2023 Board of Director Nominees

Nominee Name: Hannah Alexander
Nominee Company: Evolytics
Nominee Job Title: Associate Director, Experimentation & Strategy
Country in which nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Consultant
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahcalexander/

Hannah Alexander, leads the Experimentation & Strategy practice at Evolytics, inclusive of A/B Testing, personalization, Conversion Rate Optimization and strategy planning for clients such as Vail, Sephora, HSBC and Realtor.com. She is an Adobe Analytics certified expert who is further known at Evolytics for having developed the Evolytics Hybrid Analytics Workforce Team, designed to help new-to-analytics employees develop a personalized analytics career path.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

I'm passionate about advancing analytics capabilities and the growth of the industry as a whole. I further look up to the initiatives of the DAA and look forward to the opportunity to contribute to many of its efforts - expanding knowledge within this community, the promotion of better hiring practices and equality and fairness in the workplace, to name a few.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

I'm an incredibly social person with a passionate for professional advancement and personal growth. I've been looking for a way to get involved in the community again (since COVID). I'd love nothing more than the opportunity to start an Atlanta Chapter and/or find opportunities to partner with organizations in the area.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

"I'd love to see us bring back in person gatherings; There's something different about meeting in person! If given resources, I'd love to find opportunities to expand the community in Atlanta. I'd also love to expand upon events, networking opportunities and learning opportunities in general. I think it would be awesome to serve as a hub for learning opportunities within the community as a whole (upcoming virtual conferences, seminars, events, etc.), and put together events that could provide more opportunities for our community to connect and share."

Nominee Name: Juan Damia
Nominee Company: Intellignos (A Havas Group Company)
Nominee Job Title: CEO
Country in which nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Consultant
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damia/

My Analytics career started in 1998, working for one of the first Argentinian Tech Startups. My love for Analytics was instant. I joined the DAA in 2007 and cooperated in several projects with a focus on making the DAA available and relevant for people from different cultures and backgrounds. I worked for several companies before launching Intellignos in 2007, a company with a focus on helping clients improve their competitive situation through the use of data using much of the know-how that I have been developing for years. The company was acquired in 2016 by Havas group and I keep working there as its current CEO. I wrote the book called Meta Analytics and co-wrote Mejor Marketing by AMDIA. In 2010 Endeavor awarded me as High Impact Entrepreneur and Emerging Entrepreneur of the year. In 2019 I founded Ninety Upsilon Sigma, a company that is developing an algorithm to identify and accelerate high-impact startups.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

As an immigrant that lived in several countries, I can bring a multicultural touch that can support the fantastic work that the rest of the members have been doing to turn the DAA into a global and more open organization. Our industry is very math-oriented, no doubt about it, but we are still humans and the cultural aspects are still the most important ones in our careers and life. Do you know that 9 out of 10 companies are not taking information into action? Did you know that the problem is not technical but cultural? Let's work on that together.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

The DAA has done a great job not only on evangelizing about the benefits of the practices we promote but also on constantly raising the bar. I'm convinced there's no better way to learn than from each other, mainly from our errors. During the last 20 years, I've been promoting the use of data to understand and improve the digital world through professional development and community. Back in 2007, I created an event called HOWA (Hands-on Web Analytics) that was key to expanding the Analytics practice throughout Latin America. I wrote two books. Since 2005 I've been writing in my blog about Analytics in both Spanish and English. I worked with Universities to create programs to teach Analytics and I taught in many of them. I participated as Jury in startup contests to promote the development of better technology for our industry. I would love to bring all that experience to work hand in hand with the rest of the members to achieve the DAA mission.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

With the development of AI there's an entire new world (or industry!) to create and the DAA should lead that transformation process, being (as always) one step ahead to help all the professionals in our industry be prepare to take advantage of it.

Nominee Name: Sharon Flynn
Nominee Company: Publicis Sapient
Nominee Job Title: Associate Director Data Strategy
Country in which nominee is located: Cananda
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Practitioner
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonflynnbama/

I have over 20 years of experience in the digital space, including Infotrust (GA reseller) BMO, Millward Brown (Director of Digital Strategy & Effectiveness), TVO (Director of Research), Astral Media (Head of Research & Director of Interactive Research), CBC (Research Manager), and The Canadian Media Fund (Statistical and Economic Analyst). As life long learner I am passionate about digital analytics and its role in driving organizations forward. I co-founded the Digital Analytics Association Toronto Chapter and have served on the Digital Analytics Association board member for two terms

