#030: 2016 Predictions for Digital Analytics

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.30 [Michael Helbling]: Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, April 5th at the San Francisco Marion Marquis. The digital analytics power hour. Live! That E-Metrics San Francisco. There will be pontificators, arguing, probably drinking, and face painting for the kids. Then Tim Wilson will walk the tightrope over the pit of doom. Be there! April 5th at the San Francisco E-Metrics and live on

00:00:35.14 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:01:04.96 [Michael Helbling]: Hello everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 30. You know how you’ve been hearing about how awesome and powerful predictive analytics are? Well, we have to. We’ve finally decided to do something about it. And yeah, it’s February and the end of February, but we’re going to do some 2016 predictions. That’s right. Our powers of predictive analytics on a special episode of the digital analytics power hour. And we couldn’t make this episode happen without.

00:01:38.61 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t think that’s what predictive analytics means. Um, we’ll find out later. Maybe, maybe, because I predict they’re going to change the definition of predictive analytics.

00:01:48.23 [Michael Helbling]: One of my predictions, yeah, I know it’s not what predictive analytics means. I know you know. That’s a joke. One of my predictions is that we’ll finally find out what predictive analytics means. You’re so optimistic Exactly Okay, so obviously we’re hearing from one of my fellow co-hosts. It’s Tim Wilson senior partner analytics demystified I predict that I will never let you get through your intro Unmolested in this year and the surprisingly much more polite co-host Jim Cain CEO of napkin I predict this is the only sentence I have today where I don’t get cut off.

00:02:25.03 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, sorry. I was taking a drink. I meant to cut you off

00:02:28.86 [Michael Helbling]: And of course, I’m Michael Hobling, the analytics practice lead at Search Discovery. So gentlemen, here we are, gathered two months into the year to predict what’s going to happen in the last 10. So where should we start? Who wants to kick it off? Because I predict we’re going to have a fun time.

00:02:50.58 [Tim Wilson]: If I start off, it’s going to be with a rant about prediction. So I think we should start.

00:02:54.67 [Michael Helbling]: I think we should go while we all defer to Jim Cain in a digital analytics power hour first.

00:03:02.78 [Tim Wilson]: Let’s keep talking about deferring to him and not let him actually aspire.

00:03:09.98 [Jim Cain]: I get the panics now. I never get to go first. So I’m going to actually start by, I think this time last year we had the heat and shot episode. where we were talking about kind of alternate analytics tools. And I remember the one thing that he said that at the time I thought was kind of, yeah, sure buddy, whatever, but he was talking about how large organizations that are really data driven are actually moving away from analytics tools entirely and just focusing on creating a big data infrastructure and then kind of a self-service mechanism on top of it for being able to do ad hoc reporting and build dashboards and stuff. And I remember the time thinking, sure, whatever buddy. For the last quarter in particular of 2015, and here at the beginning of the year, I’m hearing more and more large companies say, I don’t want to move into Adobe or into Google Analytics. I want to move away from all of those tools and actually just focus on Datamart and visual discovery tools. I don’t actually support that as a particularly good idea. So don’t take that from me as a cool best practice. But I think you’re going to be hearing lots and lots of that as the year progresses. because people are starting to retool and I think it’s going to be a very visible option.

00:04:22.10 [Michael Helbling]: So while that was intelligent, I’m sorry, we needed to hear that in the form of a prediction. No, I’m just kidding.

00:04:31.42 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I think you’ll actually hear more talk about it. I think a lot of the challenges with predictions is it’s a lot of challenges that analysts have and that vendors and technology, it’s a lot easier for them to look at a technical capability and then kind of rapidly underestimate the people and process required to actually make it happen. And therefore, you know, frame is their prediction. But I think looking at what a lot of the tag management systems that have started talking about how with a tag, they can shove data wherever you want. You know, they don’t have to just fire a web analytics tool. They can, you know, connect name your insight and telium name, name who you want to name. are all kind of talking about, you know, tracking visitors, tracking people across sessions, across channels, across devices. And I think inherent in that is, well, you’re kind of tracking them and shoving the data somewhere and it’s kind of lessening their view of how much you need to rely on a technology. But I think the problem is that’s really a lot of complicated data with a lot of little pieces and parts that have to talk together and be joined. So I actually kind of agree. I think that’s it’s a hearing more companies talk about it, both vendors who say you should be just feeding it all into one master data store, grab more data, shove it there. I think you’ll hear from both companies and I think you’ll also hear various types of technology vendors saying kind of the same thing.

