Awards for Excellence 2016: Nominees

Congratulations to the 2016 Awards for Excellence Nominees

Digital Analytics Rising Star (Individual)

Kerri Adcock, Sr. Digital Analyst, National Instruments

Kerri is on her way to becoming an all-around DA rock star. She is highly intelligent and insightful in gleaning proper results to drive the business objectives.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvadcock
Akhil Anumolu, Manager, Digital Optimization and Personalization, Delta Air Lines
Akhil joined the digital analytics industry in February 2011, after graduating from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems. Since joining the industry, he has spent the majority of his time learning more about digital optimization, personalization, on-site analytics, and front-end development. He also has experience with SEM, SEO, paid advertising, statistical modeling, data analysis, shipping logistics and offshore manufacturing.     Akhil is a trailblazer in the industry. He helped launch, build, and grow the digital optimization and personalization platform at Symantec, and revamped their Latin America SEM and SEO practice, growing bookings 50% year over year. He spent time building a startup, Wonder Workshop, from initial inception through a crowdfunding campaign and their first ecommerce platform with revenue $5M+, in less than a year.

Akhil’s results speak for themselves. At Symantec, he built the first personalization and optimization system to connect offsite ad creative (whether text or display), to the onsite experience. This led to an overall global increase in bookings of 8% YoY and 50% YoY bookings growth within his assigned Latin America territory. He also redesigned landing pages via A/B and multivariate testing to create distinct experiences based on customer region, keyword, referral site, ad placement, and language, which contributed to improving global ROI for all Symantec markets. He was nominated by multiple Symantec executives for the Digital Analytics Rising Star Award in 2015 and named a finalist.

Since joining Delta Air Lines, he has taken on the role of leading and refining the on-site advertising deployment process, optimization, personalization, and marketing technology in order to improve the customer experience across Delta’s digital touch points. Early success from process and technology improvements have yielded a record-breaking increase in the number of American Express co-branded card acquisitions and card approval rates, an increase in internal metrics via optimization for major areas of Delta.com & Delta Vacations. He has also provided thought leadership regarding Delta’s deployment of tag management and optimization tools, to improve site performance and test quality.

Akhil proactively seeks opportunities to demonstrate thought leadership and share his learnings with others. He presented and/or helped create presentations for speakers at Adobe Summit, eMetrics, Click Summit, and Ensighten Agility. He actively participates in Quora, Reddit, and Growth Hacking forums, by answering questions on digital analytics. He has an active personal Twitter account. A few of Akhil’s accomplishments in the community include:
- Adobe Target Customer Advisory Board
- Quora, Reddit, and GrothHackers forum submissions and answering of questions
- Mentor to startup incubator FourAthens specifically for Digital Analytics and Marketing
- Advisor to 2 startups for counseling on data driven growth
- Discussions via Twitter on the hashtag #measure
Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhilanumolu
Mert Bay, Principal Data Scientist, Conversion Logic
Mert has made tremendous impact in his first year in the attribution field. As part of his ongoing contribution to the state-of-the-art Conversion Logic platform, he developed sophisticated time series analysis to bring offline and online attribution together. This unique combination of a shared baseline and time series model is a true industry innovation that pushes the edges of attribution's data science. Mert is also the author or co-author of over 20 publications that have appeared in the Journal of Acoustical Society of America, Springer Studies in Computational Intelligence (book) and in various conference proceedings. His work is cited by 400 other publications.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mert-bay-a8106340

Supporting Nominee Information:
Jessica Calhoun, Senior Marketing Analyst, Atlassian

Jessica's best known at Atlassian for her prolific output of insights, averaging 30+ recommendations implemented by Go-To-Market department each quarter, and has recently been selected by executives for a deep strategic analysis on one of our flagship products. This means she has demonstrated a deep understanding of how web analytics can help an entire company think more critically about marketing efficacy. Despite company-wide recognition, Jessica lives all five of our company values - most notably our 'Play as a Team' value - which means she balances tactical and operational requests with answering strategic questions about our business. She is recommended for a top rating, placing her in the top 5% of her peers at the company.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlynne
Justin Goodman, Lead, Digital Analytics, Analytics Pros
Justin is an exceptional partner and a key to our reporting success -- always willing to help us navigate complex issues and find sustainable technical solutions, while considering our business and brand needs. Our team relies heavily on his knowledge of the digital marketing and analytics landscape. Moreover, he's an absolute pleasure to work with. Justin is absolutely someone you want on your team to get the job done right.

Industry expert. Knows all aspects down the little details.

Justin is incredibly responsive with any analytics questions we have ever asked. When we get an answer it is far above and beyond our immediate need. Justin has proven time and time again that the actions that come from research and data can greatly impact business and he has a passion for making a difference. Truly a Rising Star.

Justin has conducted many workshops for the American Marketing Association over the years on the topic of Google Analytics. Each workshop has been very well received by attendees and Justin continues to tweak and update his sessions to provide the most timely/topical information on quickly changing subject matter. He has developed as a go-to leader/expert on this topic for the American Marketing Association.

Consistently shows excellence in analysis and solution design.

Justin has been a great contributor to the San Diego Tableau User Group, including presenting excellent tips and tricks for doing complex calculations and page design.

He helped our company building a series of new reports for our eCommerce business with Tableau and those reports allowed us to analyze facts and make a decision more quickly. They are very valuable not only DTC team but also other teams within the company.

Justin Goodman is an incredible teammate, and probably the most innovative problem-solver I have come into contact with yet. The way that he approaches his client work shows that the practice of digital analytics is both his hobby and his passion. I have worked alongside Justin in building out and implementing unique data models for Princess Cruises, Whole Foods, and ASICS - all in just a year. He singlehandedly drew out the blue print for meaningful data that will serve these companies for years to come.

Aside from being talented at every "hard skill" I can think of, he also is experienced in treating his clients as if they were on his own team. He puts his foot down where applicable, but always with a great explanation & humorous anecdote of why the client's suggestion is going to, "screw up their data." I cannot think of a more deserving person for this Rising Star award!

Justin has grown his professional capabilities year over year and provided consistently excellent work to the companies he supports. He has personally played a key role in the process to mature the digital analytics capabilities of numerous global brands, including ASICS, a leading online travel agency (who must remain nameless), and many others. Justin's skillset and practice has grown not only in depth but also breadth, including mastery of GA Premium, Google Tag Manager, Tealium, and some insanely awesome Tableau based reporting. Additionally, Justin has contributed to several conferences and notably done a number of events with the American Marketing Association. This stands out to me as a key attribute of a rising star in our industry because it champions not only sharing knowledge and furthering our industry, but expanding it beyond the typical boundaries. Traditional marketers, such as what the AMA has a large membership of, desperately need to better understand digital analytics. Justin's efforts with the AMA have evangelized digital analytics to these audiences, something of worthwhile note.

Extremely client-focused, excellent work and communication, team-player.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmgoodman

Supporting Nominee Information:
Thanh-Trang (aka T) Hoang-Le, Senior Consultant: Data Science, MaassMedia, LLC
Thanh-Trang (aka T) is an integral part of our web analytics and analysis team. In less than 3 years she's worked her way up from an entry level analyst to Senior Consultant: Data Science. This being her first job out of college, T has shown great maturity with the management of projects and handling of clients well beyond her years. She's done this by executing analysis projects such as: web behavioral analysis and attribution for Comcast, email response analysis and purchase behavior for Lenovo, a predictive model for the ESPN Watch App for time viewed and server calls during the men's world cup and buy flow reporting for Starwood hotels. T is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and an active alumni helping to recruit new candidates for our internship program. She's certified in Google Analytics as well as Tableau Desktop. She also recently completed a 120 hour continuing education program with Harvard Business School.

Highlights: T manages our entire internship program and built a multi-track on-boarding process for new interns. She currently is assigned to our client ESPN as the sole expert on Tableau for their digital marketing team. She volunteers her time with several non-profits including animal rescue. (She likes cats. A lot.) She wrote a blog post on a custom Tableau function that she created which literally has doubled our website traffic.

