Awards for Excellence 2015: Finalists

Congratulations to the 2015 Awards for Excellence Finalists

Digital Analytics Rising Star (Individual)

  • Simo Ahava, Head of Analytics, NetBooster Open to view Nominee Details

    In the past year, Simo, and the great advice and knowledge he shares on his blog (simoahava.com) have become a go-to source for anything Google Tag Manager related. It's amazing to have such well detailed and documented practical advice for implementing GTM, understanding new features, and using the tool regularly published by such a knowledgeable person in the industry.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    fi.linkedin.com/in/simoahava

    Twitter Handle:
    @SimoAhava

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    simoahava.com  twitter.com/simoahava

  • Akhil Anumolu, Principal Marketing Specialist, Symantec Open to view Nominee Details

    Akhil has a done an amazing job in taking our search analytics to the next level. He has truly bridged the gap for us when it comes to understanding the full funnel of our business in only 8 months in this role, which also includes global web development and optimization. Before rejoining Symantec, he lead marketing for the startup Wonder Workshop (formerly Play-i), growing them from initial inception to over $2M in eCommerce pre-order sales in 12 months. Prior to that he spent 2 years at Symantec helping build and lead the global optimization program under James Niehaus & Peter McRae, whom was nominated and a finalist for DAA Practioner of the Year.

    Outside of work, Akhil actively engages in #measure discussions with practioners globally on twitter. He has amassed a good number of followers in the field and actively looks to learn from conversations already taking place and contribute to them further.

    Akhil, at age 25, has done all this in less than 4 years in the industry, coming directly from graduating college to Symantec.

  • Eric Fettman, Analytics Coach and Trainer, E-Nor Open to view Nominee Details

    Eric Fettman is the next big thing.  He's been involved in the industry for 10 yrs as a digital analytics practitioner, trainer, and consultant.  I envy the passion in his voice while talking to clients - whether he's explaining his analytics training curriculum, development plan, or just basic concepts to clients - he makes analytics easy to understand and ties it together tangibly with it will result in gains for your business.  He's created sites dedicated to quizzes and games (his latest gaining popular attention is Analytics Jeopardy!) and analytics tips of the day - just for fun.  Eric is known across the nation and internationally, conducting trainings on digital analytics throughout the United States as well as in countries such as Dubai.  He is a thought leader having written several popular published articles and creating hit training videos on advanced digital analytics topics.  If you haven't heard of him now, I guarantee you'll hear about him in 2015.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericfettman

    Twitter Handle:
    @ericfettman,  @GglAnalytcsTest,  @GATipOfTheDay

    Supporting Nominee Information:

  • Ben Gaines, Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Open to view Nominee Details

    Since 2009, when he had the vision to provide enterprise-level support using social media, Ben has continually sought to provide value to the analytics industry. In his current role, he both conducts analysis on behalf of the Adobe product team and is directly focused on making the lives of analysts and practitioners less complicated and more impactful to the CMOs they serve by implementing workflow improvements and ongoing innovation to Adobe Analytics platform. Ben's emphasis on analytics use cases that span tools and platforms allow him to contribute throughout our entire industry, not just within one set of tools. As a blogger and tweeter, Ben focuses on practical tips and advice that help digital analysts experience success. Ben's humble nature and desire to give back to this quickly growing industry makes him the perfect candidate to be honored as a rising star. 

    LinkedIn Profile:
    www.linkedin.com/in/benjamingaines

    Twitter Handle:
    @benjamingaines

  • Casper Blicher Olsen, Industry Analyst, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    In all ways Casper represents the next generation of digital analytics who burns with a dedicated passion for the field above and beyond any normal sanity and job requirements. His dedication and devotion to data maps a trajectory aim at the highest level and positions in the analytics community.     Despite the humble age of 26 he already achieved more than 4 years of dedicated experience from both Cardinal Path and IIH Nordic before signing up with Google as an analyst in November.    

    As the first dane to earn an Award of Achievement in Web Analytics from the University of British Columbia and as a Certified Web Analyst from The Digital Analytics Association Casper strives to build a consistent framework across both theoretical and practical knowledge.     At the same time he loves to share this knowledge and functioned as an active member of the DAA serving on both the research committee and the SIG focusing on the European Cookie Law for years - this dedication to share also shows in his willingness to travel and present the analytics message whether it be at SuperWeek with Avinash or at a Google Analytics training session in Copenhagen.