00:06:07.67 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, so I have a few things to say about this prediction. One is, with all due respect to Heaton Shaw, our very first guest on the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Where you see this happen the most is in organizations that are technically focused and fairly lean, as a matter of course. So fast growth startups, and technology companies. There was a really interesting article, and for the life of me, I can’t remember. I read it a while back, and it’s a company we all know, but they basically detailed their transition from an analytics tool. I believe they were using Mixpanel into kind of a, they build their own kind of cloud-based solution on Redshift, Amazon’s web service. And so walking through all that and i think that is a common scenario i’ve seen that happen and it will continue to happen quite a bit as companies kind of embrace sort of that build your own model. However that’s one kind of company. you don’t see massive enterprises taking that on as much because there’s all kinds of challenges around not just sort of like where the data lives and how are we gonna analyze it, but like things as dumb as like user management and how do I get everyone access to the same thing even if they don’t really know what they’re doing. So there’s a lot of moving parts to go into that. So I agree with your prediction, Jim, and I’d say that this is something that’s been going on for a while and it’s growing and it’s because it’s cheaper and cheaper to leverage tools like Amazon’s Redshift and Looker and things like that to build these things out.

00:07:50.69 [Tim Wilson]: So I think what you’re saying is that some of the pure play tech startup type companies that may be growing in or at scale may successfully do this. That doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of legacy large enterprises that start initiatives. We just don’t seem to think those initiatives are going to get off the ground. You know, somebody will read what Twitter has done and say we should do that too as a large insurance company. Right. may even throw a few million dollars at it, but it’s certainly not something that will happen inside of a year and may quickly realize that that’s a really, really tall order.

00:08:25.35 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and it is, it’s a very difficult thing to do. And if you think about how the tech companies are staffed, they’re full of people who are comfortable with programming and data and putting these kinds of things together. And that’s not necessarily core to someone who’s a marketing manager for the Eastern region of XYZ company. But at the same time, in essence, companies like Adobe and Salesforce and those kinds are building marketing clouds to try to handle and do the same things these other companies are attempting to do.

00:09:06.29 [Tim Wilson]: Right. They’re saying put a, put a layer of you’re not building from scratch. We’re giving you the basic structure and you’re loading it into it. In Adobe’s case, they’ve got, you know, get Adobe premium. You’ve got insight. You’ve even got the ability to access that tool, not necessarily in the democratized self-service way that that seems to be a popular trend. But yeah, I agree. There’s, there’s, there’s an idea that that will work, that that is the way to go.

00:09:31.94 [Jim Cain]: So for my first prediction, lots of companies of all different kinds will try and move into big data practices instead of traditional kind of quick stream analytics practices to any degree of success. That’s not nuts.

00:09:48.83 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I think that’s I’d buy that. Well, here, I think we’ll see articles about it at least.

00:09:54.26 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, well, there’ll be no shortage of big data articles. All right, who wants to go next?

00:09:59.71 [Tim Wilson]: Well, so I’ll do kind of a quasi, it’s not really a counter, but more of kind of a build on that. And it’s a little generic, but it’s just because it’s a given that Adobe and Google will both roll out new features that we are pretty excited about and are actually useful.

00:10:17.92 [Michael Helbling]: I feel like is that really a prediction or more just a function of you getting beta and brought roadmap information?

00:10:27.76 [Tim Wilson]: No, that’s the nature of the fact that we’ve talked about this in the past. We’ve got a really, really healthy competition going between those two. They both have release cycles. They both have conferences where they preview stuff they’re going to do. This is specifically like Adobe, I think, analysis workspace is going to continue to incrementally get better. Google. you know their stuff they showed I wasn’t there and they showed it there or whatever partner summit or whatever that’s called you know and I think that stuff’s gonna actually come come to life this year and there’s gonna be stuff there some of those will be things that roll out and sound freaking awesome and that nobody ever actually uses But they’re going to roll stuff out. Some of it will hit, some of it will sell well, but not be all that practically useful. I mean, Google’s kind of been surreptitiously outside of analytics making Google Sheets like fixing little things that just keep incrementally adding more power to Google Sheets, which Man, talk about take a free plugin to pull in your Google Analytics data. You can start to visualize stuff better. So I think Google has that thing that, wow, they’re pulling the data into something that is getting a richer, it’s quietly getting a richer and richer visualization environment just through another one of their platforms.

00:11:47.44 [Michael Helbling]: I agree with that. And actually, there’s some really cool stuff you can do in combination with Google Analytics data and Google Apps Scripts.

00:11:56.00 [Tim Wilson]: There you go.

00:11:56.74 [Michael Helbling]: That might be a topic for another episode.

00:11:59.38 [Tim Wilson]: What have you got for us, Mr. Helbling?

00:12:01.71 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I think 2016 is really going to be the year of mobile. I think that’s still a couple more years out. No, I think mobile is done, so I’ll pick something else. Here’s what I predict. I predict that you’ll hear more and more about leveraging optimization and testing in meaningful ways. And what I mean by that, and I’ve got a couple reasons why I think that’s true, One is, I think everyone is sold on the use case of A.B. testing and using it for personalization and targeting and those kinds of things. Very few organizations manage to do that well. And there’s a lot of challenges to doing it. One of the things that’s unique about this year is that we are in an election year. There’s an uncertainty with the sort of global economy, if you will. And I think people will want to try to make more out of what they have. And that will naturally guide companies to thinking about how do I leverage the tools I’ve gotten place for optimization as opposed to spending large amounts of money on new tools or new websites or whatever. So that’s my prediction for 2016.

