2015 Awards for Excellence Recipients

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Digital Analytics Rising Star: Ben Gaines

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

Practitioner of the Year: Krista Seiden

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/

Most Influential Industry Contributor: Aurelie Pols

From Europe, Aurelie 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.

Aurelie 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 Rene.

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

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

New Technology of the Year: Hub'Scan

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

Most Influential Agency/Vendor: Cardinal Path

I would like to nominate Cardinal Path for the Most Influential Agency of the Year Award. I am nominating Cardinal Path because they embody what it means to be committed to clients, to our industry, and to doing business with integrity and innovation.

In speaking with members of the Cardinal Path team, it's tough to say what aspect of their work they are most stoked about: whether it's at the technical level deploying advanced implementations, at the innovation level bringing new approaches to the industry, as educators turning on new people to digital analytics, or the fact that their business - a roll-up of three leading agencies - has grown exponentially over the last four years, and has offices across North America, 60+ of some of the industry's top minds, and a global client base.

But it should always come down to the data, so here are the facts to support this nomination of Cardinal Path for Agency of the Year:
Award-winning: Digital Analytics Association's 2014 Practitioner of the Year, David Booth and 2013 Most Influential Industry Contributor, Stephane Hamel.

Expert leadership team: David Booth and Stephane Hamel work alongside co-founders and partners Alex Langshur (Director Emeritus of Digital Analytics Association) Corey Koberg, Dave Eckman, and President John Hossack (former President of Internet Marketing Association).

As thought leaders, this team really shines. Cardinal Path's team members:

moderate the world's largest G+ analytics community in the world
last year keynoted and spoke at events that reached tens of thousands of people globally
hold a free, monthly webinar series
in 2014, produced 100+ whitepapers, industry reports, eBooks, videos, articles, and blog posts
were featured in the largest-ever Google Hangout event "Atmosphere", which highlighted Cardinal Path client U.S. Cellular talking about how Cardinal Path helped them design ways to drill down into disparate data sets and learn things about their customers that will shape their business.
continued to do the work outlined in case studies including the largest-ever implementation of Google Analytics,complex custom analytics strategies, and applied data science that uncovers the true impact of digital media.
created and shared whitepapers and industry reports such as the State of Digital Data in the Top 50 Non Profits in the U.S.A. demonstrating Cardinal Path's ability to define an entire vertical by its use of analytics.

Technology: Cardinal Path was the first to sell Google Analytics Premium and is the largest reseller in the world. They are partnered with 20+ best-in-class technology vendors and hold certifications in Adobe, Google and IBM analytics solutions.

Tools! Cardinal Path shares their knowledge with tools of the trade:

Google Analytics Campaign Tagging Tool, 3000+ downloads
Online Analytics Maturity Model Assessment has been used by over 1,000 organizations
Web Analytics Solutions Profiler (WASP): 11,000+ users

Esteemed alumni: people who worked at Cardinal Path are highly sought-after in the anlaytics field. These includeJustin Cutroni, Analytics Evangelist and winner of the Digital Analytics Association's Most Influential Industry Contributor 2014, Casper Blicher, Google Industry Analyst, Eduardo Cereto Carvalho, Web Analytics Specialist, Google, and Jackson Lo, SEO Specialist at TripAdvisor, to name a few.

Education:
Cardinal Path Training Academy has trained tens of thousands of people in digital marketing and analytics techniques. Training is available in cities across North America and Europe, onsite with clients, and online.

Lynda.com - Cardinal Path instructors David Booth & Corey Koberg reach over 40,000 people in 140 countries around the world through their online training with courses in Google Analytics, Adobe Reports & Analytics, SEO, and SEM.

Global Google Partners Academy - As many of you know, Cardinal Path is responsible for this program, developing and distributing training through video and live events to train other digital marketing and analytics agencies. And through this program, they bring together industry experts and practitioners to share their knowledge with the analytics community.

Boards & Advisory - Board of Advisors for McMaster University (Alex Langshur) Instructors with University of British Columbia School of Digital (several team members) Adjunct Professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Dave Booth).

Clients: Their client list spans industries across finance, pharma, retail, telecommunications, and non-profit, among others. Merck, Forever 21, Cole Haan, PayPal, Universal Music Group, Hyundai,, Pfizer, Bridgestone, NBC, BNY Mellon, Heifer International, LG, Toyota and the list goes on. From what I've seen, these clients are a loyal bunch, and many consider Cardinal Path services to be their "secret sauce".

At the end of the day, the question is "what makes an agency influential?". My simple way to answer that question is with another question: "If given the chance, would you want to work for them?". That's a question that I believe that many of us in the industry would answer "yes" to. Their ongoing track record of achievement, and the respect that others have for them in the industry are the reasons why I believe you should consider them for the DAA's 2015 Most Influential Agency of the Year Award.

Supporting documentation for Cardinal Path Agency of the Year Nomination:

Education:
Tens of thousands of people have been trained in digital marketing and analytics techniques by Cardinal Path Training Academy (CPTA) and thousands more through the shared knowledge provided by CPTA for free, online, not to mention Lynda.com training available in 140 countries.

Law of Attraction: Lynda.com Launches New SEO Fundamentals Course by Dave Booth

Google Analytics Tips by Corey Koberg

eBooks
Marketer's Guide to Digital Priorities for 2015
eBook featuring advice from industry experts including, Justin Cutroni, Google, Ginger Conlon, Editor in Chief, Direct Marketing News, Digital Lead from Forever 21, Kevin Murphy, and CMO for Western Union Business Solutions, Brian Harris.

What you need to know about AdWords: A Beginners Guide

Whitepapers
The State of Digital in the Top 50 Nonprofits in the U.S.

Digital Analytics Maturity: Your competitive advantage

Four steps to getting into your customer's head with the data you already have

Video
Google Analytics Premium Overview

U.S. Cellular & the True Impact of Digital

Webinars
How to Activate Big Data with Google BigQuery

A Global Marketer's Guide to Privacy: Unlocking Value & Controlling Risk

Advanced Adobe Analytics: Getting the Most from your Metrics

Practical Guide to Dashboards for Digital Channels

How to Step Up Your Retargeting Strategy for Higher Conversions

Your Digital To-Do List: Experts Weigh in on 2015 Priorities