"Thanh-Trang Hoang-Le, affectionately known as ""T"" by her friends and colleagues, was hired by MaassMedia straight out of college in 2013 as a Data Analyst and in two years has quickly become a star analytics consultant. Her technical specialty lies in statistically analyzing disparate sets of data and interpreting them in ways that are meaningful and actionable to clients, skills she developed while majoring in mathematics with a minor in creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and honed in MaassMedia's digital analytics apprenticeship program. Her ever-increasing body of client work includes:
- Building a daily demand generation forecast model for Comcast Business
- Conducting a robust analysis on three years of global email marketing campaign data for Lenovo
- Converting legacy Excel reports into automated Tableau dashboards for ESPN's executive team
Because she has demonstrated an unusual ability (not just for someone of her age but for anyone) to remain tactful while exceeding the clients' expectations and deliver results, T was recently promoted to the position of Senior Consultant – Data Science, and has taken a leadership role with several clients where she is now the primary point of contact.
Miss Hoang-Le always maintains an incredibly positive and productive attitude towards work, clients and colleagues. Her quality of work is consistently high and rarely, if ever, makes mistakes. She works very quickly and efficiently, often exceeding ours and our clients' expectations, and she demonstrates a personal commitment and investment in her work that is above and beyond the typical high-performing employee. Overall, I would consider Miss Hoang-Le's contributions to our organization to be best-in-class. T has authored numerous blog posts on analytics topics, many of which have attracted a lot of attention, including:
- ""Tableau Tips: Direct Connection to Site Catalyst""
- ""Analytics Automation With Google Sheets: Adding Triggers and Overcoming Maximum Execution Time Error""
- ""Tableau Tips: How to Show Customized Monthly, Weekly and Daily Views Dynamically In Your Dashboards""
She has spoken publicly at Web Analytics Wednesday in Philadelphia and is certified in Google Analytics and Tableau and recently completed Harvard Business School's Credential of Readiness (CORe) program, passing with High Honors.
We are very proud of T's accomplishments and believe strongly that she is more than deserving of the DAA's Rising Star award."

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thoangle

Supporting Nominee Information:
Ellen Hoffman, Public Relations & Marketing Manager, JDC Healthcare Management LLC
Ellen has piloted an innovative digital content strategy to further optimize SEO activity, strengthening brand awareness and online engagement for Jefferson Dental. Furthermore, she has driven social media strategies to build a network of partners. Through her digital content management, Jefferson Dental outranks all other National Dental Service Providers in overall industry keywords. In 2015, creative digital content creation strategy landed Jefferson Dental media placements in more than 200 publications, with a combined more than 700 million impressions, as well as a viral story about DIY Braces that circulated worldwide. Ellen further builds a digital footprint for Jefferson Dental through strategic tactics that garner engagement and build a loyal digital community. One such strategy is the use of Twitter to build partnerships with state and national health partners, and regularly contribute content to partner sites such as SaludToday, EmpowHER and Its Time Texas. Innovation and creativity are drivers of tactical strategic campaigns for creating a omni-channel digital presence for Jefferson Dental. As an up and coming digital analytics professional, Ellen continues to utilize both her creative vision and tactical use of market research and web analytics to streamline the digital content strategy for Jefferson Dental, creating true digital impact.

Supporting Nominee Information:
Ignatius Hsu, Manager, Digital Analytics, Capital One

In just over a year since joining Capital One, Ignatius has made his mark within its Digital Analytics Team, contributing to corporate imperatives that empower its product teams to decision off of its enterprise data. Ignatius led the federation of web analytics, aligning tag implementations with the priorities of individual lines of businesses; he simultaneously partnered with IT on adapting a newly implemented model of deploying and listening to web analytics tags for agile software development practices. After the mid-year mark, Ignatius moved from web analytics to mobile app analytics, where he enables its fledgling iOS and Android app teams to rapidly innovate on products with the support of quality data, and enhanced reporting and monitoring. All the while, Ignatius governs over enterprise web and mobile analytics standards, crafting the data collection framework in concert with the core digital analytics team. His daily duties include promoting better interoperability of data within the larger digital analytics ecosystem, including data warehousing, activity logging, customer experience management, voice of customer and testing tools. Ignatius is a believer in transparency and accessibility. To that end, he publishes documentation to demystify complex processes and codify evolving standards, and works with other analytics product owners to minimize jargon and improve analytics reporting capabilities. Ignatius is plugged in to the world of digital data today. However, he steadily accumulated his responsibilities in analytics as he moved into different digital positions. Ignatius owes his start in analytics to Georgetown University nearly a decade ago. He had his first taste of web analytics on a project with the university's Office of the President and immediately knew where he belonged.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignatiushsu
Carmen Mardiros, Senior Digital Analytics Manager, Navabi
Carmen is one of the most talented individuals in the industry that I know. She is a master of understanding data in its purest sense; in other words, she knows what data points are required to get business insight and how to build the perfect model she requires to answer her business questions. She has keen business acumen, and is able to translate strategic business goals into a data collection plan, implement that plan (including tagging and coding), and most importantly use that data to make meaningful decisions taking advantage of BI tools such as PowerPivot. What impresses me about Carmen is that she is so "full stack" when it comes to digital analytics. She understands analytics and data requirements from the highest level of strategic business needs, to best in class data analysis practice, all the way down to code level implementation and building her own data warehouses. A kind, caring, and humble person, she also excels in communication and all aspects of the "human element" that is so critical in any professional setting. I can think of no other person who deserves this award as much as Carmen.

Supporting Nominee Information
- http://digitalanalyticshub.com/london2015/discussion-leaders/
- http://www.slideshare.net/carmenmardiros/presentations
Enrico Pavan, CEO, Digital Analyst & CRO Manager, Enrico Pavan
Enrico is an independent consultant based in Italy, specializing in digital analytics and conversion rate optimization. He has worked for several leading Italian and international finance, retail, B2C, B2B companies, as well as for eCommerce, gambling, fashion and travel firms. Over the past 12 years, he has focused on data analysis, usability and A/B and MVT (Multivariate) testing, using testing software such as: VisualWebsiteOptimizer, Optimizely, and Adobe Target to improve the performance of online advertising campaigns and create effective landing pages. Enrico also specializes in mobile marketing tracking and analysis, specifically for financial and B2C marketing and as a complement to direct mail marketing. He has spoken at many major events related to data analysis and has also taught digital analytics at the prestigious University Ca 'Foscari of Venice. In early 2014, Enrico was nominated in the Practitioner of the Year category in the annual Digital Analytics AssociationAwards for Excellence competition. He is one of the first digital analyst in Italy to have generated the data integration between online and offline, becoming a point of reference for many professionals. He is always looking for innovative ways like using NFC, beacons and proximity marketing. In 2015 he published a chapter for "Applied Marketing Analytics" published by Henry Stewart Publications Philadelphia. Title: "How Date and User Behavior Analysis Impacts Sales - Especially via Mobile"

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/enricopavan

Supporting Nominee Information:
David Roy, Digital Analytics Manager at ALDO GROUP and President & Founder at Courir la Beauce

David started his career in the digital marketing industry seven years ago as a website development and SEO projects manager.

Three years ago, David started specializing in Digital Analytics, when he started working as a Web Analytics & SEO consultant for small and medium businesses while completing a bachelor in management at HEC Montreal business school. After completing his bachelor, David was hired as a Web Analyst at the Business Development Bank of Canada to work on projects such as enhancing the data capture (via the implementation of Tealium and configuration of Google Analytics) and increasing reporting capabilities by helping with the creation and sharing of multiple digital marketing dashboards.

Since 2015, David acts as Manager of Digital Analytics at the ALDO GROUP, one of the biggest retailers in Canada - present in over 95 countries around the world. As a manager David leads projects such as Attribution, UX analysis, A/B testing and is also responsible of digital data governance, reporting and analysis and increasing usage of digital analytics data in all business units.

He also uses digital analytics data of his non-profit website and social profiles to increase participation in the non-profit running events and engagement in its running club and virtual community of over 1200 runners.