00:13:17.92 [Jim Cain]: Did you predict testing or did you just predict a recession? I think you just predicted a recession.

00:13:23.72 [Michael Helbling]: I hope I did not predict a recession and I hope everything goes smoothly, but there’s multiple factors. If you look by industry, not every industry is doing really well. In fact, a month ago, Macy’s announced the layoff of a bunch of people. So I obviously hope the economy does great because that’s going to be good for everyone. But I also think people might hold back a little bit, especially because there’s an uncertainty in the US anyways about who will win the presidential election this fall. So I think it’ll impact part of the year. I don’t think we’re going to all suddenly not have jobs. I think it’ll be fine.

00:14:00.54 [Tim Wilson]: But is that going to be, it’s kind of like Jim’s initial prediction of, I was proofreading a blog post of one of my partners who made a comment about A.B. testing and saying, hey, it’s so easy to start A.B. testing. And I kind of pointed out and like no it’s really easy to get the technical capability to do a B testing but man watching the number of companies because even if you say I’m gonna do a B testing I don’t want to invest in new technology I don’t want to redesign the site all the sudden you’re like oh shit I need designers I need project managers I need a test test strategist that it’s the same sort of I could see it getting people saying, aha, I’ve discovered something. I am going to just incrementally optimize what I already have. I think most of them will be in.

00:14:48.89 [Michael Helbling]: It’s not magic. I’m not saying it’s going to just be a light switch and all of a sudden people can test more. It’s that there’ll be a will to pursue that more than there has been in the past. So in other words, it’s less of a path of resistance now. then what it would have seemed when they had maybe more budget to say, go just redesign the website and distract all the corporate big wigs that way. You see what I’m saying? Or just spend more on Google. Hey, let’s just up our AdWords budget by $5 million and go from there.

00:15:24.96 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I mean, I still watch how hard it is to get even simple optimize. You’re spending on paid media of some sort to drive to a landing page that is a registration form and you can’t figure out how to run a B testing on a simple landing page with a one click conversion because organizationally, you know, you’re, you’re struggling. So maybe that’s kind of a, I think there’s a lot of the predictions that are kind of out in the space have that gap between. This is what should be happening. Every so often I can’t be my sonny, rosy, optimistic, glass half full kind of guy. Occasionally, just this one episode.

00:16:07.86 [Michael Helbling]: You are truly the E.O.R. of analytics. Like you truly are.

00:16:12.39 [Tim Wilson]: The Drumpy Cat of analytics I’ve been in many.

00:16:14.95 [Jim Cain]: Well played. So how was your chat with Jim Stern, Tim? I just want to slam a door on my hand. I’ve lost my tail.

00:16:24.74 [Tim Wilson]: I like to think that I’m so excited and enthusiastic about the field that I’m just perpetually frustrated that it’s not moving as fast as I would like it to.

00:16:37.91 [Jim Cain]: To go to Michael’s point, though, I remember when I’m not saying you predicted a recession, but you are saying that people are going to be thinking about using what they’ve got and not maybe necessarily buying the shiny new hotness as much in 2016, which I don’t think is a nuts thing to say. What was it? Eight nine years ago when the recession started. Yeah, that’s right.

00:16:58.54 [Tim Wilson]: I think how much. Wait a minute. We have to do the math. How much in advance we were recording this in 2013, but it’s not going to go live until 2016. No, we don’t record that much.

00:17:07.19 [Michael Helbling]: There’s going to be a movie that comes out right before this podcast called The Big Short that everybody can probably already seen.

00:17:16.57 [Jim Cain]: I predicted that psycho from the apprentice is going to try and run your country. No, I’m serious.

00:17:22.02 [Tim Wilson]: You’re insane. That would never happen. He tried that four years ago and got laughed off this stage immediately.

00:17:28.47 [Jim Cain]: That’ll never happen. In 2007 or 2008 or whatever it was, the thing that I really noticed in the e-commerce side of digital was that all of the scrappy upstart companies moved to a pay-for-performance model. So instead of a more traditional softwares of service like monthly fee licensing agreement, all the companies that we’re really taking off, we’re going in and doing paper performance, which created a gigantic mess from a measurement perspective. And I think it’s partially why attribution started to become such a requirement. But if something similar happens this year, it’s always interesting to see how people who still need to sell their software and services have to pivot to stay relevant and get into budgets. You know what I mean?

00:18:11.45 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s a good observation.