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

As a committed member of the DAA, I would bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the table around the very unique needs of the digital analytics community and the DAA in particular. The industry has changed beyond recognition over the last 5 years and accelerated over covid. Ensuring our members are equipped, supported and have the community they need to succeed is more important than ever. I am particularly interested in contributing to the professional development and advocacy initiatives of the organization, as I believe that these are key to empowering individuals and teams to deliver value through analytics in hybrid, remote and evolving working environments. Its been a challenging two years for the DAA, our members and those who utilize Digital professionals' skills.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

As an experienced digital analytics professional, I am confident that I can assist the DAA with meeting the objectives of its mission by bringing the following specific contributions:

• Professional Development: I would be committed to contributing to the professional development initiatives of the DAA by sharing my knowledge and expertise with members and steering committee groups, especially with a focus on the productization of the competency framework
• Advocacy: I would support the DAA's advocacy initiatives by advocating for policies and practices that promote the advancement and recognition of of digital analytics as a distinct and valuable discipline
• Community: Community is core to the DAA's mission.
• Leadership: With my experience in leadership positions and organizational development, I believe that I could play a key role in supporting the growth and development of the DAA. I would be committed to working with the board and the membership to develop and implement strategic plans, initiatives, and programs that further the objectives of the DAA's mission.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

Key Objectives:

1. Solid community engagement in person and virtually
2. One Conference established on the conference calendar
3. Sustainable membership revenue

Nominee Name: Enrique J. Gonzales
Nominee Company: Verisign
Nominee Job Title: Senior Manager, Digital Analytics
Country in which nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Practitioner
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enriquejgonzales/

I started my digital analytics journey in the late 90s tracking an AOL site with “plus groups” and a related website with log files. In the early 2000s, I pioneered the use of Adobe Analytics at Gannett Newspapers on almost 100 newspaper sites when the tool was still called SuperStats. I then held the first dedicated digital analytics roles at USA Today, NPR, AARP, and the journal Science. At USA Today, I also conducted the national newspaper’s first digital a/b test. A former journalist, I have written for publications from the Austin American Statesman to the Wall Street Journal, but now use my storytelling skills to explain how data can drive positive organizational change. An early member of the DAA, I own a cloisonné pin from both the DAA and the WAA, from when the organization was first known as the Web Analytics Association. I currently work at Verisign.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

Digital analytics as a field needs a strong advocate for its role in digital leadership, much beyond any notion that analytics is a simple basic support role for marketing optimization and product development.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

The DAA remains dedicated to "uniting web analytic professionals, consultants, and end-users to discuss, combine forces and powerfully promote our common interests worldwide." Our most important role as the DAA is raising the organizational importance of understanding digital data.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

The DAA in the next two years needs to be in the forefront of the changes wrought by digital privacy that will likely shift credible analysis from ad platforms to 1st party systems. At the same time, the DAA needs to be an active voice in how data science is applied to digital data from machine learning to artificial intelligence.

Nominee Name: Hailey Meekins
Nominee Company: Search Discovery
Nominee Job Title: Senior Solutions Manager
Country in which nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Consultant
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haileymeekins/

I am writing to you to express my strong interest in joining the DAA Board. My colleague, Val Kroll, recommended that I contact you regarding a position due to my deep investment in the digital analytics industry.

I started my career in analytics at Moz as a Product Analyst. Business Intelligence was a fledgling team whose services were in high demand, which meant acting in many roles was an absolute necessity. When the position demanded that I build the company’s first executive level dashboards in R, without having any experience coding in R or SQL, I paired taking online courses with Stack Overflow visits and found I was soon presenting a shippable dashboard to my stakeholders. When the company needed a new data visualization tool, I drove the business proposal and spearheaded company-wide tool adoption for Tableau software. I became the in-house expert on Tableau, creating the first series of executive-level dashboards in the company’s history, curating training materials for onboarding internal users, and acting as the point of contact with the Tableau sales and account management teams. When Business Intelligence made goals to improve data quality and stakeholder trust in BI, I performed a complete audit and repair of our web analytics implementation. Following the audit, I championed the acquisition of a data quality assurance tool, then led myself and an intern through the process of placing data collection failure alerts on our web analytics implementation.

Following Moz, I entered LegitScript as an Analyst on a brand-new program. As internal reporting standards were not yet formed, in my short time there I created and governed dashboards which communicated program statuses to management, as well as pilot retrospective reporting standards.

