MeasureCamp Copenhagen 2019

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Etnetera Activate

6 min readJun 13, 2019

This year we decided to visit more international events and since we heard that Copenhagen’s MeasureCamp organized by IIH Nordic is well-known for hosting many international guests and that the official language is always English, it was a no brainer.

Just after the landing in Copenhagen Airport we traveled into the city center by metro (the city is probably not that big, since it only has two metro lines more than Brno). The navigation looked exactly like a line-up of a heavy metal festival (just the fonts are a little less diverse).

When we got out of the underground the first thing that surprised us was the amount of bikes on every corner of the city centre and insanely heavy bike-traffic (probably a bit increased by the nice weather on Thursday). We were also surprised to see actual nudges preventing littering. But they were white — someone would call that “a typical Danish sloppiness”.

Friday’s Warm-up Party

As we arrived on Thursday, we were looking towards meeting with the other attendees before the main event, so we asked the organizers if there is any Warm-up party. There was nothing officially planned, but the idea clicked and we arrived at the venue on Friday evening, helped a little with moving a couple of chairs and got beer-support and a tip, that drinking on an embankment after work is a popular Danish thing to do. We know how hard is to organize a perfect event, so we understood when the organizers themselves were not able to attend (we also hope that we didn’t cause too much trouble — Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry), but at least it looks like we have founded a tradition for the next issues of Copenhagen’s Event.

Saturdays Unconference and the discussed topics

Czechocalypse! We bet that the second country with most attendees at #mccphg19 was Czechia. Here they are: Tony, Marek, Marina (one ex-russian, ex-australian, currently-finnish exception), Leona, Milan, Martin, Tobiáš, Hana (Lukáš is missing, maybe he was stalking Simo somewhere).

The story of the bottle of courage

In Czechia there’s a saying “drinking like a Dane” (= a lot), we guess that after this weekend there will probably arise a similar phrase in Denmark — “drinking like Czechs”. As we know that the best experience you can take from MeasureCamp is to present and at the same time that most attendees fear public speaking, we decided to donate a bottle of courage (nice mellow rum from Barbados) to all attendees so they may overcome this hurdle.

Google Tag Manager Custom Templates

This new GTM feature had pretty good coverage by both Julian Juenemann and Simo Ahava. They were mentioning them in their presentations and discussing various aspects related to this forward-looking promising move of Google. This attempt to regain mutual trust in between marketing and IT departments (partially lost due to marketing collateral of Tag Management Systems stating that managing JavaScript tags can be done by circumventing slow and complex IT processes) by providing far better control allowing for increased security and supporting best development practices seems to click with the analytics community.

Simo also presented an open-source project of himself and David Vallejo to build, maintain and share reviewed templates and asked attendees to contribute.

Data Science Ethics

The topic was mentioned in the morning session lead by Jeff Doctor and later again in presentation by Steen Rasmussen. Especially Hana is always excited if someone is about to speak for a more broader point of view considering all the consequences.

Especially the networking conversations emphasized what bad could be done with new powerful data tools, if we’ll use it without making some policies about it. With Steen it was more in the practical way related to analytics and social media, with Jeff it was more philosophical (❤) about knowledge without wisdom and turning statistics into a dangerous tool not reflecting relations among people.

Topics related to these discussions are also GDPR (legislation trying to catch-up with the technology trends) and a new “war” (as mentioned in the presentation by Alban Gerome) sometimes referred to as cat-and-mouse game between the browser vendors and marketing technology providers around cross-site scripting and inadequate data sharing. We already have the ITP series (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) from Apple/Safari and Mozilla/Firefox joining the effort as well, so we kind of hope that our industry will still exist after future revisions of such actions even if we, at least for now, are still able to find feasible workarounds (like the one against latest issue of ITP presented by Simo Ahava).

Other highlights

Our sessions

Usually, we enforce each other so all of us have a session, but this time, only Lukas and Hana made it through.

A newbie view by Leona

This “unconference” is really awesome! I love the everyone’s drive for data and web analyses. It’s not like science conferences, where everybody has to present their results to be more visible, for reference to their articles and scientific collaborations. Here, it is different — no reviewers and abstracts or choosing who is suitable enough to have a presentation. You can talk here on your own topics, in case you find it interesting for somebody. Just to share the knowledge and data tricks, no need to get anything back. The schedule board was magic — there was balance between spaces and sessions. Next time I would be proud to stick my own session card on the board as well.

After Party

As we probably overestimated the fear and the session board filled up pretty quickly in the morning, the rum was finally useful as an acceleration of the After Party, when we upgraded the game of beer-pong with it.

We were offered to play our favorite songs at the After Party. That wasn’t a wise decision, because since we arrived to our Airbnb, we switched local AppleTV into Czech and started to play two songs: Promiň (Sorry) and Dělám stojky (I do handstands). Those songs are from the bizarre category and we recycled the phrases in them again and again during our stay. We’re so sorry, that even other people had to listen to these. But to enjoy the stupidity, here’s a typically Danish sloppy translation into English, so you can suffer with us.