00:18:13.53 [Tim Wilson]: That’s funny. So we’re talking about testing. We’re talking about the elections. We’re talking about when the recession started. So it does seem it is, I think, probably more coincidental. The fact that, optimistically, right, that has definitely been the literally came out of nowhere. And I think all the other major testing platforms or preceded it, but that was right. That was the genesis out of Dancer Worker working on the Obama campaign in 2008, trying to do testing. I think was he using Adobe target or testing target, whatever it was called at the time?

00:18:45.32 [Charles Barkley]: I don’t know.

00:18:46.12 [Tim Wilson]: There’s manually coded or whatever, but I wonder now if that actually helps them when they came out and said we have a low cost easy to deploy product and they were launching within a couple of years into the Great Recession if that really kind of aided them. Because it was an alluring call. Hey, don’t go and fully redesign your site. Just tweak it. Drop this snippet of code on your site. I predict that Johnny Menzel will make an ass of himself in multiple ways.

00:19:18.62 [Michael Helbling]: And I predict that he won’t do it as a member of the Cleveland Browns anymore.

00:19:24.06 [Tim Wilson]: I believe the Browns do not have a history of making wise personnel decisions. And therefore, there is a chance that he’ll be there.

00:19:31.31 [Michael Helbling]: Hold on, because I have a Brown’s prediction for the show.

00:19:34.74 [Tim Wilson]: Oh, yeah. Oh, excellent.

00:19:35.72 [Michael Helbling]: Because as you know, a month ago, the Browns hired Paul de Podesta, who is the original Moeneyball guy from baseball, the Oakland Athletics. So if you’ve ever read the book Moeneyball or watched the movie.

00:19:50.54 [Jim Cain]: Can we stop talking about not hockey? You guys are killing me with just the hockey talk.

00:19:54.67 [Michael Helbling]: Not hockey.

00:19:55.55 [Tim Wilson]: I have proximate to the Browns. That’s where Helblings Heart is. So I realized that was a tooth that once again, leaving the Canadian out.

00:20:02.52 [Michael Helbling]: So yeah, so the Browns organization have hired this guy whose whole thing is baseball analytics for the last 20 years. to build an organization that’s analytical within the Cleveland Browns football organization.

00:20:16.01 [Tim Wilson]: It’s going to suck. Hiring offensive linemen based on their own base percentage?

00:20:19.85 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, exactly. The slugging percentage of the quarterback is through the roof. So it’s interesting because that’s what everyone is speculating is. Is this insane or is this sort of concept of analytics transferable across sports? And what think we, my prediction, get ready, my prediction is that it will be successful. Not that the Browns will be a good team, that no one can predict, but that Paul de Podesta will actually have a pretty good impact on how the organization operates and be impactful on how they approach personnel and data generally. And we’ll see that in better results probably over the next three to five years.

00:21:02.24 [Tim Wilson]: So although Ben Gaines has been a guest on this podcast. I don’t know whether he listens to it, but I’m pretty sure right now if he’s listening, either his head’s about to explode or he’s pumping his fist or he’s like, why I need to tell you guys something.

00:21:13.96 [Michael Helbling]: I am pretty sure Ben Gaines supports what I have to say based on no data whatsoever.

00:21:20.71 [Jim Cain]: You’re from Cleveland. Just call him and get him to be on the show next week and he can talk about his approach.

00:21:25.75 [Michael Helbling]: Hold the Podesta?

00:21:26.88 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, sure. How big can it be?

00:21:30.29 [Michael Helbling]: It’s true. Yeah, it’s been shrinking because there’s not a lot going on there. And, uh, no, it’s, it’s just very interesting because, you know, if we try to draw an analogy back to, uh, our world, it’s maybe something like trying to go from, uh, nonprofit to like a, you know, multi-channel retailer or something, you know, are those skills transferable across those verticals?

00:21:57.71 [Tim Wilson]: It’s interesting with football teams, though, you do have kind of the classic hippo of all hippos, right? I would say football owners are generally, of all these sports owners, they are the ones who are the most hippo-like by reputation.

00:22:13.40 [Michael Helbling]: And coaches too. I mean, that’s the thing is all the media is talking and again, this is all a month later. But you know, the media is saying that now the Browns are going to really struggle to find a GM because that GM is not going to have the power to control the roster the way he would in another organization. Because and that’s the other thing is sort of the NFL has been slower to kind of take on analytics as a part of their process And I think that’s the other misconception that I think a lot of people have in sports and in business We had that episode about you know culture and analytics and things like that And it’s sort of like if analytics comes in all other thoughts will just be destroyed and only data will rule And I don’t think it’s ever the case. I just think it’s kind of funny That’s how people will sometimes perceive it

00:23:01.84 [Tim Wilson]: But sometimes that’s how they think it will work. I mean it is I literally got an email today saying I’m gonna redesign the site Can you just pull like you know like some trends like where the traffic came from and how much traffic they got and you know opportunities and gaps I’m like. Oh, yeah, that’s the Yeah, let me just go to that report. Let me show you the GAF report. There’s the traffic sources, opportunities, and gaps to which I’m like, well, once again, for two years, I’ve been trying to explain until you’ve defined what the website is supposed to do.

