I feel a bit guilty starting a recap of X Change with the venue. But Terranea exudes a sense of place that is both deeply comfortable and quite spectacular. Whether it was a poolside sunset for the opening reception, light-washed rooms with open doors and sweeping vistas for our conversations, the insanely great “Strawberries 5-ways” break treat between Huddles, or s ’mores at the fire pit after the main dinner, it was hard not to be satisfied.
We’ve done X Change at quite a few amazing venues. Copia in Napa, the Ritz and St. Regis in SF, the Monterey Plaza in Monterey Bay, and the Coronado in San Diego. Every one of these venues has had something fairly unique. From Copia I remember the lovely theatre, the wine-tasting area, and the great closing activity – a full-on cooking demonstration. At the Ritz we had a five-course meal for the main dinner that was almost certainly the best Conference food I’ve ever tasted. The Regis was the most consistently beautiful hotel I’ve ever stayed in – with every room and every space stunningly themed. We’ll never top the weather in Monterey (Monterey will never top the weather we had in Monterey) or, I suspect, the spectacular dinner in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And it would be hard to imagine a view better than Coronado Island looking back across the Bay to San Diego. Overall, though, Terranea was probably my favorite X Change venue ever.
Everything about this place was really, really good. I’ve mentioned the relaxed vibe – an atmosphere that fits X Change a little better than the SF Ritz’s slight formality or the Regis’ high-style. Monterey and the Coronado had the same feeling, and I think it works for us. But Terranea exceeds both in service. From champagne at the check-in to a staff that seems almost suspiciously omnipresent and friendly (if this were a movie something would be very wrong), to the consistently excellent food, it was hard for me to find fault. And, for X Change, the meeting rooms are critical. Crowded meeting rooms or sound bleeding from room to room drive me nuts and I hate the feeling of being trapped in a “Las Vegas” like experience of dark, walled-in rooms. At Terranea noise was virtually nil and pretty much every meeting room was the right size and backed out to open doors, glass, and ocean views. It makes a difference.
My X Change started in earnest with Think Tank – our pre-Conference advance training. I had two classes this year – one on building a Proof-of-Concept Analytics Warehouse and one on the Web Analyst’s Toolkit. In the first, I covered some of our recent work on data model theory – in particular issues around joining “stream” data. This is a topic I write about in some depth in my upcoming white paper with IBM. The second half of the class is more technology and vendor specific with pretty extended discussion of a both data sourcing and data platforming. I tried to cover alternative strategies for people trying to build a data warehouse on-the-fly or without a giant enterprise budget.
My second class, the Web analytics toolkit worked very well indeed. I described this class in an earlier post and it was instantly one of my favorites. The only real drawback was that I was a bit pinched for time and had to cover the last two topics - Advanced Funnels Analysis and Merchandising Analysis - at a fairly breakneck pace.
After Think Tank we adjourned down to the “Adult” pool at Terranea – the pool closest to the ocean. It was a lovely night and I gorged on oysters, prawns and crab from the raw bar. Terranea had devised some lethal tropical cocktail that they were handing around, but after one of these I switched to beer. I was glad I did because I had a great time listening to James Robinson, Jeff Chin, and Tom Betts talk media analytics. It’s pretty cool to have the senior measurement guys from the NY Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times talking analytics. Only at X Change.
The Conference kicked off formally the next morning with Jon Farrar our keynoter. Jon’s a long time customer analytics guy who cut his teeth on credit scoring. Unlike me, he never made the switch to digital – so this is a new world for him. On the other hand, I missed out on about fifteen years of increasingly sophisticated customer modeling. Given that we in digital analytics are increasingly focused on the customer side of things, I figured it would be interesting to get an outsider’s perspective.
There were three things in Jon’s speech that really struck me. First, these guys built models for everything. They started with credit-scoring models, but they tackled almost every problem with analytics. From predicting attriters to what to say when somebody walked into a branch to the impact of overdraft protection (or lack thereof), these guys built models to support every aspect of banking operations. I think Jon must have discussed at least ten different types of models he’d helped build. That’s pretty cool and frankly made me a little jealous.
Second, Jon had a slide on Voice of Customer and how digital analysts should re-consider some of their methods here – to use lighter surveys that are more customer and less site focused. This was music to my ears since I’ve been preaching the same gospel for the last couple years. As I remarked during the closing panel, 99% of companies I know are wasting 99% of their opinion research.
Third, Jon had some thoughts about PENS – a methodology developed for analyzing gaming experiences – and its possible applicability to Web analytics. This is one of those un-expected direction things that I’m going to have to think about a bit. I find gaming analytics fascinating, but it’s not something that we at Semphonic get a chance to try. You can see that game developers have evolved some very clever strategies for increasing engagement, so I don’t think it’s too much a stretch.