    In all ways practical Casper is the true image of a Rising Star.    To quote Alex Langshur and Stephan Hamels words from Caspers Linkedin profile     “Casper is a stand-out in many ways: he works hard, shows initiative, seeks out ways to bring innovation to the tasks at hand, has great team spirit and put his hand up to offer help to others. But above all, he's a great guy who knows his stuff.”   Alex Langshur  Co-founder & Senior Partner at Cardinal Path    “Simply put - a bright young analyst with a great future. I hope he will make us the pleasure to come back with the team!”  Stephane Hamel  Director of Innovation at Cardinal Path

    LinkedIn Profile:
    dk.linkedin.com/in/casperblicher

    Twitter Handle:
    @casperblicher

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://casperblicher.com/

  • Olivier Silvestre, Vice President of Analytics Solutions Group, Ensighten Open to view Nominee Details

    Olivier Silvestre, vice president of Analytics Solutions Group at Ensighten, is a prime candidate for the DAA’s 2015 Digital Analytics Rising Star Award. Silvestre’s data analytics career began as the director of professional services for web-analytics pioneer WebSideStory, serving during a nine-year period in which the company built up its value prior to a 2004 IPO, ahead of its 2008 acquisition by Omniture /Adobe.

    As an expert in web analytics and optimization, Silvestre created one of the industry’s first Conversion Optimization Programs and led a team with a 100-percent success rate helping clients increase online revenue. He subsequently co-founded tag management company Tealium in 2008, and then joined Anametrix as SVP of client success. Silvestre led the Anametrix implementation and account management teams, as well as data scientists and other experts in professional services. His focus has always been ensuring clients gain full business value from their marketing analytics solutions.

    Currently, at Ensighten, which acquired Anametrix in 2014, Silvestre will put his energy on building up a Professional Service organization focused on Advance Data Analytics Solutions. Silvestre’s team will design and create the framework (tools, methodologies and best practices), leveraging advanced analytics and data science to enable clients to leverage the ever growing computing power at our disposal to solve most of the key challenges digital marketing faces today and will tomorrow.

    Silvestre loves sports and is a huge tennis fan and player. His competitive spirit gets translated into the way he approaches things with the joy of winning. Nothing is more rewarding than experiencing success through your clients, he says.     Another of Silvestre’s passions is wine, for which he merged his professional and pastime worlds, by founding VinoMatch, a search engine that matches people with their personal tastes to wine choices.    With his experience in the analytics space and dedication to his career, Silvestre will be a rising start to watch in 2015. 

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/osilvestre

    Twitter Handle:
    @osilvestre

Practitioner of the Year (Individual)

  • Kyle Donaldson, Senior Consulting Engineer, Society Consulting Open to view Nominee Details

    Kyle is a top expert in both implantation and reporting. No matter the company, and no matter the challenge Kyle is the guy for the job. Not only is he an expert in the digital analytics space he is an excellent teacher. Given my 5 years in the industry he has helped me to go from someone with no analytics experience to an owner of an analytics digital agency.

    While he isn’t a blogger or a social media celebrity, there are few in the DA world with more knowledgeable than him on the subject matter.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    www.linkedin.com/in/kyleldonaldson

  • Grace McLean, Director of Digital Analytics, ESPN Open to view Nominee Details

    Grace is the Director, Digital Analytics at ESPN and is in charge of data collection across all products and platforms for the entire organization.  Grace is one of the most knowledgeable digital analytics professionals I have ever had the pleasure of working with and her digital analytics implementation skills are second to none.  ESPN tracks its users across every device imaginable, from the fixed web to iOS and Android to Xbox, Roku and Apple TV.  Grace has aligned the ESPN organization’s data collection standards in order to allow the stakeholders at her company make data informed decisions on the direction of their organization.  Grace works with a very small team of analytics professionals to ensure data quality throughout ESPN and at the same time mentors those professionals on their digital analytics career path.  Grace has spoken at the Disney Analytics conference, Adobe Summit  and other various conferences helping the industry understand data collection on the cutting edge.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=4767901&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=5n5U&locale=en_US&trk=tyah2&trkInfo=tarId%3A1419277100698%2Ctas%3Agrace%20mclean%2Cidx%3A1-1-1