00:23:31.95 [Michael Helbling]: If Adobe and Google are listening, there’s a really good report you could build to fulfill Tim’s prediction.

00:23:40.56 [Jim Cain]: I was about to say, I wouldn’t be surprised, and I haven’t seen Google’s roadmap, either for ages, but Google started to put some interesting things in the product as far as kind of like little updates that are starting to take advantage of the network effect of all the Google data. So like the intelligence alerts and some of the things in GA about pointing out errors in your implementation, like proactively giving you stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised if directionally they started giving conversion optimization recommendations or starting to give marketing campaign optimization or attribution optimization recommendations. I wonder actually from a feature perspective. if in two or three years, Adobe and Google Analytics don’t compete against each other, because they just, they’re really starting to deviate in terms of functionality, at least to me.

00:24:26.01 [Tim Wilson]: So there’s the feature I want one of them to go with is to actually start using the median absolute deviation to sift through all of your metrics or events and pop up that, hey, you might have a tagging issue with this specific event, EVAR prop or custom metric, but that’s a topic for another.

00:24:47.54 [Michael Helbling]: I don’t know why you need to build that. You could just run less scan from a vendor that scans for those things.

00:24:55.71 [Jim Cain]: You know what? Let me just open up a category of predictions. We can lightening around some stuff. What about acquisitions? Is this going to be a year where people are buying other people?

00:25:04.46 [Michael Helbling]: Ooh, or can we see an optimizely IPO?

00:25:07.59 [Tim Wilson]: Possibly.

00:25:08.55 [Michael Helbling]: No.

00:25:09.21 [Tim Wilson]: I got to throw out the Brian Clifton prediction back in 2011 that Facebook would buy Webtrends. which sounded hilarious, but he had some rationale for it. And I still think it would be a good move because Facebook, I think still doesn’t have internal analytics chops when it comes to providing data out to marketers and web trends still has internal talent. I don’t think it’ll happen. And Brian Clifton made at some point say, why do you keep talking to bring it up every year? I’m like, I think his prediction in 2011 was genius, but it probably won’t happen.

00:25:43.33 [Jim Cain]: I could see some acquisitions in the tag management space this year.

00:25:46.99 [Michael Helbling]: Well, it’s interesting because who’s actually a tag management vendor anymore? You know, I mean, yes, TeleM and Insight and Signal, but both TeleM and Insight are much more than just tag management now, right? So they are… They present themselves that way. Yeah, right. We’ll have to have them on the show. Maybe. No. Never mind. Don’t even call. It’s not going to happen. I’m just kidding. No, I’ve heard really good things about audience stream, right, which is a 2.0 in product. And I know a bunch of folks over in Sighton who are smart. So I’m assuming they’re not full of crap.

00:26:30.05 [Tim Wilson]: And I’m not, I’m not bashing them. I just think that’s one of those where that’s the gap between the technology able to do something and then actually managing to get it implemented at scale. Right.

00:26:41.93 [Michael Helbling]: It’s certainly challenging. But the thing that hinders an acquisition of either of those players, and maybe signal might be then the one best prime for an acquisition in that case, is that they’ve had venture rounds that value those companies at some pretty big numbers. So I think, optimistically, just took another round of funding and then incited and took a round not too long after. And they were, those numbers were not that far apart. So, you know, without knowing kind of things on what the valuation was and what the percentage of ownership and blah, blah, blah, it’s not, it’s not totally visible, but they’re raising its amount of money and you can’t do that on a crappy valuation.

00:27:26.53 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, you can’t, the multiplier ain’t one. Exactly.

00:27:31.16 [Jim Cain]: So anyway, So, no then. No big acquisitions this year.

00:27:35.11 [Tim Wilson]: I’m sure there will. I remember going back to, I mean, business school, it’s like one of the things that has stuck with me is how much acquisitions just almost never pan out and yet it’s kind of, it always looks good on the whiteboard and therefore they happen, right? Somebody says we’re going to, I’ve got the authority, we can do it. It tells a good story and my compensation is such that I’m going to, I’m going to come out on top.

00:27:57.37 [Michael Helbling]: I think we will see more acquisitions in the space of who can deliver these things. So the small peer play agencies that do services and work around the tools, I do think that will continue because that was a trend in 2015. We saw some acquisitions happen in that space.

00:28:16.05 [Tim Wilson]: I could see some of the smaller, the non-big players, or the smallest players in a market for testing, tag management, web analytics, you name it, getting acquired not necessarily directly in the space but acquired As I’m thinking of like when clear sailing got acquired by they didn’t get directly acquired by eBay. They got acquired by GSI who then got acquired by eBay. So I could potentially back out again. Well then who did Microsoft picked up one of the Twitter. I mean there’ve been the cases where a company is big enough and says we’re just going to buy that. We’re just going to bring that. Capability in house and it’ll be ours not because we want to sell the service. We just want to use it and kind of own it. I could potentially see that happening You know an oracle saying we want to have a tag management system now that you’re saying it would be interesting if you remember epic one Yeah, yeah analytics is first.