To stay up to date with the industry, David is a member of the Digital Analytics Canada (Québec) LinkedIn community, which organize meetup every few months, and is also currently undertaking the Creating and Managing the Analytical Business Culture online course at University of British Columbia.

When not analyzing web data, David can be found running, hiking a mountain, kayaking, traveling, listening to indie rock or reading a book in a café.
Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidroyy
Ryan Sleeper, Director, Data Visualization, Evolytics
Ryan Sleeper has quickly escalated as an analytics rising star within the Tableau Data Visualization discipline. Ryan has proven his thought leadership and digital analytics expertise as the Director of Data Visualization at Evolytics. He has also earned industry recognition and several prestigious Tableau awards including:
- 2015 Tableau Public Viz of the Year Recipient (voted #1 data viz out of 80,000 shared on Tableau Public)
- 2013 Tableau Iron Viz Champion (an international data visualization competition)
- 2013-2015 Conference Speaker (Tableau Conference, eMetrics Summit, among others)
- 2013-2015 Tableau Public Guest Blog (Invited)
- Founder and leader of the Kansas City Tableau User Group
Ryan actively blogs about Tableau how-to tips and tricks at http://www.evolytics.com/blog/, providing the data visualization and analytics community with some of the most actionable training and advice on maximizing the performance of Tableau while building individual skills and capabilities. Ryan is a member of the DAA. He has an unparalleled passion for data visualization. His impressive contributions to the industry have set the foundation for many great Tableau-based data visualization tools to come in the future.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryansleeper

Supporting Nominee Information:
http://www.evolytics.com/blog/evolytics-ryan-sleeper-earns-tableau-public-viz-of-the-year/
Jason Tribbett, Analyst and Testing Optimization, Digital Analytics, Hyatt Hotels Corporation

Jason has been with Hyatt Hotels Corporation, working from our corporate WHQ for only just over a year. He is a complete genius - not only does he play multiple instruments as a one man band musician, but he is also a one man band in all digital analytics and optimization/testing as well. He's beyond mastered the skills of all our tools sets and uses them together to basically do whatever is needed and beyond in our digital world. He's a solid programmer, genius analyst and has such a diverse set of skills beyond any other. He is quite an asset here to our corporation. To add to that, he's an exceptional communicator with social skills that can relate directly to the marketing team in which we reside. Very unique in every way, and excelling rapidly by demonstrated impacts in all areas up to SVP and C suite levels.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-tribbett-078380b2
Ken Williams, Manager of Analytics, Search Discovery
Ken is an exceptional analytics manager who specializes in helping clients maximize the value of Analytics through custom implementations, training, and automated reporting. He is an expert in tag management, strategy, data visualization, and optimization who has led analytics projects for clients in nearly every industry, from e-commerce to nonprofit. In addition to his client work, Ken also manages Search Discovery's strategic partnerships with Google and Optimizely.

Last year his work with American Cancer Society was recognized by Google with their Google Analytics Award for Excellence. Ken earned his undergraduate degree at Texas A&M and his MBA from University of Georgia.

Ken has truly exploded on to the Analytics scene this year. Most recently being recognized for the Google Analytics Award for Excellence by Google. Ken is also Google Tag Manager certified and knows GA and GA Premium better than anyone in the industry.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethcwilliams

Supporting Nominee Information:
Wayne Wyatt, Senior Manager, Society Consulting

Wayne exemplifies consulting excellence-he has deep knowledge of analytics platforms across the full stack, and he leverages his knowledge to creatively solve the business problems that his clients face.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/waynemwyatt

Practitioner of the Year (Individual)

Kerri Adcock, Senior Digital Analyst, National Instruments

Kerri as established herself as a leader in the analytics space within the company. - Formulating best practice and structured process for the newly-formed Analytics team in the company. - Exemplifies the skills, behavior, and attitude of a proven analyst and making herself indispensable to the Marketing business.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvadcock
Sushant Ajmani, Head of Consulting, Nabler
Sushant Ajmani is a seasoned Digital Analytics Practitioner with over 15 years of experience in the online industry and have worked with organizations like EBAY Enterprise, Sapient, Home Décor, Computer Associates and HCL Technologies. He has travelled to more than 17 countries during this tenure, consulted many eminent brands and retailers in the digital analytics domain. He has conducted various training sessions on behalf of Adobe and Google in South East Asia and Asia Pacific, and recently, he has been chosen as a measurement expert by Gerson Lehrman Group to conduct workshop on Google Full Value of Mobile for online businesses in India.

He is a certified web analyst from DAA and have also attained Adobe and Google Product certifications.

During his tenure with EBAY Enterprise and Sapient, he got a wonderful opportunity to work as a measurement consultant for brands like Harrah’s Casino, CDW, GEICO, Ralph Lauren, Zales, Toys “R” Us, Sports Authority, Levis, Charlotte Russe, BCBG Max Azria etc.

He is running his own start-up by the name of ConversionPath (www.conversionpath.in) in South East Asia, and have conducted various regional and private training sessions with Adobe on their Marketing Stack (SiteCatalyst, Test&Target, Audience Manager and Discover) until 2014.

Currently, he is heading the Business Consulting practice for Nabler since last 2 years, and is responsible for providing strategic consulting to large enterprises in North America and South East Asia.

He is been considered as a wonderful mentor by his team-mates and known for spreading an enormous amount of energy and passion around him.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://in.linkedin.com/in/sushantajmani

Supporting Nominee Information:
Mohandas Alle, Digital / Web Analytics Practice Lead, Accenture

Mohan is considered as an influential & leading Digital Analytics Practitioner. Prior to joining Accenture Middle East, he was a Head of Research & Analytics for MRM//McCann - Middle East. He helped to establish Digital Analytics practices successfully. His initiative on Analytics Universe is to produce SMEs and to strengthen organizational analytics capability. He initiated writing a book on Digital Analytics to help Analytics Enthusiasts to build a strong foundation based on real life challenges, hoping to make the website live soon.

Mohan’s recent outstanding solution on “Re-Targeting Algorithm” which helps clients to focus on Re-Marketing based on their existing customer base, which helped the client to maximize their conversions from their owned data base.

His other outstanding solution on “Search Analytics" that helped clients to gain more visibility in search engines with higher rankings.

In addition Mohan is a speaker at community events, he is a founder of “Digital Professional Community” where he builds network of digital professionals.

Mohan demonstrated outstanding initiative and leadership in driving capability development program to strengthen organization’s capabilities in digital analytics, he manages a team of analytics experts and helps them to deliver best solutions for clients.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohandasalle
Supporting Nominee Information:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z6bgahx2l4weqr2/Reference%20-%20MRM%20-%20McCann%20-%202015.pdf?dl=0
Brandon Bunker, Sr. Director of Customer Analytics and Intelligence, Vivint

I recently read a great case study from Ensighten featuring Brandon and Vivint. Basically Vivint is finding new ways to make the most of the data it is collecting and Brandon and team. Because of Brandon's team Vivint is able to syndicate the data it collects to any location and in any format it chooses. By doing this makes it easier for them to synchronize and have consistent tagging across iOS and Android and collect latent data that is not connected to a screen view. Pretty Impressive. Below is a Quote from Brandon. This changes the game for us,” says Bunker, “especially when it comes to post- launch app support. If anything goes wrong, we can catch it before most of our customers are even aware of it. We also avoid the dirty data problem. When you’re tracking across different operating systems, variables get different names, data comes in formatted in different ways. It’s a mess. Once you decouple the tagging from the development process, you can get granular in your metrics.”

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbunker

Supporting Nominee Information:
https://www.ensighten.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/vivint-case-study.pdf
Rachael Gerson, Product Marketing Manager – Testing and Optimization, Google
Rachael is a very experienced and talented digital analyst. Over the past year, she has transitioned from the agency side to the practitioner side to run the testing and optimization program for the Google for Work team. In this role, Rachael has excelled at bringing multiple groups of stakeholders together to drive design and innovation, ultimately improving the bottom line of the business through her experienced leadership. In addition to running experiments across a portfolio of sites, Rachael shares her expertise with cross-functional teams to ensure the ongoing optimization of sites and to foster a data-driven culture, as well as advising external organizations on the benefits and best practices of performance marketing.

