me personally. I was trying to find courage to attend the Golden Punchcard Prize with the following assignment “Demonstrate any Digital Analytics solutions or method of your own that is way beyond the defaults.” I really wanted to share my latest progress in automating tests of digital analytics built on top of Google’s Firebase infrastructure and Puppeteer, but the product was not 100% ready. We use the tool internally, but the usage is pretty difficult, so I needed to built a GUI and easier way to configure tests to reach the desired result that would be worth sharing.
But during Monday and Tuesday I was able to get the live demo together and thanks to that I signed up and presented it. It was an honor to share the stage with everyone else there, although I didn’t win.
I also managed to retain the tradition that was established during last year’s event and two subsequent MeasureCamps (Copenhagen and London), so the “Project Simo” continues:
