MeasureCamp London #14

After being an organizer of the MeasureCamp in the Czech Republic for the last 5 years, I wanted to attend some of the other events across Europe. This year I started with Bratislava (my second time there and I guess that it doesn’t really count as visiting a foreign event), then we visited Copenhagen with pretty big Czech representation. Then I was for obvious reasons attending MeasureCamp Czechia 2019 and Activate as a Gold Sponsor once again left a significant mark there. And that was still not enough. In the end I was lucky and got my ticket to the mother of all MeasureCamps — London.

Can you tell, what’s the difference?

It is hard to compare these different events. Although the concept of this unconference stays the same, there are subtle differences caused by individual details around every single edition.

In the Czech Republic we decided to rebel against Peter’s idea that MeasureCamp should be tied to a single City and renamed ours to “Czechia” when switching the location between Brno and Prague. Slovak MeasureCamp is driven by the team that has mostly gathered around Exponea and thanks to Peter Jakuš and the team they managed to organize great event this year by being able to invite Jim Stern, Mikko Piippo and Robert Petković — well-established names in our industry. Copenhagen on the other hand is a great city by itself — bike-friendly, very international and thanks to other interesting names (Simo Ahava, Steen Rasmussen) on the attendee list this event also attracted a great audience.

But London is still London.

Basically the most important city on the most advanced market on the old continent. Therefore main organizer — Peter O’Neill — being a celebrity by his own doesn’t really need to put a lot of effort to attract all the great people of our industry as well. Being able to attend also Superweek earlier this year I am starting to feel like an acknowledged member of this digital analytic geeky community. And it is a great honor for me, that I with all humbleness may call some of these people friends.

Can you stop being pathetic, please?

So what about the content of this years’ MeasureCamp London? I’ve been pretty lucky and was able to attend a couple of very interesting talks. Peter Jakuš from Exponea continued his discussion of the challenges of customer-centricity that has been on the rise recently with Google switching to App+Web with Firebase Event-base data model — Exponea is trying to explore this area for quite some time and it was therefore pretty clear that Peter understands the topic and is able to raise ideas that resonated with the audience. Although the time for such discussion is limited to 30 minutes, we were able to cover some brilliant ideas on how to survive in a session-less environment (TLDR; sessions are artificial concept and we can do without them just fine — we just need to overcome the narrow-focused channel/product-oriented reporting requirements by educating ourselves and our mates on the new paradigms).

I also attended a very interesting discussion about gender diversity in our industry led by Molly. It wasn’t the usual bragging that we need more women, but rather a structured discussion about what the research says about how diversity affects the performance of the teams and common misconceptions about the simple solutions to the rather delicate issue of both negative and positive discrimination.

In another session we shared our experiences with upgrading from Adobe DTM to Adobe Launch — new Tag Management solution that replaces the old one that won’t be supported in the near future. There is not that many folks in the Czech Republic that come into daily contact with tools from Adobe, so I was glad that I was able to share my hands-on experience and also learn from others how they solve this inevitable issue (support for DTM will end soon).

Then after a delicious lunch and some networking I presented my ideas about GA App+Web and my determination to help others to start experimenting with its new data model and capabilities (BigQuery export for free!). Because I strongly believe that we need to get used to it and playing with a demo website always uncovers issues and unlocks new ideas.

Then I wanted to support my friend Till Buettner on his presentation about his career as an analyst in DHL and about his experiences with promoting Data-driven culture in larger organizations. We got numerous practical tips on how to avoid losing credibility by promising the impossible, delivering inaccurate data or even cheating. He also emphasized the need for continuous training of both analytics team as well as stakeholders to build up the game together.

Matt Gershoff shared his vast knowledge of theoretical concepts behind A/B testing applied to practical overview of the available approaches and their advantages and pitfalls. With throwing around the Thompson sampling, Epsilon greedy and other statistics terms, he was still able to describe everything in plain language, so even myself — going through statistics exam in my university studies back in 2003 on my 7th trial — was able to get it.

There was a couple of presentations (Simo’s for obvious reasons) that were so packed that I used that time to rather network a little bit with the other peers and tried to gather additional feedback on my presentation about Data Layer standardisation and GAv2.

Skip the boring stuff, did you have some fun?

MeasureCamps are well-known for the relaxed atmosphere, so when Keely Jacob did her closing speech to thank sponsors, the team and give out some prices for first-time presenters, we enjoyed her humour so much that Julius Fedorovicius (founder of the great Facebook GTM Community Group) proposed that she should just do a stand-up session of her own next time.

I tried to start a couple of new traditions to further improve the brilliant MeasureCamp atmosphere. The first one was started on MeasureCamp Copenhagen with a bottle of liquid courage so I brought one to London as well. The second tradition originated on Superweek. I always felt a little ashamed to ask Simo to take a picture with me and therefore I invented this little gamification and it looks like everyone loves that.

We finished the day with traditional After-party with foods and drinks and many many conversations about various topics. I got to bed at approximately 2 a.m. so it must have been really good party, I guess :D

It was a great event and if you want to know more, I recommend following the hashtag #MeasureCampLDN on Twitter or the MeasureCamp London blog, where I believe will soon be an overview of the most of the presented materials.