Prior to joining Google, Rachael launched the analytics division for a Philadelphia digital marketing agency. Rachael has been a frequent and highly-rated presenter at digital and marketing conferences, primarily speaking about analytics, experimentation, and SEO, and the role of analytics in the broader spectrum of marketing and advertising. She has worked on multiple DAA initiatives, including co-chairing the Professional Development & Membership committee, planning local symposia, and volunteering for prior galas.
Rachael exemplifies what a great digital analyst should be and thus I strongly believe she deserves to be recognized as the 2016 Digital Analytics Association Practitioner of the Year.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachaelgerson

Supporting Nominee Information:
- Website
- Twitter
Jason Goldlist, Chief Marketing Office, WealthSimple

Jason demonstrated expertise leveraging WealthSimple digital campaigns. His team created very focused and well timed campaigns that were really well placed. A good example would be the Shopify campaign where they placed a facebook ad for users that declared working at Shopify on the day that these people could actually sell their stocks. Their ads was simple and the purpose was to help shopify employees to sell their equities. Again, very well timed, connected offline with online marketing and well placed. Amazing job.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/goldlist

Supporting Nominee Information:
http://grow.wealthsimple.com/sell-your-shopify-stock-options
Steve Harris, Head of Digital Analytics, Capital One

Steve Harris is the Head of Digital Analytics at Capital One. He is responsible for defining and executing on an enterprise strategy for how Capital One captures, analyzes, tests, and visualizes customer interactions across our entire digital footprint. During his five-year tenure at Capital One, Steve has been responsible for building a Digital Analytics organization from the ground up, which now supports a robust suite of products and services. He is a relentless innovator in the financial services sector and constantly pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

In 2015, Steve drove self-service implementation of Digital Analytics products to streamline and simplify user adoption, while driving a vast group of stakeholders in the community to more easily consume digital data. He had his organization federate the integration of clickstream analytics across the enterprise, through a comprehensive enterprise-wide training initiative, in order to bolster their ability to deliver results even more quickly.

At the same time, Steve also created a Digital Testing and Experimentation program again leveraging a self-service interaction model. And, even more importantly, he championed an enterprise-wide cultural shift around testing and experimentation, laying the foundation for a broad data-driven design revolution in 2016 and beyond. Steve has been able to accomplish major changes like this, despite the high level of complexity associated with having innumerable enterprise platforms to manage across a Fortune 150 company.    Steve continues to hire the best talent in industry and has quadrupled the size of his team in less than two years. His team members are expected to contribute regularly at industry and vendor conferences, in order to promote innovation on a larger social scale. Steve was asked to present to Rich Fairbank, CEO of Capital One, the first week of 2016 on his team’s accomplishments year-to-date. He was praised as being “integral from the beginning at the core of our digital data evolution.”

More important than his abundance of success at Capital One has been the team culture that he instills. His goal year over year is to make the Digital Analytics team a destination for the best talent, which he sees as paramount. Steve accomplishes this partially by maintaining that his team members actively manage its culture through groups of subcommittees focused on elevating every aspect of their DNA, but also by instilling a sense of family with everyone at every level in his organization. His influence both in his organization and across Capital One has been profoundly impactful.

Steve has over 17 years of experience with a focus on digital analytics and measurement, previously as the Global Head of Digital Analytics at Hilton where he similarly built that organization from the ground up, and he has sat on multiple advisory boards for major analytics industry products. Steve and his wife live in Washington, DC, where they are avid fans of the Washington Capitals.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-harris-a81913
Terri Kochersperger, Director, Digital Analytics, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc.

Terri Kochersperger joined the newly formed Digital Center of Excellence as one of the first charter members in 2011. She has built a best in class digital analytics practice for the Consumer organization, and in the process established core fundamentals including global implementation of tag management and Adobe Analytics. She created the digital analytics practice, building her global team and curating our standards, IT integration, and a data driven optimization based company culture -- a daunting task in a decentralized leading CPG company. In particular, Terri has established a global KPI framework and workshop approach - immersing our cross-functional talent in analytics as a way of life and competitive differentiation. She has also integrated analytics into our company wide training and talent development programs, and tirelessly works to embed the practice in our aggressive global campaigns for iconic brands such as Johnson's Baby, Listerine, Neutrogena, Clean & Clear, Band-Aid, Tylenol, Zyrtec, and more. Along the way, Terri has integrated data analytics into our digital platforms (e.g., global website, CRM, Mobile), and helped to launch our real-time marketing dashboards. Terri is a rock star who is uniquely able to demystify complex data concepts and requirements into action oriented must-haves. She always seeks to further her fluency in our marketing initiatives, and has achieved impressive results (and ROI) with very limited resources.

Terri created the digital analytics practice at Johnson & Johnson Consumer. She is responsible for oversight, strategy, execution and training globally; over 1,000 marketers, analytics and various agencies are embracing the practice. With nearly 1,000 websites and a growing mobile application presence, global standards, common technologies, governance and a well-structured organizational model, the strategy is paying off. Silo'd reporting is a thing of the past and real time optimization and predictive analytics is being embraced across the division.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-kochersperger-5605581
Kaitlin Marvin, Digital Analytics Architect, Progressive Insurance
Kaitlin Marvin is truly an influential contributor and thought leader in the digital experience analytics space at Progressive Insurance. She is a driving force behind many of the key efforts we are currently executing in digital experience analytics and Big Data. She is also a key contributor in the community through case studies, a Google Analytics Hangout on Air, presenting at eMetrics conferences and many more.
Kaitlin is also a key practitioner and advocate to the internal architecture and enterprise practices at Progressive Insurance and partners closely with Domain Architects and Data Architects alike to create best practices and enterprise standards for digital experience analytics. Her advocacy and influence has led to currently fulfilling Progressive’s very first Digital Analytics Architect, which is a business role responsible for driving advancement in the analytics capabilities of both our Native Mobile application offerings as well as Digital Servicing channels combining both technical expertise as well as business knowledge. Some of her key contributions:
- Led the implementation of digital experience analytics at Progressive for over 19 applications
- Teaches her own classes on digital analytics for Information Technology and Marketing for employees at Progressive Insurance, which are some the highest rated classes
- Presenting at eMetrics conferences
- Developed a case study with Google detailing how Progressive does its Mobile Analytics using Google Tag Manager and Big Query
- Works closely with Domain Architects and Data Architects at Progressive to ensure best practices and share Enterprise standards
- Currently responsible for the management and health of digital experience analytics for the Enterprise at Progressive Insurance
- Developed Enterprise standards and guidance for digital experience analytics
- She created a group for sharing knowledge and foster mentoring for analytics through key contacts throughout the company (GALs - Google Analytics Leaders)
- Kaitlin has made the data more accessible through dashboards and notifications to increase the quality of our applications.
- Provides feedback for vendors on prototypes/betas and products the whole community can take advantage of.
Kaitlin’s drive, passion and energy has truly led the way for Progressive. She is probably one of the most eager to learn resources and has continued to lead the way for the digital analytics space and her influence in the community is recognized throughout.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaitlin-marvin-17b7a411

Supporting Nominee Information:
Rachana Mukherjee, Director, Analytics and Data Systems, Evite

Rachana is a one-woman powerhouse, and a data scientist in the truest sense of the term. Her passion for data led to an overhaul of the analytics at Evite, and she's leveraged the full suite of Google products to give her the sophisticated data with BigQuery to meet her high standards. She's also led her teams to adopt the Google Analytics interface in their daily operations. In signing on with Analytics Pros, she's broadened the use of Google Analytics at her company, organizing three company-wide trainings in 2015 alone.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachana-mukherjee-6190555
Duc Nguyen, Performance Analysis Consultant, Telus
He is the web analytics and big data consultant in my Digital Analytics team at Telus. Over the past years, he has been working with our BI tool called Domo to automate various source of datasource and gives us a realtime insights for us to improve our scorecard. He is the most knowledgeable person in the cross-channel analysis where we need to bridge the gap between web data and other data sources such as sales data, call data, and customer base data. He has helped numerous analytics teams outside of Digital channels as well as internal analysts. My co-workers and I have learnt so much about the data integration and analysis from him. He is someone who should be recognized as an expert of realtime cross platform analysis.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/ducxnguyen

Supporting Nomination Information
- This is our BI tool
- This is our company
Hannah Poferl, Senior Manager, Newsroom Analytics, New York Times
Hannah brings a fierce passion for analytics to every conversation. She has demonstrated a well-rounded understanding of analytics - business strategy, data modeling and reporting - to provide The New York Times with data that is both deep and wide for everyone in the newsroom. Hannah consistently brings best practices to the table, ready to move from insights to action within her team.