00:29:14.01 [Jim Cain]: So, you know, they were bought by their biggest customer. I think right I think that’s what happened.

00:29:18.82 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, yeah, the the car dealer at dealer.com I think Yes, something like that.

00:29:24.81 [Jim Cain]: Um, cause dealer.com was gigantic and they were like, it would actually be cheaper to buy this company and make it our analytics department than pay them for five years. You know what I mean? Like, cause definitely for me, the watershed one-liner for 2015 is that it was the rising tide. Like everybody, whether they were a vendor or a practitioner in analytics had a very good year in 2015.

00:29:46.15 [Michael Helbling]: I mean, it’s probably because of our podcast really.

00:29:51.44 [Jim Cain]: Please send your royalties.

00:29:53.40 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right.

00:29:56.93 [Jim Cain]: Maybe 2016 is the year where large enterprises, and this leads to one of my predictions, but large enterprises start to go, we can’t find these people because HR is hard. Let’s just buy a whole department at once, similar to the dealer.com thing. But one of my predictions for this year, and it could be a combination of acquisition or just building it. But I think that rather than being something we sell to, you’re going to see analytics become a first class. We do this on purpose. We’re actively selling this service from the big, big consulting shops.

00:30:32.09 [Tim Wilson]: Isn’t that a little bit of a trend that’s been, if you look at EY buying some kind of Deloitte kind of stood up Deloitte digital and they were kind of pushing, I don’t disagree.

00:30:40.68 [Michael Helbling]: Accenture modicuity.

00:30:43.06 [Jim Cain]: Having it available and putting it front and center. are very different. And I still think even at those practices, we have a world-class team, if you want fries with that.

00:30:54.04 [Michael Helbling]: I think in terms of public messaging around analytics, the really large companies just use the word analytics. So it’s the world of SaaS and SPSS not Adobe Analytics and Google. It’s that BI analytics, not digital analytics. And I make a mark distinction between those two. All right, so I’ll make a prediction. Is it my turn? Or is it your turn, Tim?

00:31:19.72 [Tim Wilson]: That just passed right over me.

00:31:22.68 [Michael Helbling]: Now you know what it feels like.

00:31:25.65 [Tim Wilson]: Now you know. I’m going to be grumpy and I’m going to get talked over. This is just a weird experience.

00:31:32.64 [Jim Cain]: So anyways, Michael, I think you should go ahead and make your prediction now. Oh, that felt good.

00:31:40.15 [Michael Helbling]: So I’m going to predict that analytics demystified and search discovery merged together to form analytics discovery. No. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. Anyway, so here’s my prediction for real. All right. So a lot of buzz last year about DOMO, I predict in 2016 we will continue to hear more buzz, but it’ll actually lift a perspective about data exploration, data presentation, and data communication from an operational standpoint and really helping out organizations like Tableau, our good friend Sergio Maldonado in Sweet Spot Intelligence, and of course, Domo themselves as companies start to realize, hey, yeah, this is a way that we can really improve our business management capabilities across more than just digital, but across everything to communicate better about data together. And that is going to start to emerge. And I think 2016 we’ll start to see the first steps into that. Whereas it’s sort of. I’m a buyer. I don’t know what to tell you.

00:32:50.05 [Tim Wilson]: You’re a buyer who’s, I guess I just, and I, because I went to their website, there’s, yeah, Domo is going to keep throwing a lot of money. I mean, Domo lives in my Facebook feed, and it just makes my skin crawl with what they promise. And Jim had found the Tableau, Tableau’s 10 predictions for 2016 and like half of them said either self-service or democratization data exploration and kind of throw, we talked about this with Jim Stern on our last episode. that this idea again I look at the reality of who I work with and what they want and there is there is not a remotely hell half the analysts that I know don’t actually do anything around statistics. And when they’re a company saying, oh, the tool is just going to put it in, people aren’t even thinking, they don’t even know that that is something they could care about whether or not this movement upward was relevant or not. So I agree there’s going to continue to be a buzz. I am very nervous that that is going to have a lot of companies throwing a lot of money. It’s something that they just are not equipped to actually put to use. But again, I’m not a domo user right now.

00:34:07.92 [Michael Helbling]: So yeah, I mean, certainly I am not a magic bullet believer, right? So, you know, what’s your quote, Jim? Hype lies and sales guys.

00:34:18.99 [Jim Cain]: I like that.

00:34:20.15 [Michael Helbling]: And, you know, the message makes A lot of dreams come true. The work is real. So there’s real hard work to be done in making these things happen. But I think companies will start to see that. And what’s interesting about these platforms, it’s not data democratization. It’s data curation in place for better communication and understanding.