I next wanted to expose myself to as many business challenges and platforms as possible, which led me into consulting. I’ve now worked at Search Discovery for over five years and in this time I have held a plethora of roles. From implementation specialist, to analyst, to analytics manager, to customer success manager, to senior solutions manager, I’ve found my career has naturally progressed and that I have always been apt to use my transferable skills to jump in and solve problems important to the business. My sphere of influence has continued to expand. Where I once focused on solving data challenges for a single business, I now build SAAS products which help numerous businesses collect and use data more efficiently and effectively.

As I move to the next phase in my career, I’m looking to continue to challenge myself and embed myself into larger callings. I believe this starts with joining the DAA Board. Your mission to empower people in the community aligns greatly with personal missions in my career. Furthermore, the leadership you hold in the community and praise you receive indicate that you pursue your work with excellence. It would be an honor to aid the efforts of the DAA.

I hope I effectively presented my abilities as an effective team member. If the position on the Board plays any part in enriching our community, then this is a position I am highly interested in and capable of supporting.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

Having worked in consulting for several years now, I have a healthy pulse on changes in the industry and what problems people and organizations are needing to navigate. This is helpful because where people are needing to solve problems, the DAA has the great opportunity to provide help! Educating and enabling others is a passion of mine, and I have always maintained a commitment to building capacity in others. For example, I serve as a mentor within Search Discovery for several team members and have led many initiatives to standardize our processes. Within the last decade I have also held a role as a math tutor and mentor for high school students. If I don’t know how to enable someone myself, I love to bring in other voices and experts for all of our benefit. Ultimately, I take immense joy in seeing others succeed in the areas important to them.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

While I will happily contribute to accomplishing all DAA objectives, my skills will shine in fostering our community. Fostering a community involves creating a sense of belonging, inclusivity, and shared purpose among a group of people. I do not believe that you can create belonging and inclusivity in a community such as the DAA without thoughtfully and intentionally providing a platform for minority voices.

This is something that I do as a leader of the Thrive at Work community at Search Discovery. The Thrive community strives to encourage inclusion through understanding, respecting, and valuing diversity. This community helps effect change at Search Discovery. For example, last year, I facilitated a month-long series on Invisible Disabilities in the Workplace. Search Discovery employees came forward, shared testimonials, and led panel discussions around neurodiversities, chronic illnesses, and mental health disorders. When several employees self-disclosed in a panel discussion the challenges with reading quickly when living with dyslexia, Search Discovery leadership created recorded versions of our strategy documents. I’ve heard coworkers express that this was a highlight of their time at Search Discovery.

I would like to continue to grow inclusion in the DAA community and provide education on how bias, which has the potential to exacerbate discrimination, can be mitigated in digital analytics.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

The DAA should be the first place people go to for education and finding community in the industry. The DAA should be in the forefront of peoples’ mind and on the tip of their tongue, so when someone says they would like to get into digital analytics, it will be easy for a friend to say “The DAA has tons of resources to help!” Or when someone needs to mature their skills, they’ll easily see through a search result that the DAA is the place to turn to.

I will be able to help achieve this goal with my ability to standardize, communicate, and provide clarity in many situations. In my role at Search Discovery, I am charged with creating standardized product solutions for problems our consultants and clients are encountering. This has given me the ability to understand urgent and expensive problems and create automated means for solving those problems while coordinating with diverse teams to confirm messaging and effectiveness.

Nominee Name: Mai AlOwaish
Nominee Company: Gulf Bank
Nominee Job Title: Chief Data & Innovation Officer
Country is which nominee is located: Kuwait
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Practitioner
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mai-alowaish/
 

Mai AlOwaish is a seasoned information system and digital analytics expert with 17 years of experience between the United States and Kuwait. Mai currently holds the Chief Data Officer position at Gulf Bank, contributing to a bank-wide digital transformation and leading the data and analytics practice.

Mai has spent the past ten years working in Digital Analytics, employed with DAA corporate members and Google partners in the United States, where she consulted corporate organizations on leveraging digital analytics data, setting up & optimizing Google Analytics solutions and enabling digital transformation for retail and eCommerce businesses. Prior to that, Mai worked in leading digital banking initiatives with the National Bank of Kuwait, Commercial Bank and Boubyan Bank in Kuwait.

Mai holds an Engineering degree in Industrial & Information Systems from Oregon State University and a Master's degree in Information Systems from Northwestern University. Mai is a certified CWA, PMP and is the recipient of DAA’s 2019 President’s Awards.