Hannah has taken on a massive effort in growing the analytics capabilities of a wide array of users and played a key role in deploying an upgraded digital analytics capability across the Times. From training dozens of people in using analytics to masterfully managing the day-to-day needs of a robust implementation, to supporting hundreds of data consumers, Hannah demonstrates what is excellent about our industry and deserving of practitioner of the year.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahpoferl
Supporting Nominee Information:
- http://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/capitalcomment/media/new-york-times-reporters-too-will-get-access-to-web-traffic-data.php see notes at the bottom where Hannah's involvement is noted.
- http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/12/8557509/memo-emnew-york-timesem-alex-maccallum - see where Hannah's contribution is called out
Jacob Ruttenberg, Senior Manager, Digital Analytics, Starbucks

Jake is an incredible nominee for DAA practitioner of the year due to his ability to look past analytics systems, and understand what is happening behind the scenes with Starbucks' data. From there, he is able to take that data and action it in a way that makes using Starbucks digital platforms a pleasure for their customers. On his team you can bet that no decision is being made without a firm backing in the numbers, which is why Starbucks' digital team is so successful.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-ruttenberg-7691202
Muhammed Ahmed (Ahmed) Saeed, Manager, Data Platforms, Optimization & Analytics,
Fox Sports Australia

I am self-nominating myself for the exceptional achievement in the field of both analytics (Adobe Omniture Tagging Multi-Site Architecture across various products such as web/m-site, responsive site & iOS/Android Native Apps); Running successful training sessions with business/product users on correctly using Adobe Reporting & Analytics packages to find answers to the business questions; and most noticeably, successfully creating increasing website engagement & revenue by strong double digits by optimizing customer behavior after conducting a behavioral & longitudinal in-depth insight-led study on key visitor traits on 'Acquisition, Behavior & Conversions' customer journeys with providing valuable/actionable 3-point recommendation that has now become the back-bone in streamlining company-wide strategic objectives of growing reach and subscription, and serving relevant content/placements for a wide array of visitor segments ranging from attitudinal to time-based, from behavioral to interest-based and from transaction-based to casuals.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
au.linkedin.com/in/muhammedahmedsaeed
Sushmita Pilaka Saha, Sr. Manager & Head, Global Analytics & Insights, GoPro

In her time at GoPro, Sushmita has overseen the creation and growth of a global analytics and insights team. In her leadership, she has enabled data-driven decision making for enterprise-wide Products and Services at GoPro including analytics for hand-held devices like cameras and drones, Mobile and Desktop Apps, GoPro Apps on TV consoles, Web, Ecommerce, Online Marketing, Social Media and CRM.

GoPro has become data-driven, leveraging BigQuery data and combining it with device usage logs in innovative ways and continuing to refine their implementation strategies and dissemination of their data.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sushmitapilaka
David Vallejo, CEO, Freelance

David is a top-notch analytics implementation specialist. He is true expert in anything technical related to digital measurement. His knowledge of web and app technologies, client-side and server-side, is both broad and deep. David's work demonstrates his deep care about process and methodology. He is well respected in the technical analytics space and has a good business sense that allows him to translate business requirements into a data collection solution. He has developed a (currently unreleased) hardware based tool that can debug *any* wifi connected device (mobile, app, IoT). He is also the creator of the SaaS solution Analytics Debugger: http://www.analytics-debugger.com

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-vallejo-analista-web-digital-41a34a22

Supporting Nominee Information:
http://www.analytics-debugger.com/en

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Most Influential Industry Contributor (Individual)

Simo Ahava, Senior Data Advocate, Reaktor

Simo Ahava, Senior Data Advocate, Reaktor This guy just gives, gives and gives to help others. His blog has been invaluable to me in my work. He has answered comments I've posted there and questions I've posted on the GTM forum. I had the pleasure of meeting him at Loves Data Melbourne where I asked him if he got any payment from Google for doing this. He replied that he didn't, so I asked him how he had the time to reply to everyone. His answer was that he has an understanding wife, and also that when you have knowledge, you have the responsibility to share it. I now feel I have the responsibility to share my belief that he is truly worthy of this award. He has helped me directly with analytics problems, advanced my knowledge and inspired me to learn javascript and hopefully, at some stage, start blogging.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simoahava
Supporting Nominee Information:
http://www.simoahava.com
Karen Bellin, VP, Insights and Action, Mirum, Inc.
Karen Bellin, a leader who founded the analytics and insights practice at Mirum Inc., a global digital agency, brings integrated analytics services to her roster of top global brands and businesses to transform information into insights and optimize customer experiences, campaigns and products. Starting as a web developer, Bellin became familiar with the importance of data when she began implementing tracking code for clients’ websites and campaigns. Recognizing that clients consistently asked for advice on what to track and how to read reports, she identified a major opportunity for the agency, thus establishing an analytics department focusing on data-driven strategy, analytics infrastructure, data presentation and insights delivery. In recent years, Bellin has worked to transform the way her clients, her team, and the agency at large, leverage data for decision making. Bellin has matured the analytics practice at Mirum to enable clients with “systems of insight,” as originally defined by Forester, and which she has further classified as:
- Decision makers empowered to act on data: Bellin has developed an integrated campaign dashboard and dashboard approach for dynamically populating data from a variety of sources, enabling her to inform clients how various channels and creative executions affect each other and campaign performance as a whole, providing clients with clear insights to explain how their businesses are impacted by a particular activity/action. This dashboard approach has been leveraged to service several global clients, including Mazda and Epson to efficiently tie together data from a wide range of tactics. Bellin also works with her team to adopt analytics tools – like Adobe, Google, Tealium, Optimizely and Tableau – in order to ensure they’re informing clients’ campaigns with the most reliable data.
- Data incorporated into agile processes: Bellin works with her clients to encourage data consideration at every step in an engagement, not just when a product launches. For example, during a website development project, data should not just be reviewed after launch, but be used to inform user experience, visual design and development.
- Data used across organizations: Bellin fosters collaboration with her clients to ensure there is a single version of truth (the agency shares data with the client and vice versa, and departments across the client organization share data with each other) in order to achieve an integrated view of the customer and user engagement across digital touchpoints.
In order to enable her clients with a “system of insight”, Bellin has strategically staffed her department to service any analytics need, as her team consists of analysts with a variety of skillsets, including data modeling, conversion optimization, technical infrastructure, CRM and behavioral analysis. From technical analysts who develop proprietary tracking technologies to bridges gaps in data collection, to storytellers who are able to craft meaningful business stories to educate clients, Bellin has grown her team to include analysts with specific expertise, and staffs projects with a combination of expertise in order to deliver industry-leading offerings to her clients, who include Qualcomm, Inc., NBC Universal and Ubisoft.

Growing her team members’ skillsets – and helping them apply those new skills – is a priority for Bellin. She manages relationships with technology partners to bring training to her team, and fosters a continued learning environment by providing the team the latest information on R programming, trends in data science, data visualization, marketing automation and various analytics methodologies – to ensure they are abreast of the most recent trends in the industry. She also hosts monthly forums for the Mirum analysts working in North America, where work samples and processes are shared, so there is a constant flow of knowledge, and employees can learn from one another.