From there it was on the Huddles. I’m going to cover some of the most interesting take-aways in upcoming posts, so I’ll just outline the topics and conversations here.
For me, first up was Tom Betts’ Huddle on “Democratizing Data”. I was surprised at many of the organizations there still share a considerable reluctance to give user’s actual deep data access. That’s not necessarily a mistake. It takes a lot of organizational maturity to truly democratize data. It seemed to me the focus for most participants was still on distributing centralized insights (especially from Testing) not necessarily distributing data.
The intriguing “Seduction of Real-time” with James Robinson was next. This session covered four primary reasons for driving to real-time: bragging rights, short term content evaluation, operational research, and behavioral targeting. I’m a fairly strong believer in these last three, and I wouldn’t discount the first either given the discussion. Creating real-time displays for general company consumption isn’t my big interest, but it does seem to drive organizational interest.
My last Huddle on the day was surprisingly interesting. It covered the challenge of Agile Development methods for analytics teams. This is the kind of topic you can only real hear discussed in-depth at X Change. Andy Nelson from REI was leading – and I was pretty impressed with the strategies they’ve found to work within an Agile environment. I shared this Huddle with our own Jon Entwistle who’s been deep into a large, ongoing implementation project with a large enterprise shifting from Waterfall to Agile methods. So for both of us, it was not only topical but deeply involving.
Day One wrapped up with an Hawaiian themed dinner at Nelson’s – Terranea’s casual dining place on a point overlooking the ocean. We had the whole place to ourselves and whether you were parked by the large outdoor fireplace, clustered around the fire-pit, or just looking over the rocky coast of the Pacific, it was pretty sweet. Poke – pretty good. Poi – still not my favorite. I got a chance to catch up some with Alex Schultz from Facebook…always a highlight for me.
Yeah, I could live like this.
After breakfast (fresh-made waffles, blintzes, scrambled eggs, etc., etc.) on Day Two, I hosted my fill-in Huddle on “Getting the Data to Tell its Secrets.” I have to admit that I’m getting kind of used to these fill-in duties, and I’d miss it if nobody bowed out! I don’t think this was the best Huddle I’ve ever done, but I still think it was pretty darn good. It’s surprisingly hard to talk about actual analysis, but we had a pretty strong group and there were some excellent tips.
Unfortunately, I missed a good chunk of my mid-day Huddle (Tom Lingdell of The Hartford on Incomplete Data) since I had a call that I just couldn’t schedule at any other time. I know that’s a bad example for everyone, but sometimes you just can’t get three un-interrupted days. Bummer.
That took me into my last Huddle – Brandon Bunker of Sony’s Driving Personalization with Analytics. There were quite a few interesting rabbit-holes in this conversation, but probably the most intriguing was Brandon’s own experiences. He’s explored psychological segmentations of the data and had some pretty good luck with it. What I find intriguing about these psychological methodologies is that they provide a strong basis for driving real creative briefs and for interpreting tests. Since both are vitally important to effective testing and personalization, they seem like a promising strategy (and perhaps doubly interesting because they're not our general approach at Semphonic).
In year’s past, I’ve treated the "close" largely as a Conference feedback opportunity – something that I did directly in an extended Q&A with the audience. I’ve gotten a bit tired of that and I felt like it would be nice to have something a little more reflective and content focused. So this year I invited David McBride (Comcast), Alex Destino (TIAA-CREF), and Susan Fariss (ACS) to join me and conduct a very informal panel on highlights, trends, and take-aways. The session turned into a pretty open free-for-all with the audience, which is exactly what I was hoping for.
We’d come to the end and one final reception, one last chance to chat (except for those lucky enough to stay for the Analytics Challenge), one last chance to break bread. We’d organized a build-your-own-cupcake bar for the farewell (so you could literally break bread), but I was happier with a beer. Don’t tell my daughters!
Some of the group went for cycle ride along the coast with Phil Kemelor. Another set headed out to the Links with Greg Dowling. I headed upstairs for one more “last goodbye” at the DAT event in the Lobby Bar and one last chance to talk analytics. Then we gathered up most of the Semphonic folks for a “we’re not on” anymore dinner. I was so exhausted, I could hardly stop yawning. I don’t think I made it past 10 that night.
Yes, like Roman triumphs, all glory is fleeting and this too must pass. It's on to next year.
And speaking of...next year’s venue is already in the books. We’ll be at the lovely Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel; a unique beachside Ritz with a surfer-chic ambience and one of the most spectacular settings you can imagine.
Mark your calendar now and you, too, can be easily satisfied!
Comments