00:34:42.94 [Tim Wilson]: Which, yeah, okay, so I will say, like, that’s where the story Sweet Spot has had, I feel like has been a much, much more responsible on that front. That it’s a curation and sharing. Domo, that’s not the story they’re telling. Like they are promising the moon. Everybody just gets it. You can just drag and drill it. Now the reality is the way, I mean, from what I’ve seen of the product, you still have to, you’re still setting up what can and can’t be done. You’re basically, it’s not that different from building a fricking power play cube in Cognos, you know, 12 years ago, that yes, you can build somewhat isolated, pulling disparate data and kind of make sure that you’ve kind of locked in where the joins are, like what can be done.

00:35:27.10 [Michael Helbling]: But, uh, can you enter beast mode? Cause, uh, you can and do about.

00:35:31.64 [Tim Wilson]: Really? Yeah. There’s a beast mode. Oh my God.

00:35:34.13 [Michael Helbling]: There it is. It’s actually really cool.

00:35:37.75 [Jim Cain]: No thanks.

00:35:39.63 [Michael Helbling]: You guys are haters, but I’m telling you, I’m a fan and I’ve always been right.

00:35:45.46 [Tim Wilson]: No, I am. Let me be clear. I’m not a hater of what DOMO does. I am a hater that, and this is why I’ll never be in sales because I am all about under-promising and over-delivering. No, same, same. You know, technology. I mean, my counter prediction, I’ll again try to kind of build or pivot. I sort of had a couple of choices over the holiday lull. And it was either to dig into one of the kind of tag auditing services, you know, and try to set up like, how do I really get it to crawl and check a bunch of kind of custom values? Or I could dig back into R and try to actually do something that I wanted to do with it.

00:36:31.55 [Jim Cain]: And you suck at having a holiday. Just a side note. Finally, I had some quality time with the family and I decided to learn.

00:36:38.72 [Michael Helbling]: This is something. No, I think this, I get this because, and this is, I think why you and I, Tim got along so well from the start because you two, two out of three. No, not for this podcast, just as people, because like we literally do analytics as our hobby for fun.

00:36:59.51 [Tim Wilson]: like learning news and you’re the same way jim you friggin make new products because you think they’re cool and have a final in this case i i’d finally and we asked we asked eric goldsmith on that episode like hey do you just like come up with something that you don’t really need to do and you just kind of do it or do you actually need to have something you really have to deliver and he was like uh… i would recommend having something really have to deliver so i had a long overdue not super high priority to do that was going to be a royal pain in the ass with Google Sheets or Excel. And so I kind of knuckled down and did it with R, and by no means an R expert. But in 2015, the number of people who started emerging who were using Python, using R, looking at the R and statistics channel on the measure slack, which was not not an original channel like there had to be a little bit of kind of a can we add can we add can we add and it’s now fairly active There are web analysts who I knew as web analysts who have now been using R and or Python regularly and have kind of shifted to that as one of their dominant tools. And I got enough of a taste of it that I could see I didn’t get to the visualization part like GG plot two just just killed me. And I’m like, I probably should go it’s Christmas morning. I probably should go watch the kids open a present or two. No, wasn’t that bad. But. I’m increasingly a believer. We’ll see if I can continue to find time to monkey around with it. But I think that’s a case where, hey, you have these packages. You can kind of on the fly pull in data and build your scripts to do the munging together. And you can visualize it. And oh, some of the reason I was struggling with it is because it’s really made more for working with works really well with massive data sets that are a very atomic level detail as opposed to how many visits came from paid search last week. No, I want to know every visit that came from paid search last week. So I think the R and Python machine will continue to kind of grow and it’s going to be really interesting to watch how that evolves over the course of the next 12 months, how the DOMO story and adoption evolves, how Tableau’s story and adoption evolves over the course of the year. I think all of those are going to continue to kind of build their own stories based on what digital analysts are actually doing with them.

00:39:37.35 [Jim Cain]: Well predicted, sir.

00:39:38.63 [Michael Helbling]: All right. Well, that’s all the time we have. All right, Jim, what’s up for you next?

00:39:46.10 [Jim Cain]: Hmm. I feel like I really peaked with that whole acquisition rant. So, I guess the other thing, and this is more like something that I wasn’t seeing at the beginning of 2015. It started to get more and more momentum as the year went on. You know, at the beginning of 2016, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start getting a lot more requirements to make analysis an important business objective from the C-suite and not just from… So, we normally get hired by, and I normally hear people at shows saying we need to take analytics seriously at a level no higher than vice president, which isn’t bad. And it’s still super powerful, but it doesn’t make it a corporate initiative. It makes it a departmental initiative. We’re starting to get phone calls from we’re starting to have conversations with the person who runs the whole company. And instead of them saying, I want reporting from the people who work underneath me, they’re saying, I want reporting for myself. And it’s definitely becoming more of a top-down thing, which is an extension to that conversation that we had with Gary a few episodes ago. But it was always that I wish someone would give a shit, and it seems like people are. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, again, over the course of this year, you’re seeing more and more business requirements being dictated from the executive floor and not two floors beneath that.