Bellin actively engages in the analytics community. Bellin consistently provides thought leadership on the Mirum global blog, in addition to sharing trends and topics through Twitter. A sample of her latest posts can be found here:
- http://www.mirumagency.com/san-diego/blog/what-if-personalization-was-ranking-factor-google-search
- http://www.mirumagency.com/san-diego/blog/4-tricks-creating-meaningful-infographics
Looking into 2016, Bellin will continue to build the data practice across Mirum, focusing on the “team approach” that has proven successful in San Diego. The data space is increasingly complex and requires multiple roles and advanced analytics technologies in order for businesses to successfully leverage their data.

She also plans to focus on greater community education as data literacy becomes increasingly important. She hopes to greatly contribute to educating younger generations though Mirum’s partnership with the University of California, San Diego Rady School of Management in the new Rady School Center for Business Analytics, where she will engage MBA students on project work exploring the latest breaking innovations in healthcare marketing and communications.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenbellin

Supporting Nominee Information:
Mark Berry, CHRO, CGB Enterprises
Mark Berry is a phenomenal thought leader on the development and application of HR insights in business intelligence. While his keen sense of analytics savviness is beyond compare, his mentoring of colleagues, education of the market and evangelism for HR to adopt these strategies is remarkable. Not only is he is top requested speaker at worldwide venues, and a top blogger/writer; he has been documented by Bersin with a case study and yet has a keen sense to lean in and always learn more. He is a unique mind (and mentor) I have not found in the market widely

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/smarkberry

Supporting Nominee Information:
Matthias Bettag, DAA Germany enthusiast, Organizer of Digital Analytics Events, Partner of two Digital Analytics Service Providers
Matthias is a leading person in Digital Analytics in the EU. Because of him, our trade is growing in Germany and well beyond. His enthusiasm is contagious as he connects people in the digital and analytics worlds.

Matthias started his career as a nurse in an ICU, a place where trend-lines on a monitor are literally essential… His true digital career started as a webmaster in the early 2000s for a major pharmaceutical company. He then advanced to a leading role in the Global E-Marketing department where he focused on analytics. He literally reinvented the enterprise’s global webanalytics platform, enabling standards, methods and roles in order to use data to prove success.
From 2012-2013 Matthias headed Semphonic’s first European office in Berlin, Germany, up until EY acquired Semphonic.

Since 2012, Matthias organizes the “DA Hub” in Europe, together with his UK based partner Michael Feiner. He is proud to bring this purely conversational senior level conference to the US in 2016 (taking over the famous “X Change” conference, originally initiated by Gary Angel and his team at Semphonic).
Matthias has been co-sharing eMetrics Germany for three years and is a board member of the DAA Germany, the first officially established DAA country organization besides North America.

He is helping in the educational route as a tutor of the University of British Columbia’s “UBC/DAA Award of Achievement in Digital Analytics”.
To connect people and combining this with his practice as an analyst makes him a leading person and an example.

Matthias is partner of Digital Motion, a young company focusing on enabling and supporting enterprises on their journey towards digital transformation, and of Digital Economics, a digital analytics talent provider.

Nominee LinkedIn and Twitter Profile:
- https://de.linkedin.com/in/mbettag
- https://twitter.com/MatthiasBettag
Supporting Nominee Information:
- http://www.digitalanalyticshub.com
- http://daa-germany.org
Luka Cempre, Data Scientist, Analytics Pros
I am constantly amazed at Luka's willingness to dive into any problem. He has not only solved for complex client issues, he has built tools that save precious time and resources for our team. And the best part—he always works with diligence, generosity, and enthusiasm. He participated in two very, very important integration projects: a Hybris extension for Google Analytics, featured in the Hybris Marketplace, and a code library for Apple TV. Both integrations are open source and available, again reflecting his spirit of innovation and generosity in moving our industry forward. In addition, he has played a key role in optimizing our website and crafting our product development strategy. He also actively engages in online communities, often posing and answering questions in forums and message boards. It's hard to overstate his value, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention his love for chocolate, especially Nutella.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/luka-cempre-9b5ba71a

Supporting Nominee Information:
- https://www.hybris.com/en/partner/hybris-extend/google-analytics
- https://github.com/analytics-pros/GA-Tracker-for-Apple-tvOS
Jonathan Corbin, Director, Marketo

Jonathan has sold more than one hundred million dollars' worth of analytics' software.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcorbin01

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Brian Cosgrove, Principal, BrianDo

Brian specializes in the design and maturation of digital analytics capabilities within both agencies and companies. He leads an analytics practice that enables brands to get the most out of their data with better data collection, structure and customization, robust dashboards and actionable insights. He’s well versed in Google Analytics, Adobe (Omniture), IBM (Unica, CoreMetrics, TeaLeaf), WebTrends and similar platforms with numerous certifications. He has experience assisting clients with measurement planning; staffing and training; report design; dashboarding and delivery; knowledge management; testing (CRO) and targeting; and tag management strategy.

Additionally, Brian works with E-Business and IT teams to use actionable data and insight gained from analytics to streamline website/app development. Brian also has a breadth of experience in organic search (SEO) programs with projects that stretch across many topics including content marketing, online reputation management, site architecture, page speed, URL management, and more. His approach is to creatively architect the "best" (from a user standpoint) result for a topic; technically optimize the markup, maximize page speed/delivery, address cross device accessibility/compatibility; and promote the result through natural channels from e-newsletters and announcements to TV or social media.    Brian has considerable practical expertise in several other digital agency/e-business activities: paid search(SEM)/social media/display media strategy and management (including extensive retargeting), email, web standards, e-commerce, mobile and more. Brian has been a guest speaker at many events, including: Search Engine Strategies (SES), Search Marketing Expo (SMX), the Digital Analytics Association(DAA) Symposium in Philadelphia, and several smaller events.

Testimonials from Brian’s Colleagues:

“Brian was a great mentor to me early in my career at Razorfish and TPG. His passion for client results and commitment to developing the skills of others around him improved the performance of everyone on the teams he spearheaded. Brian grew client revenues by tens of millions of dollars with SEO, web analytics, SEM and display campaigns amongst other digital tactics. His intelligence, technical skills, digital experience and his ability to clearly communicate make him a tremendous asset. He enjoys challenges and is great at building frameworks to identify, work through and solve complex marketing problems. I was fortunate to start my career learning from and working with Brian.” Harris Neifield, Paid Search, BrainDo, colleague.

“Brian does a great job of connecting a lot of different data points and different sources that would not be as obvious to a lot of people. So it’s not just simply digital analytics as a theory, which he can also talk about, but he applies it towards our client’s marketing campaigns and turns it into something that they can understand and know how to use and apply to future projects. . . There’s logic to his madness.” Jenny Du, Principal, BrainDo, colleague.

“Brian Cosgrove is a thought leader, presenting at the DAA conference. He’s a futurist, able to anticipate trends in analytics and keep clients ahead of them. He’s a teacher, having raised the analytics competency level of every single BrainDo employee through mentoring and example. He’s an innovator, excelling in designing and implementing comprehensive analytics solutions for complex organizations. He makes it sound simple, and justifies his work with quantitative and qualitative ROI.”   Mike Murphy, Content Strategist, BrainDo, colleague.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianjcosgrove
Peter Crossley, Director of Architecture, Webtrends
As Pete likes to say "Webtrends did big data before there was Big Data" and Pete has been the primary driver behind our company's approach. He is a well-respected leader in the analytics and Big Data industry and is often called on to speak about how he and his team are approaching Big Data using Hadoop and Spark. In his recent keynotes, he's received much recognition around his different approach to Big Data and how Webtrends is far ahead of what other companies are doing. Check out a couple blogs, videos and articles listed below to better understand his POV.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petercrossley