  • Nandita Menon, Product Manager, GoPro Open to view Nominee Details

    The Practitioner of the year exemplifies what we all strive to achieve. Nandita Menon’s work with GoPro over the last 12 months has truly been exemplary.  Nandita has successfully led industry leading Analytics implementation across all of GoPro’s platforms and software. In 12 months, GoPro has released a number of Apps for iOS, Android, gaming consoles like Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Windows 8.1 and LG Smart TV, in addition to a long list of software and services that GoPro end users are now enjoying. Many of these implementations are not even based on tracking models that existed. There is no guide on how to track an LG Smart TV. Nandita has been able to provide insights that help GoPro employees make the content that leaves you entranced. Nandita’s key role is not just getting Analytics implementation in place, which would be an achievement enough for most, but raising the bar by ensuring that this is always done strategically. Meetings with key stakeholders always take place, to ensure what is being tracked and it is inline with the outlined strategy, helping lead the way for GoPro to achieve it’s product and business goals.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=20833633&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=J93m&locale=en_US&srchid=779893291420737800968&srchindex=1&srchtotal=14&trk=vsrp_people_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A779893291420737800968%2CVSRPtargetId%3A20833633%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary

  • Anees Merchant, Senior Vice President - Digital, Blueocean Market Intelligence Open to view Nominee Details

    Anees leads the Digital practice and brings over 18 years of experience to Blueocean Market Intelligence. He has worked with numerous global Fortune 500 clients across various industries, including Retail, Travel and Hospitality, Telecommunications and Technology, Media and eCommerce.  Anees has been instrumental in setting up a dedicated digital team at Blueocean in last 18 months, while launching specialist services aimed at different client verticals. In 18 months, Anees has also created different technology solutions for different client needs, which cater to various adherent customer needs like consumer profiling, managing and launching retail programs in lean vs. holiday season, planning campaigns depending on weather conditions etc.

    Anees has been the brain behind Blueocean’s award winning solutions called Social Effectiveness Index and Digital Persona Insights. These solutions have been showcased also in leading industry conferences across the globe.  Recently Anees led Blueocean’s social insights team - to create a proprietary, custom made solution based on consumer feedback on social platforms for a leading CPG brand in US. The big data solution was built on automated data extraction platform from social channels – which then connected to TALEND based ETL system for business logic, and finally connected to BI platform (Tableau). This agile and big data solution was all hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services). While combining different facets of technology, the solution provided real time, on demand, highly customized and globally accessible social intelligence solutions thus enabling the client to take near to real time insights from social media channels in areas like – feedback in Innovation and R&D, tweaking Marketing Communications, driving strategic engagement programs, etc.

    Apart from focusing efforts on clients, Anees has been instrumental in driving key Analytics and Digital Interest groups in India and other parts of the world. He has setup and participated AIGs (analytics interest groups) to drive interests and focus on digital and analytics awareness.  A practitioner, innovator and industry thought leader, Anees has contributed across different facets of digital and analytics initiatives.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneesmerchant

  • Giles Richardson, Head of Analytics - Direct Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland Open to view Nominee Details

    In only his first year as the Head of Analytics, Giles was able to completely shift the culture at RBS. With a team of 4 others looking at web optimization, they had created a familiar number of well received proofs of concept  showing the dramatic improvements data driven optimization could achieve. The challenge was that RBS was very firmly rooted in ‘Firework culture’ that is 

    • Light up something (a new web experience)
    • Run away (without measuring anything)
    • Everyone claps (with no view of success we applaud the act of doing something  itself)

    He understood that in order to change the internal view of analytics it would require some creative thinking. To achieve this he launched a program at mid year called 'Superstar DJs'. Instead of keeping analytics and test and learn tools among a select group of analysts they distributed this to 50 digital ‘Journey managers’ who between them manage the whole digital experience.

    Building on a flexible analytics implementation via a tag management system each Journey manger had live dashboards showing exactly what was going on in their area.

    This allowed the marketer to see which part of the digital journey created a struggle for customers, and allowed them to set up a test to see if they could resolve it. Most importantly, they were trained and supported to do this themselves.

    This program allowed RBS to go from 3 optimization tests in the first 9 months of 2014, to 70 by end of year, have 50+ people working on it as an integral part of their day job, and generated £1m+ already in extra revenue.

    Now

    • We only change something when it is seem to be a struggle for a customer
    • We measure if it fixed it and if not it gets backed out
    • We don’t celebrate launches – only customer impacts

    Superstar DJ’s used the theme a of a top DJ feeling connected to the audience he was playing to gauging what they needed. He would experiment with new content and instantly see if it was going down well. If it wasn’t he would change it almost instantly. He was cognitive that audiences change depending on where they come from and over time. Most importantly he had the tools and the skill to do it all himself.