Mai is a volunteer in several task forces in DAA. She has been a community volunteer for the DAA’s Women In Analytics community since 2018, and she’s also been a co-leader in the Women In Tech Maturity model since 2019; working closely with DAA staff and other volunteers to help promote DAA efforts and realize goals of these projects and communities. Mai also served on the OneConference 2020 team and helped in the Thought Leadership conversations to highlight women and women allies in the industry.

Mai is a contributing member of the DAA community. She wrote a technical article for the DAA newsletter and published analytics recipes in the DAA cookbook for different analytical tools. Mai also shares her perspectives on mentorship and diversity with other members through the DAA blog. Mai has also held several DAA webinars on different analytics topics and presented in the OneConference 2020.

Outside of DAA, Mai has been a thought leader speaking about analytics and diversity in tech. She’s a published author with a practice paper in the Applied Marketing Journal (June 2020) and a contributor to the Analytics Interpreted book (Feb 2021) by the Women In Analytics. As for conferences, she spoke in the Women In Analytics Conference 2019 about enabling data science in digital analytics. and she also shared her views on diversity in tech and talked about the DAA’s Women In Tech Maturity Model in Google Partner Summits of 2019 and 2020.

Mai has also been part of the Women In Analytics (WIA) conference team for two years now and was also involved with the local efforts that WIA works in the Ohio community as well. Mai served as a volunteer in the Tech Corps Analytics Program of Ohio, working with a team of professionals to develop an analytics-based curriculum summer program for K-12 students and teachers to educate, empower kids with technology and encourage them to explore and learn skills and concepts focused on technology and analytics. Also, Mai was a volunteer with the Ohio State University Women in Data Science Summer Camp 2019, as she's passionate about helping young ladies get into STEM and learn about data.

While she was working at InfoTrust, Mai established an internal Leadership and Mentoring program in InfoTrust with the goal of enhancing the leadership ratio and enabling women to grow in leadership roles and eventually close the gap.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

My involvement in digital transformations enabled me to see how digital analytics is sometimes not seen as a key ingredient in the transformations that are happening now worldwide, lots of focus on the technology but not analytics. With my exposure to these transformations in different sectors (retail, ecommerce and now financial), I know I can capitalize on my digital analytics experience and make DAA take the lead to be an essential part of digital transformations.

Providing an international perspective inside the board and promoting awareness of DAA worldwide through local efforts on this side of the world and my personal brand. Diversity work and experience with women in tech and analytics organizations that can be translated to initiatives and partnerships with other organizations.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

Develop the training and education assets for DAA to establish a platform for professional development and continuing education in digital analytics. I worked on volunteer and freelance projects where I made training courses on mediabistro and also delivered many learning sessions and developed learning curriculums with my previous employers. Aligning some of DAA’s work with DAMA as I am now involved in the larger aspect of data, especially with the recent updates in analytics platforms mixing digital analytics data with other sources. I believe digital analysts are now demanded to look beyond website data with the proliferation of new platforms and integration with other data sources and tools.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

DAA should have a standard or reference for digital analytics best practices, which can serve as the base for certification testing and associated courses. Think PMBoK for Project Managers and DMBoK for Data Management. We need DABoK for Digital Analysts. With my exposure to these bodies of knowledge and involvement in training and learning curriculums, I am sure we can create a base for the digital analytics certification. I think DAA should rebrand the CWA certification since it’s not just “web” anymore and provide several layers of the certification (based on experience). Given how fast digital analytics change, these certification could serve as the badge employers look for as knowledge of digital analytics concepts. I have developed multi layered curriculums and exams for enterprise clients for Google learning and internal certification, I believe I can assist DAA to begin working on a framework for learning and certification and also employ the current webinars to practice and gauge interest in those topics.

DAA should have more existence around the world with chapters and events, capitalizing on the online events opportunity right now to recruit members that will start chapters in the future. I have been involved with numerous organizations and events and I think there are many ways to encourage chapters or making a “chapter starter kit” to start making those online connections now in places around the world so they will go into offline events in the future.