Supporting Nominee Information:
- http://www.webtrends.com/blog/2015/08/big-data-analytics-hadoop-and-spark
(includes link to his participation in Hadoop Summit keynote)
- https://www.webtrends.com/blog/2015/11/webtrends-big-data-platform-unlocks-endless-possibilities-for-marketing
(Denny Lee from Databricks will soon be releasing video of when Pete spoke at the Seattle Big Data Meetup)
- https://ctovision.com/2015/08/driving-business-value-webtrends
(includes video of Pete and how Webtrends is using Hadoop)
Juan Damia, CEO, Intellignos
Develop new theories (Flowcards, Meta Analytics which is an Analytics best seller in Latam, Systemic View of Digital Environments) Created and organize the Event HOWA (Hands on Web Analytics), focused on learning for others experiences. Worked on the development of the DAA in Latin America. Working on the development of the DAA in South Florida. Contributes with his blog MetaAnalytics.org. Founded Intellignos, one of the most recognized Big Data Analytics Consultancy firms (Part of Havas Media Group). Co-Founded Socialmetrix, a Social Media Analytics firm (Part of Daily Mail and General Trust from London). Mentioned in massive media, digital and offline. Keynote speaker in some of the most recognized events. Both the companies he founded provide services to the most challenging companies in the world like DIRECTV, FOX Channels, Google, Unilever, The Walt Disney Company, Televisa, Telefonica Movistar, etc. Spearker and professor in several Universities like NYU Stern (Invited collaborator), Universidad de San Andres, Universidad Católica, FIU (Miami), UM (Miami) among many others.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/damia

Supporting Nominee Information:
Brent Dykes, Analytics Evangelist, Adobe
With more than 15 years of enterprise analytics, digital marketing and consulting experience, Brent Dykes has brought a wealth of knowledge and practical skills to the analytics industry, including some of the biggest brands in the world, such as Microsoft, Sony, Dell, Comcast and Nike, among many others.

In his current role at Adobe as an Analytics Evangelist, Brent works closely with the Adobe Analytics product team and its customers to help guide their analytics initiatives with expert advice and feedback. His contributions have helped numerous organizations create a data-driven culture, turn more insights into action and generate a higher return from their analytics investments.

Outside of his day-to-day role at Adobe, Brent is an ongoing contributor to the analytics community:    --He’s a published author, including his first book "Web Analytics Action Hero" and follow-up eBook "Web Analytics Kick Start Guide." “Web Analytics Action Hero” was recently translated and published in Korean, its first foreign language.

He directs an annual collegiate digital analytics competition, Adobe Analytics Challenge, which has exposed thousands of students to the power of enterprise-level analytics over the past 10 years, and doubled in size this year to nearly 1,000 students from 24 universities.

He regularly writes thought-provoking articles aimed at helping companies thrive in today’s data economy and evolve their digital marketing, including regular contributions to Forbes and notable placements at industry publications such as VentureBeat and Entrepreneur. He also published a paper in the October 2015 issue of Applied Marketing Analytics Journal: “Data storytelling: What it is and how it can be used to effectively communicate analysis results.”

He's recently been referenced and interviewed by influential media about digital analytics, such as TechRepublic and SiriusXM/Wharton Business Radio.

Brent also enjoys speaking on various data-related topics at many industry events. In 2015 alone, Brent participated in the following:
- Keynote speaker at eMetrics Boston 2015 with Jennifer Yacenda, “Data Storytellers of the World Unite” (top-rated session)
- Panelist on the “Do’s and Don’ts of Data-Driven Marketing” at Data Marketing 2015 in Toronto
- Keynote speaker at Conversion Hotel 2015 in Netherlands, “Storytelling with Data: That’s what you need for data-driven impact!”
- Speaker at MinneAnalytics Farcon 2015 in Minneapolis, “What’s So Special About Mobile App Analytics?”
- Speaker at UMSL Digital Marketing 2015 conference in St. Louis, “How to Become a Web Analytics Action Hero”
- Speaker at Adobe Summit 2015 in SLC and London for two breakout sessions, “Analytics Idol: America voted—the top tips are here!” and “Data storytelling: Create a happy ending for data-driven decision-making”
Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentdykes

Supporting Nominee Information:
- Twitter
- Blog
- Website
Thought Leadership:
- Web Analytics Action Hero book
- Web Analytics Kick Start Guide eBook
- Adobe Digital Analytics Competition
- Forbes Contributor Profile
  - Forbes article: Introducing a blog to help you survive and thrive in the data economy
  - Forbes article: Five key milestones in the digital analytics journey
  - Forbes article: The age of data democratization: How to effectively share data across your business
  - Forbes article: Five roadblocks to becoming a data-driven business
  - Forbes article: Analyzing big data: 8 Tips for finding the signals within the noise
  - Forbes article: 4 Questions to consider before you launch your next mobile app
  - Forbes article: 5 Data-driven business trends for 2016
- VentureBeat article: Why smart companies will start giving data back to their users
- Entrepreneur article: Marketing's unhealthy best-practice addiction
- TechRepublic article (quoted): 5 Powerful data trends to watch in 2016
Notable Events:
Justin Goodman, Lead Digital Analyst, Analytics Pros

It's clear that Justin in invested in analytics, both as a practitioner and a member of the wider community. He attends events, engages on social media, delivers addresses at conferences, and leads trainings. I have seen first-hand how he enthusiastically and expertly guides clients and people new to the industry as they learn and explore their data. Often times this is as a result of his pure passion to help new people grow in their understanding of analysis. That passion becomes clear as you see Justin interacting with others as they learn more about how to use their data.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmgoodman
Michael Helbling, Director of Analytics, Practice Lead, Search Discovery
Michael Helbling is the practice lead for analytics at Search Discovery. Under his reign the team has grown exponentially, with expansion into analytics implementation, analysis, strategy, and optimization. But that's just during his usual work hours.

Beyond growing one of the most talented analytics agencies in the world, Michael has also done an incredible job leveraging his connections in the industry to create the Digital Analytics Power Hour (DAPH) podcast. Along with Tim Wilson, Jim Cain, and many influential guests, Michael has helped bring the past, current, and future of analytics to the podcasting world. The conversations are always entertaining and educational and the podcast's following is cult-like; with deep conversations on Facebook to further discuss this week's topic. Finally, Michael has also led some very topical speaking engagements with the DAA, UnSummit, Adobe Summit, and more! The entire industry

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mymotech

Supporting Nominee Information:
Lee Isensee, Directory, Product Strategy, Search Discovery
Lee Isensee is a long-time member of the digital analytics industry, with twenty years experience beginning in the early days at Sane Solutions with the NetTracker / NetInsight product, through its acquisition by Unica, and Unica's acquisition by IBM. More recently, Lee was the Director of Solutions Engineering and Product Strategy at Localytics (the leader in mobile app analytics and marketing) and now leads Product Strategy for Search Discovery (founders of the Satellite tag management product, which was acquired by Adobe to create Adobe's DTM product.)

Lee is a well-regarded expert in our industry, with knowledge spanning digital marketing, digital analytics, customer analytics and CRM, and mobile measurement and marketing. He is often called upon by companies to train their staff in the fundamentals of the digital and mobile space, and to help prepare organizations for what is to come in the respective industries.

For years, he has been an active, vocal (!) and committed member of our industry community. He served a two-year tenure as Co-Chair of the DAA Membership Committee, during which the committee was the largest and most engaged in years, and executed initiatives like founding the DAA Awards for Excellence (and corresponding Awards Gala) as well as producing the Career Guide for Analysts (which eventually became the starting point for the current DAA Professional Development Committee.) He also helped to get the DAA Boston Local Chapter off the ground, by serving on the planning committee for Boston's first ever Symposium a few years back, and is a frequent supporter of DAA events in various markets.

Lee was a key contributor to the W3C Data Layer Standards, working with other industry figures such as Justin Cutroni and Eric Feinberg, and as a key member of the authoring group for the most recent DAA Web Analytics Definition Guide. More recently, Lee created “Measure Slack” and, along with a group of industry peers, has created an incredibly active community for digital analytics discussions, with hundreds of members from across the globe and a true focus on community. This group has quickly becoming THE "go to" discussion forum for analytics questions, and Lee administers this open forum (in his own time) on an on-going basis. His experience in the startup world has led to him being a common name contacted by VCs for consultation and guidance into the digital marketing and analytics space.