    Now we have 50 Superstar DJ’s who enjoyed the fun of the program, the music ,the crazy updates, the billboard charts, the gold disk awards, the bank execs getting involved with tests so much so. They barely noticed they were changing their way of working forever.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilesrichardson

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-marketing-cloud/rbs-customer-success-video/

  • Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google Open to view Nominee Details

    Krista is truly a star in supporting the SF DAA chapter as one of their co-chairs, leading a successful symposium, and establishing herself as a thought leader through advocacy of analytics and best practices.

    Through most of 2014 she put her practitioner skillset to good use to lead the Google for Work group’s Analytics and Optimization practice internally at Google.

    Towards the end of 2014, Krista moved to the Google Analytics team as an Analytics Advocate where she is using her practitioner experience and knowledge to help educate analytics users around the world. We’re really excited to see what’s in store for 2015.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    www.linkedin.com/in/kristaseiden

    Twitter Handle:
    www.twitter.com/kristaseiden

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://www.bloggerchica.com/

  • Jose Uzcategui, Global Data Analytics & Ecommerce Optimization Lead, ASICS Open to view Nominee Details

    The Practitioner of the Year truly shows what it takes to go from a vast understanding of analytics, to being a trendsetter in the greater field.  Jose Uzcategui’s work with ASICS Global over the past several months has laid a path for a very successful future.

    Last year, Jose moved into his role as Global Data Analytics & Ecommerce Optimization Lead, and if analytics is a pool to be jumped in; Jose went straight to the deep end. In just a matter of months, Jose led implementation efforts that spanned across all of ASICS’ platforms, including the mobile application MyASICS that is available for both iOS & Android.     He also brought the concept of a Center of Excellence to the team at ASICS Global, and now holds regular meetings to discuss how to best use the insights that they’ve gleaned from their now-clean data. These meetings are lead by Jose and include the head of each ASICS region including: The United States, Australia, Netherlands & Japan.

    Finally, while living in Canada, Jose co-founded the Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Meetup, which grew from an initial 100 members to over 600 members by the time that he moved to Japan. Jose is a member of the Digital Analytics Association, and is very active across all social media platforms- giving advice wherever he can about best practices for analytics.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2078698&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=Vh-n&locale=en_US&trk=tyah2&trkInfo=tarId%3A1421089349941%2Ctas%3Ajose%2Cidx%3A1-3-3

    Twitter Handle:
    @joseuonline

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://www.onitsukatiger.com/us/en-us/

  • Randy Zwitch, Senior Manager, Data Science, Comcast Open to view Nominee Details

    Data science and big data have quickly become part and parcel of doing digital analytics over the past two or three years. Very few other practitioners have embodied this movement more than Randy Zwitch, who has pushed the envelope with his innovative work in this area - work that he has generously shared via his blog posts, Twitter conversations and perhaps most importantly his GitHub repository.

    While many practitioners, at most, contribute via knowledge sharing, Randy is one of the rare few who has also created products for the digital analytics practitioners and the broader data science community - products that he's given away for FREE. He also encourage others to try their hand at data science, whether it's by dabbling in R Stats via his popular RSiteCatalyst package (a package so popular that it was cited as a new best practice at the 2014 Adobe Summit), Twitter or other venue conversations, or by quietly sharing tips on how others might try to create free code packages - and thus become innovators too.

    Randy continues to create new data science packages and foster an atmosphere of creativity in our digital analytics world. He's ahead of our industry curve, inspiring others and helping us all evolve. This is why I'm nominating Randy as the 2015 DAA Practitioner of the Year.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    www.linkedin.com/in/randyzwitch/

    Twitter Handle:
    @randyzwitch

    Supporting Nominee Information:

     

Most Influential Industry Contributor (Individual)

  • Simo Ahava, Head of Analytics, NetBooster Open to view Nominee Details

    More than any other person in the industry he has helped with knowledge sharing and understanding of the full potential of Google Tag Manager. He is regularly contributing to the Google + GTM community and blogs on what seems like a weekly basis about the latest challenges and opportunities with using GTM. His name is the first mentioned whenever talking about GTM. Purely for his unselfish efforts he deserves this award.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    http://fi.linkedin.com/in/simoahava

    Twitter Handle:
    @SimoAhava

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://www.simoahava.com/tag/google-tag-manager/

  • JD Nyland, Director of Product Management, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Open to view Nominee Details

    JD Nyland led the design, development and delivery of major innovations in all of the past 5 releases of Adobe Analytics—the product behind last year’s DAA Most Influential Analytics Vendor. Adobe Analytics is the award-winning analytics backbone of Adobe Marketing Cloud. It is the industry’s best-selling, and most advanced enterprise analytics solution, used by more than 140,000 marketers and analysts at the world’s largest brands to better understand their businesses by leveraging big data. Adobe Analytics measures nearly 7 trillion server calls each year.  