Nominee Name: June Dershewitz
Nominee Company: Amazon
Nominee Job Title: Data Strategist
Country in which the nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Practitioner
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdersh/
 

June Dershewitz has spent her career driving analytics strategies for major businesses. In her current role at Amazon she guides strategy and execution across Amazon Music's portfolio of data science, machine learning, analytics, and business intelligence initiatives. As an analytics practitioner, she builds and leads teams that focus on marketing analytics, product analytics, business intelligence, and data governance. In her prior life as a consultant, she was a member of the leadership team at Semphonic, a prominent analytics consultancy (now part of Ernst & Young). As a long-standing advocate of the analytics community, she was the co-founder of Web Analytics Wednesdays. She first served as a DAA board member between 2008-2012. She returned to the board in 2019, with leadership positions as Board President in 2020-2021 and Board Chair in 2021-2022. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

In recent years, I have served on DAA’s Executive Committee, including turns as President (in 2020) and Board Chair (in 2021). I have now passed the baton to new leaders, but I still see myself as an extension of the Executive Committee through my past experience. I currently lead the Membership Committee, where I regularly bring together a group of awesome volunteers who seek to understand and improve the value we provide to members and prospective members. I think of members broadly to mean individuals who work with data, and the companies who employ those individuals. The major contribution that I believe I can bring to DAA is a well-informed understanding of what our members need from us now, crossed with the benefits that DAA offers (or could offer!). I see all of my DAA work through the lens of what our members need as those needs develop. My contribution will be a strong voice in DAA’s strategic decisions about what our organization should start doing, stop doing, and do more of to create compelling member value.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

In terms of community, I believe that DAA is uniquely positioned to rally around causes that matter to people in our industry. I seek out opportunities where DAA can play that role. For example, I was an early advocate for DAA’s Job Seeker Meetups that surfaced as a need when tech industry layoffs became increasingly common earlier this year. As another pillar of DAA’s mission, professional development is something I have always been passionate about - first stemming from my quest to understand career development pathways for myself, and now helping other people pursue their own. Recently, I have taken to involving DAA’s university members in our initiatives, where they can work alongside more seasoned professionals, build connections, and learn from others in a volunteer setting. I have also enjoyed helping more experienced analytics professionals give back to the community by sharing their accumulated knowledge, either through committee participation or speaking engagements.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

I believe the DAA holds a great deal of potential to grow upward in our organizations to reach even more analytical decision-makers. Two years from now, DAA should have developed into an indispensable resource for entry-level analytics practitioners all the way through to our senior-most leaders. I am committed to helping DAA members chart their dream career paths, build highly effective teams, and learn from one another along the way.

Nominee Name: David McBride
Nominee Company: Quantum Metric
Nominee Job Title: VP, Retail and Telco Strategy
Country in which the nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Vendor
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcbridedavid/
 

Seventeen years of experience in the analytics industry, including roles as a practitioner, consultant, product manager and industry strategist. Four years on the DAA board, all on the Executive Committee as Treasurer, Vice President, President and Board Chair. Family: Partner, father and trail runner. Resides in Bountiful, Utah, USA

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

If I am elected to a final two-year term, I will spend my time focused on areas of responsibility assigned by our board president. Initiatives that I am especially interested in advancing include:

• Engagement: Amplifying our focus on community through an increase in opportunities to get together, both virtually and in person, association-side and as local chapters.
• Academic: Improving our offering for people who are new to the industry, especially our programs for academic community members.
• Value: Creating a membership model that is more focused on free and paid offerings, with enhanced value for paid individual memberships.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

The future of the DAA is not assured. No member should assume that others will do the work. We are at our best when we rely on each other for support and our personal and collective development. As a board member, I plan to emphasize opportunities to get together as a community to support each other and advance the practice of digital analytics.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

The Digital Analytics Association is at an important juncture. The pandemic, economic headwinds, and an over-reliance on corporate memberships (which have compromised our connection with individual members,) have combined to reduce our financial flexibility. Engagement is lower than we would like. I believe the solution lies in a product-led focus on our customers and our offering. Keeping the association alive and restoring it to a position of influence will require that we do things differently than what we have done in the past. This will take focus, collaboration, and work from across the analytics community, especially by the board and staff. If elected, I am committed to this work because I believe in the power of community to improve the practice of analytics and the well-being of our members. My response to the contribution question speaks to how I propose we go about doing this over the next two years.