00:41:06.54 [Tim Wilson]: I think that goes to Gary’s comment that for the boutique shops, which in one flavor or another we all are around digital analytics, are we prepared to answer that call? Or is that part of the reason that the big boys, the McKinsey’s, Deloitte’s, they might be the ones who are, the default is them getting the call, right? You’re gonna call the ones who have talked strategy before, and that’s potentially a, It’s a little bit of a call to action for us as in the trenches analysts to say, wow, if the CEO calls, am I going to find myself five minutes in talking about bounce rate? I mean, I don’t think I would, but I think that’s, that’s something we’ve all kind of recognized as being a challenge for the analyst. We grab it. Well, all of a sudden we’re talking about what’s in our tool as opposed to what’s the problem, the C-suite’s trying to solve. All right.

00:41:58.94 [Michael Helbling]: And I’ve got one, another prediction, this just in. Looks like we’re predicting Ohio for the… No, I’m just kidding. Decision desk. All right, guys. Well, hey, this has been very fun and a lot irreverent. But it sounds like we’ve got some ideas about what we think is going to happen this year. And now everyone else can hold us to it. Oh, one last prediction. I predict if you’re listening right now and you thought this was a pretty good conversation, I predict you’ll probably go ahead and jump on the measure slack and tell us about it or rate us on iTunes. And if you just can’t get enough of the Digital Analytics Power Hour, you can come see us live at E-Metrics San Francisco. So more details to come on that. Or you can just go to the E-Metrics website. Right, Jim Cain?

00:42:56.01 [Jim Cain]: 90% totally.

00:42:57.19 [Michael Helbling]: I love it. All right, gentlemen. Any last thoughts? Any closing?

00:43:04.23 [Tim Wilson]: I predict it’s going to be a fun year because we’re in digital analytics. It’s a fun damn field and it’s going to be fun. And if you don’t have a fun year in 2016, you’re in digital analytics, just get the fuck out.

00:43:17.23 [Jim Cain]: I predict a riot.

00:43:25.76 [Charles Barkley]: I predict a riot.

00:43:35.74 [Michael Helbling]: A quiet riot? Oh, and I’ll do this one too. I predict, you know, because it’s digital analytics and things will just be changing all the time. Wow, yeah, that’s totally one but somebody always does come up with that one of these prediction things Like oh things will just keep changing you’re like really will they anyways alright Well, hey, listen, if you’ve got predictions, we’d love to hear them. Come check us out on our Facebook channel or the Measure Slack. We’d love to hear from you, hear your predictions for this year or the ones you think we got really wrong. Tim Wilson, especially because he’s carrying way too much positivity coming into this year. And of course, for my fellow co-hosts, we are always so happy to hang out and do this show together.

00:44:29.44 [Announcer]: For Jim Cain and Tim Wilson, keep analyzing.

00:44:50.37 [Charles Barkley]: smart guys want to fit in. So they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.

00:44:58.70 [Tim Wilson]: How’s that order for that, new mics?

00:45:00.98 [Jim Cain]: They sent it to my old office and then sent it back to Amazon.

00:45:08.89 [Michael Helbling]: Winning!

00:45:10.65 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, all right. Jim’s like, I don’t want any customers that are geographically close to me and also cold weather.

00:45:19.14 [Jim Cain]: Right, forget that. Drink two sock puppets.

00:45:23.85 [Michael Helbling]: Exactly. I’m too wilson. The dashboard is only one page. I hate pie charts.

00:45:30.50 [Jim Cain]: You know it burns my ass? Poop joke. Poop joke. There, now I’ll say something.

00:45:36.37 [Michael Helbling]: Has anybody here ever heard of a banned Europe?

00:45:41.62 [Jim Cain]: They’re amazing. They are pretty amazing. Like whenever our car gets over about 120 kilometers an hour, it really starts to shudder. How would I resolve that with Adobe Analytics?

00:45:57.57 [Michael Helbling]: Well, also, Analytics doesn’t pay very well in Quebec.

00:46:01.50 [Jim Cain]: Well, I mean, you get paid in Smokes, which you can trade for other things. It’s like a prison colony. Yeah. Find my software, or I will kill this puppy.

00:46:13.37 [Michael Helbling]: Exactly. You can’t see it, but it’s really cute. I don’t have, I’m like, I’m, this is all gonna get cut out.

00:46:25.43 [Tim Wilson]: Okay.

00:46:26.07 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I’ve got nothing.

00:46:27.15 [Tim Wilson]: There’s nothing wrong with us having a short episode. Nobody’s gonna say, I need fuckers. That episode was too short. Rock flag and optimism.

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