     JD’s Recent Accomplishments include:

    • Ran Adobe Analytics customer advisory board meetings
    • Ran quarterly business reviews with many of Adobe’s largest enterprise customers
    • Instrumental in the announced partnership between Nielsen-Adobe, to create industry's first comprehensive measurement platform for digital content
    • Oversaw the development of groundbreaking new capabilities in Adobe Analytics Standard, Adobe Mobile App Analytics and Adobe Video Analytics

    Worked closely with many of Adobe Analytics customers, which represent best-in-class enterprises including:

      • Top 6 Entertainment Companies
      • Top 9 of 10 Tech Companies
      • Top 4 Healthcare Companies
      • Top 5 Telecommunications Companies
      • Top 3 Internet Services Companies
      • Top 3 of 4 Apparel Companies  

    Quotes from Adobe Analytics customers on working with JD:

    • David Williams, Director of Customer Intelligence, ASOS  o “The most impressive thing about JD is his relentless drive to listen to customers and make the product better – and not just talk about it but continually deliver and regular intervals. It has impressed me since becoming a client that no matter how good we feel certain parts of the tool are versus the competition, there is a team for each of those parts within Adobe dedicated to making it better – and JD sits across most if not all of them. Innovate or die they say – no concerns about that under JD’s steer!”
    • Andrew Bowers, Senior Manager, Comcast.com Strategy and Analytics  o "JD has been a key innovator in the web analytics space.  He’s wonderful at listening to his clients’ needs and ensuring that his product delivers best in class capabilities.  We’ve certainly challenged him with designing a tool that satisfies the requirements of varying user types across our business: marketing, analytics, operations, etc.  He’s delivered tool that is simple and flexible while also being robust."
    • Christopher Marin, Digital Marketing Platform and Analytics, CSC  o “Under JD Nyland's leadership, Adobe's Analytics product has surged to the front of the pack. Their embrace of cutting edge Data Science techniques, coupled with a strong focus on the end user experience, means the customer's perceived value of the product increases tremendously after each release.  Additionally, JD has ensured that customers have a strong voice at the table, and their input is very much evident in the resulting products.”
    • Anthony Magee, Argos  o “JD has been an instrumental partner for our strategic use of data and analytics at a point where we are becoming a digital retail leader. Having worked with JD on the CAB and had collaboration workshops with our senior exec with him he never fails to have his finger on the pulse and ensures Adobes products are cutting edge and that is why it is not just Adobe but JD who Bertrand and I put our faith in as a strategic partner in becoming a digital leader.”
    • Petrick Oh, wotif group  o “As many business models move towards customer focus and analytics play a role of capturing customers’ voice through data. JD and Adobe analytics also listen to the users of the Adobe analytics platform to make every users become analysts and keeps all of people like myself up to date with the marketing trends”
    • Andreas Dierl, Managing Partner, adlytics GmbH  o “Knowing JD for many years, he is one of the brightest minds in the analytics space. His forward thinking has deeply influenced the industry. He is not only a great expert but also an amazing person to work with.”
    • Peter Luetjens, Auto & General  o “JD has been at the helm of the premier enterprise analytics product during a period of rapid change and incredible innovation. With JD at the helm, in less than half a decade I have seen Adobe Analytics metamorphise from a reporting platform into an integrated cloud marketing platform which has no peer in the industry. Much of this has been achieved by fostering extremely close vendor-client relationships, and heeding their advice on future directions for the product. It's always a pleasure to work with JD and share his excitement in building the future of analytics.”