Nominee Name: Andrew Richardson
Nominee Company: Richardson Strategy Group
Nominee Job Title: Founder
Country in which the nominee is located: USA
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Consultant
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/analyticandrew
 

Andrew Richardson is one of the preeminent marketing and technology voices in the space today. He is a highly skilled analytics and strategy leader with a passion for data-driven marketing and transformation. He has proven success in developing and leading large-scale initiatives, building and leading teams and navigating complex organizations. Andrew is committed to creating opportunities and promoting equality.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

1. I will be a voice and ear for an often overlooked segment of our DAA Membership, media, marketing, and analytics agencies or services firms. 2. As someone who is continually striving to better myself, my journey of anti-racism, D&I (across race, gender, age, sexual orientation and more) and more recently for those in the neurodivergent community (ADHD, autism and more), I am committed to ensuring the DAA meets the needs for all its members, diversifies the thought leadership accordingly, and that we recruit and bring in more diverse voices to not just the DAA but our industry at large.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

I believe so much of the focus of the DAA historically has been on web analytics, I will specifically push for more marketing analytics certification, content and networking. Additionally, providing a safe space for those that identify as neurodivergent to learn how to thrive with their diagnoses would be a focal point.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

Increased diversity across all levels, help create formal partnerships with large orgs for internship placement, creation and sustaining a neurodivergent analytics network, and significantly more marketing analytics content and training.

Nominee Name: Victoria Stapleton
Nominee Company: Acronym Media
Nominee Job Title: Director, Digital Analytics
Country in which the nominee is located: USA & Croatia
Nominee Sector (Academic / Consultant / Practitioner / Vendor): Consultant
Nominee LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-sawtelle/
 

Victoria Stapleton is the Director of Digital Analytics and an Adobe Analytics Business Practitioner at Acronym Media Inc., a full service NYC-based media & analytics consultancy. Victoria has 10+ years in consulting helping clients get the most out of their analytics programs by providing training, insight-ready reporting and dashboards, deep-dive analyses, marketing science expertise, and frontline user support to her clients. She has worked with clients such as IHG Hotels & Resorts, The Hartford, Mayo Clinic, Frontier Communications, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and Christie’s. She holds a Masters degree in Business and Management with Business Analytics from the University of Essex. Outside of work, her proudest accomplishment is travel having lived in seven countries with the current being Croatia.

What major contribution will you bring to DAA and its membership?

My background is varied with experience in SEO, project management, media measurement, and secondary education with my primary competency in digital analytics. Having such a wide variety of experience in these fields, I'm keenly aware of the skills and competencies required to become a well-rounded and successful analyst. My own career path has been filled with valuable detours that have given me a broad perspective including what is required to build a career and personal brand internationally and domestically. With this experience, it would be a fantastic opportunity to use my expertise to help develop strategies for trainings and specialization areas within those trainings. Additionally, I would like to use my consulting experience to guide conversations around thought leadership that spans verticals and tools calling to broader themes and tough questions posed in our industry.

How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting the objectives of the DAA Mission?

One of the key themes of the mission that I would like to build upon is value delivery. As the complexity and price of collecting, analyzing, and activating digital analytics data grows, the risk of senior leaders seeing analytics as a cost rather than a value center is something to consider. With challenges (although not all of them unwelcome) like privacy legislation, cookie reliability, and differing views on attribution in times of tight budgets, it more important than ever to focus on delivering and communicating our value whether that's as an individual analyst, a team, or as a consultancy. Jim Gordon sums this threat to our industry nicely: https://jimalytics.com/industry/the-modern-digital-analytics-existential-crisis// . I would like us to combat this threat by focusing on the ways we deliver revenue, in essence, business value, instead of consume budget. This should include a tieback to revenue and profitability from our work including how to communicate this at the highest levels in each training session, conference presentations, and built into our professional certification. I think it would be worth considering defining a framework for presentations to ensure we have a callback to larger principles and applications instead of just hard skills one can learn anywhere on the internet.

Of course, there are plenty of focus areas as our industry continues to shift, but I feel this should be an area for prioritization.

Where do you think the DAA should be in the next two years? How can you specifically assist DAA with meeting that objective?

In two year's time, the DAA should be well-preparing analysts to be adaptable to change and flexible in their thinking to use preexisting skills in a shifting landscape. Education should not just be about hard skills like which algorithms to leverage or how to extract data from a given platform, but how to understand the business and analytics context around them. As an example, it is easy to learn how to extract data from SA360 and from Google Analytics, but in comparing datasets, it may be difficult to compare these datasets and understand when and why one might use one over the other given a business question. This touches on broader topics like attribution, technical expertise, and business acumen that span specializations in particular too. I would like to assist in ensuring analysts understand how their 'hard' skills can be both applied and transferred to other niche domains in digital analytics. Although tech layoffs may be a temporary trend, the need to shift specializations and focus will continue, so a much broader scope of professional development will become necessary for digital analysts to compete.

Additionally, this may be more of a question or discussion point, but the DAA's presence is much stronger in the United States than abroad. It may be worth considering the DAA's presence abroad. I've lived and worked abroad for seven years and would be interested in pursuing this topic.