     

    LinkedIn Profile:
    www.linkedin.com/pub/jd-nyland/0/9a5/1b1

    Twitter Handle:
    @jdnyland

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    JD’s Speaking, Media and Thought Leadership 

  • Judah Phillips, Partner, Knowledgent  Open to view Nominee Details

    #1:
    Judah Phillips continued moving the digital analytics industry forward in 2014.  His Digital Analytics books were taught at universities and have sold very well across the globe. This year he spoke at many conferences, events, and universities both in the EU and United States. Digital Analytics Thursdays (DAT), which he founded, grew organically and was held in many states and in countries worldwide, bringing together hundreds of analysts. His analytics consultancy, SmartCurrent, is doing some of the most innovative work in the industry with leading brands. The analytics startups he has advised have raised nearly $100M. He even helped plan the DAA Boston Symposium and spoke at it. He is a relentless leader in our industry who has heavily impacted analytics and continues to do so with his ongoing thought-leadership and advocacy. He is a real change agent.

    Besides successfully heading a leading analytics consultancy, Judah has dedicated his time to educating the analytics community through his two new releases:  "Building a Digital Analytics Organization" and "Digital Analytics Primer". Judah's true focus is on helping people improve their analytics and overall business in order to identify and take advantage of the opportunities that significantly impact results, achieve goals, and create value.

    #2:
    Besides successfully heading a leading analytics consultancy, Judah dedicates his time to educating the analytics community through his two new releases:  "Building a Digital Analytics Organization" and "Digital Analytics Primer". Judah's true focus is on helping business leaders meet the challenge of competing with analytics in an increasingly complex, data-overloaded, digital-business environment. He's always eager and willing to help the analytics community achieve great things and support the people and companies in it. In Boston he founded the DAA Boston Local Chapter and continues after many years to help guide its growth as well as act as an advocate and leader for the analytics industry and the DAA.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    www.linkedin.com/in/judahphillips

    Twitter Handle:
    @judah

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://www.smartcurrent.com/about.html
    http://www.amazon.com/Building-Digital-Analytics-Organization-Integrating/dp/0133372782
    http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Analytics-Primer-Judah-Phillips-ebook/dp/B00FXX6ZRQ
    http://www.amazon.com/Judah-Phillips/e/B00DWG7SUY
    http://www.digitalanalyticsthursdays.org
    http://conversionxl.com/under-utilized-google-analytics-reports-conversion-insights/
    http://conversionxl.com/5-things-youre-measuring-incorrectly-digital-analytics/
    http://www.1to1media.com/view.aspx?docid=35113
    http://www.mediapost.com/publications/author/1801/judah-phillips/list/
    http://www.ftpress.com/authors/bio/853f209b-5acc-4a73-ab93-20af079b8cab

  • Aurelie Pols, Chief Visionary Officer, Mind Your Privacy SL Open to view Nominee Details

    From Europe, Aurélie has transformed and inspired the digital analytics industry ever since it’s beginning. While initially sharing knowledge about data uses, she rapidly focused on aligning global privacy standards, helping her customers hedge against non compliance risks and feelings of creepiness.

    Aurélie tends to ask the tough questions, today revolving around Ethical, Responsible and Secure Data Uses, pushing for more transparency and Privacy by Design ways of working for all actors involved in the data industry.

    In 2014, she featured in a number of webinars and wrote her first white paper, which was published in the Applied Marketing Analytics Journal. Her Data Science meets Data Protection infographic for International Privacy Day 2014 was picked up by the EU Authorities and Bloomberg’s BNA. She spoke at IBM conferences, Webit, Superweek, eMetrics, the IAPP Congress and O’Reily’s Strata. She’ll be at SmartCon and SXSW in 2015.

    She teaches Digital Analytics and Ethics at Spanish IE’s Master in Business Analytics and Big Data and shares her passion for chocolate as well as 2 lovely children with her husband René. 

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=729806

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    http://www.slideshare.net/MindYourPrivacy

  • Joseph Stanhope, SVP, Marketing, Signal Open to view Nominee Details

    Tag management became widely acknowledged in 2014 as the must-have technology platform for digital analytics, digital testing and optimization, analytics integration, and eventually as a key component of digital marketing technology (see the ChiefMarTech blog post "Tag management software as marketing middleware"). Joe Stanhope, SVP of Marketing with Signal, recognized the potential of tag management prior to joining Signal, through his pioneering efforts for Forrester on Digital Intelligence and extensive insight into the impact of tag management on big data. Joe recognized Signal as the global leader in real-time, cross-channel marketing technologies, and quickly made his mark at the company - playing a key role in its rebranding from BrightTag, to reflect the company’s ability to play a larger role in helping marketers collect, match, and activate their customer engagement data across channels and devices.

    For the digital analytics space, Joe's ground-breaking research has influenced many to expand their skill sets beyond traditional web analytics into cross-channel analytics and shift implementation practice offerings at consultancies into broader service products. He continues to influence the evolution of practitioner and vendor-side organizations that are working to create a Digital Intelligence practice modeled after his research. The Web Analytics Association rebranded as the Digital Analytics Association on the heels of the release of Joe's Digital Intelligence research and I am one of many that does not think that is just an interesting industry coincidence.

    Joe's recognition as an Individual Industry Contributor, in this era of Digital Intelligence and Tag Management, is long overdue given his long list of achievements that have helped marketers move toward the industry’s holy grail: a unified view of their customer.  As a true thought leader, Joe deserves to be recognized as the 2014 DAA Individual Industry Contributor of the Year.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=5398836

    Twitter Handle:
    @joestanhope

    Supporting Nominee Information:

     

New Technology of the Year (Group)

  • Ensighten Open to view Nominee Details

    Businesses are finally beginning to recognize that customer data is the key to powering their marketing programs, but in many cases are falling short in the execution. They are taking the easy path by renting their customer data from third-party sources and sacrificing best-in-breed applications and a robust platform for simplicity.

    Ensighten, a leader in omni-channel data and tag management, understands that customers demand a more contextually personalized experience. Ensighten Activate was created to enable marketers to collect first-party, omni-channel data from off-site sources like display ads, impressions, email opens, microsite visits and other company domains. Companies such as Microsoft, Capital One, United Airlines, T-Mobile and Walmart have used their first-party data via Ensighten to collect customer interactions to optimize the digital experience and provide customized content to their customers, maximizing ROI by up to 525%, according to Forrester.

    As this new technology gives marketers a complete and timely picture of where their customer is in their journey, Ensighten Active can combine third-party and first-party data to create holistic customer “profiles.” These profiles provide marketers with actionable insight to personalize content and make targeted offers at an individual level.

    Here’s how Ensighten Activate works:   

    • Ensighten imports customer data via SFTP and API’s across all online and offline properties 
    • Ensighten transforms all of this data into unified, usable customer records 
    • Ensighten exports this contextually relevant profile data in real-time to external action systems via SFTP or our REST API to take action at a 1:1 level at the right time.   

    Here’s another way to think about it: 

    • Tell me what my customer wants now
    • Compare that to what they wanted in the past 
    • Give them exactly what they want in the future   

    Ensighten Activate is a game changer for digital marketers, giving them a leg-up on their competition, as they can personalize campaigns for consumers and capitalize on online and offline data for a true one-to-one experience. 

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshmanion

    Twitter Handle:
    @joshmanion

  • Google Analytics for Apps, Google Analytics Open to view Nominee Details

    A solid mobile analytics infrastructure is a key and essential necessity in our new era of Mobile-First Digital Traffic (as of mid 2015), and Mobile-First eCommerce (as of holidays 2015). This is why I'm nominating what may be the final, essential piece in the Google Analytics puzzle:   iOS App Install Tracking for Google Analytics  - as the 2014 DAA New Technology of the Year.  Google Analytics has had an ongoing raft of improvements regarding mobile, but still had a bit of a weak spot when it came to iOS install tracking. This iOS weakness - until November 2014 - is one of the few reasons that a mobile measurer might insist on a specialty mobile analytics tool in addition to Google Analytics.  With the release of this new feature - among many for mobile with Google Analytics in 2014 (Adword + Mobile App reporting, cross-device tracking, and more) - Google Analytics practitioners now have little reason to use a specialty mobile analytics tool in addition to GA. For those of us who are rallying around the flag of Google Analytics to measure mobile, I would expect to see more and more simplification of our mobile efforts onto GA, leveraging this capability along with Google's other mobile updates to help us keep it simple when telling our mobile stories.

    In the software vendor space, I would expect that as a result of this new GA iOS measurement enhancement, we'll see some continuing consolidation in the specialty mobile analytics space in 2015 and beyond, due to the emergence of this new key GA capability.  2015 and onward should, if trends persist, be an increasingly Mobile-First world; Google Analytics, with its new   iOS App Install Tracking for Google Analytics functionality, will be core to helping many of us explain it.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/pub/rahul-oak/1/6/493

    GA iOS App Install Tracking links:   

    Other GA Mobile innovations in 2014:   

    Statistics on our mobile first 2014 and beyond from:   

  • Hub'Scan Open to view Nominee Details

    We help enterprises reach 100% efficient tagging for their whole digital ecosystem and collect 100% relevant, accurate and actionable data 24/7.

    Hub’Scan EX is a revolutionary SaaS platform dedicated to digital analytics performance. It manages data layer and quality assurance for all three phases of digital analytics: acquisition, behavior and conversion.

    From traffic acquisition to conversion, marketers feel they cannot trust collected data because tags are not installed properly. Content changing too fast, process pitfalls and technological shortcomings are some of the main reasons. As a result, bad decisions involving billions of dollars are made at the global level based on inaccurate data.

    Hub’Scan EX is the only solution on the market that fixes all these issues at a time with exhaustive scanning, tagging plan management and user journeys monitoring, from SEO to conversion.

    With Hub'Scan EX, you can:

    • secure 100% tagging coverage & efficiency so that you can launch sites faster
    • secure 100% tagging & data accuracy so you can collect 100% reliable data 24/7
    • secure 100% conversion potential so you can identify more user interactions.

    It manages the whole digital analytics process and ecosystem regardless of the environments (HTTPS/SSL, forms, iframes, mobile devices…) and bridges the gap between intuition-based decisions and data-driven decisions.

    EXhaustiveness: thanks to powerful algorithms and a robust cloud platform, Hub'Scan EX can scan entire websites containing hundreds of millions of pages. Get a full picture of your data collection potential!

    EXcellence: our quality assurance processes ensure that your data collection matches your business requirements and tagging plans. Hub’Scan EX provides scenario management and monitoring to replay user journeys, which allows insight into in-page user behavior that will impact conversion. Start trusting your analytics data again!

    EXpress: our SaaS architecture can scan over 6 million pages per hour. Our unique quality monitoring feature will alert you by e-mail if tags malfunction or if the overall quality of your data collection decreases. This means that we will identify problems quickly, ensuring that the integrity of your data collection remains intact.

    Thanks to Hub’Scan EX, our customers have been able to achieve immediate value by reducing their TTM and TCO by up to 90%. They can audit in hours what required weeks before and they can manage their whole analytics data layers, which is not even a dream without Hub’Scan.

    This empowers our customers to be more proactive with their approach and protect the investment they've made in their digital marketing ecosystem.

    Identifying and correcting problems with key conversion paths has helped them to improve their overall conversion rate and business significantly.

    By now Hub’Scan EX is used over more than 3,000 websites.
    Hub’Scan Inc. has its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts and European offices in Paris, France. Hub’Scan Inc. is a Digital Analytics Association Corporate Member

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliencoquet
    fr.linkedin.com/pub/eric-dumain/0/443/a0b

    Twitter Handle:
    @hubscan

    Supporting Nominee Information:

     

  • Visual IQ Open to view Nominee Details

    Marketing attribution technology has matured by leaps and bounds in the past few years - and Visual IQ has surfaced as a leading provider. As an increasing number of enterprises move away from last-click and embrace algorithmic attribution, we'll be counting on companies like Visual IQ to continue to innovate.

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/company/visual-iq-inc

    Twitter Handle:
    @visualiq
    @bill_muller

     

  • Webtrekk Open to view Nominee Details

    Webtrekk is a global provider of digital intelligence solutions, headquartered in Berlin with offices in China, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the USA. Webtrekk’s solutions allow companies to optimize their digital efforts. The Webtrekk Digital Intelligence Suite is widely recognized for its advanced analytics, testing and website customization solutions, enabling you to turn data into profit with personalized, automated marketing campaigns and recommendations. Alongside its Digital Intelligence Suite, Webtrekk offers a wide range of consulting services designed to address digital analytics needs, from strategy to implementation to training.

    In more than 25 countries, CMOs, CIOs and marketing managers in e-commerce, media and publishing, banking, travel and hospitality, telecommunications and entertainment trust Webtrekk’s solutions. Webtrekk customers include Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss, Red Bull, MTV, Siemens, Die Welt, BNP Paribas, Allianz, BILD.de, ProSiebenSat.1 Digital, Zalando, Esprit, Tchibo, Medion, Douglas, Rebuy, Hotel.de, Tape.tv and Mister Spex, among many others. 

    LinkedIn Profile:
    https://www.linkedin.com/company/webtrekk

    Supporting Nominee Information:
    www.webtrekk.com

Most Influential Agency/Vendor (Group)