Lee is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and an oft-lapsed blogger. (Let’s face it, he prefers to TALK!) He is truly an influential and integral part of the digital analytics industry, and deserves to be recognized as such.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisensee

Supporting Nominee Information:
Nick Iyengar, Associate Director - Digital Intelligence, Cardinal Path
If you’re like me when I look at some of the names in this category, you’re probably asking “who is Nick Iyengar?”. Good question and one that I look forward to answering. To begin, he is Associate Director of Digital Intelligence at Cardinal Path and in that capacity works with companies like Intel, Google, Universal Music, and Papa John’s to bring advanced digital analytics thinking to their digital marketing and planning. Here’s what one of his clients has to say about him:

“Nick is one of the smartest people in digital analytics that I’ve ever run across. His depth of knowledge both tactically and strategically is a very rare thing. If you need to know how to do some kind of very complex operation in Google Analytics, Nick makes it look easy. If you need to know how to interpret and use the data to change your business for the better, Nick can quickly and easily get you to where you need to go. Best of all, he does all of his work with a quiet calm and humility that belies his vast experience and intelligence in the digital analytics industry.” Dan Linton, Global Web & Digital Analytics, Intel Corporation (one of Nick’s clients, and a former colleague)

In addition to his technical smarts, Nick is a team player, a can-do guy who lives the Cardinal Path Purpose of “To know. To share. To BE our partner’s competitive advantage”.

When one of his colleagues suffered a back injury, he didn’t hesitate to step up on very short notice and fly to Europe to deliver a talk on analytics in front of packed auditorium. He believes in mentorship and leads his team of data scientists, analysts, and developers (all rising stars in their own right) by example, going above and beyond and executing with excellence. In the past year alone he has:
- Written articles for Marketing Land on analytics and digital marketing
- Co-presented webinars with Internet Retailer, the American Marketing Association and SiteTuners on attribution, analytics and marketing
- Co-authored the State of Digital Marketing Analytics in the Top 500 Online Retailers report, the first report of its kind to look at the use of analytics within top online retailers
- Played a key role in the development of content to support Google’s Digital Garge, the online learning center for acquiring digital marketing skills (currently UK, expanding to the EU)
- Spoken at industry conferences in the US and Europe, including Google’s Agency Day in Prague;
- Published multiple blog posts
- Delivered training seminars on Google Analytics and Adwords in Ireland, the US, Japan, and France;
.

Nick began his career at Google in 2006, managing Google’s "Analytics Guru" team from 2008-2010, which he transformed from technical support into a consulting team with $25 million in revenue. He also managed a multi-million dollar book of business for clients in Consumer Electronics. He then joined Cardinal Path as a consultant, before leaving in 2012 to do earn an MBA from the University of Michigan (focus on corporate strategy and marketing). He is now on what he likes to call his ‘’2nd tour of duty’’ with Cardinal Path.

His diverse skillset includes:
- Deep analysis and strong ability to turn findings into a business case
- Up-front measurement strategy that clearly connects analytics to profitability
- Structured vision for how to improve clients' analytics maturity
- Mentorship and coaching - he has trained tens of thousands of industry professionals on Google Analytics through both public and private engagements
There is a lot more I could say about Nick, but the key reason that I’m nominating him for this award is that he truly embodies what it means to be a rising star: great at what you do, active in the community, actively sharing your knowledge, mentoring and leading staff and colleagues, being considered a “go-to” person within the company, and a trusted advisor by his clients. In short, he is making a difference and I’m sure we’ll see and hear more of him in our community as time goes on. That’s why I’m nominating him, and why I hope that you will see why he is worthy of your vote.

Thank you.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickiyengar

Supporting Nominee Information:
- Nick’s work with online luxury marketplace, 1stdibs, led to a 47% lift in transactions, 34% increase in email click-through rates, 24% increase on conversions quarter over quarter, and a holistic view of the customer across devices and digital assets. This success led to the creation of Google Premium case study that was featured on the Google Premium web site (see link) http://www.cardinalpath.com/collateral/CardinalPath_1stdibs_CS.pdf.
Marketing Land articles:
Webinars:
- http://pages.cardinalpath.com/Analytics-for-Ecommerce-webinar-video-page.html
- http://pages.cardinalpath.com/State_of_DM_Analytics_Panel_Discussion.html
Case study:
- http://www.cardinalpath.com/collateral/CardinalPath_1stdibs_CS.pdf.
Halee Kotara, Senior Digital Analytics Consultant, Society Consulting

Halee is AMAZING! She’s been tasked with doing a complete audit of our Adobe Analytics implementation (from data collection to report and admin settings, and EVERYTHING in between). As if this isn’t difficult enough with all the complications on our site and with our current implementation, we are also going through a complete home page and header/footer redesign which includes implementing AEM, redesigning our purchase path, implementing a new tool for our cart, changing everything about our existing product taxonomy, and hiring 3 new digital analysts. During all of this, she is making solid recommendations and translating them to both the analysts and our platform team – and talking all of these through with us so we understand the recommendation and why she’s making it based on her quickly-gained knowledge of our business. She’s also meeting regularly with people on the business side to understand their needs, goals, objectives, and concerns. Halee is also serving as a mentor to the entire team regarding Digital Analytics in general – sharing knowledge with experienced analysts, helping to train new analysts, and teaching best practices. She is also active in the Digital Analytics Association Dallas. Halee is definitely an asset to the Digital Analytics community and someone that I hope to keep in touch with long after her consulting time at NI is over.

Halee is a true wizard of Adobe Analytics and has helped us optimize and rebuild our SiteCatalyst setup from the ground up. She is an endless beacon of knowledge and has even helped train some of our newer employees on best practices and capabilities of our toolset. She has proven her value to our team by becoming the go-to for ALL questions on implementation, even beyond those in our department. She is brilliant and has a positive and approachable demeanor despite the amount of stress and responsibility handed to her.

Halee has become instrumental in the success of the establishing a strong Analytics foundation for NI. - Her knowledge on Adobe Analytics & Excel is unparalleled. - Extremely helpful and insightful in consulting on the do's & don'ts of analytics.

Halee has been instrumental in providing detailed, custom recommendations to improve the status of our Adobe Analytics implementation, leaving no stone unturned. Her thoughtful analyses have been already impactful in the short time she has been contracted with our company, and we see her as a consummate analytics mentor. She possesses comprehensive knowledge - technical and practical - in addition to being a joy to work with. Always eager to share her knowledge and thought processes to help our team develop deeper analytics skills.

Halee is consistently heads and shoulders above most that dig into the details of analytics. She provides keen insight and drives for the optimal implementations and best practices in helping businesses and individuals achieve their desired DA goals. No stranger to many in the community, she is more than deserving of this award.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/haleekotara
Supporting Nomination Information:
http://www.kotaraindustries.com
Jeong-Yoon Lee, Chief Data Scientist, Conversion Logic
Jeong-Yoon Lee, PhD is Chief Data Scientist of Conversion Logic with over 16 years experience in data science and software engineering. Jeong has received numerous accolades for his work in data science over the years, including the highest rankings for data mining competitions at American Express, Deloitte, Otto Group, Planned Parenthood and the KDD Cup. Jeong is an extremely active member of the data science community. He frequently participates in meet-ups, and has added great value by his innovative work on the Ensemble Method, an algorithmic model based on the "wisdom of crowds" that underpins and differentiates Conversion Logic's XC Logic Platform. He has numerous patents and publications in the realm of predictive modeling. Most importantly, however, Jeong influences the data science community through his participation in meet-ups and international data science competitions. He won the prestigious KDD Cup in 2012 and 2015, and was recognized as one of the top 10 Data Scientists in the world (2nd in the US) out of over 400,000 data scientists at Kaggle. Jeong treats these competitions as community events, sharing best practices for how to win (YouTube video in web links section) and open sourcing his Machine Learning library

Additional background on Jeong: Prior to his contribution in building Conversion Logic’s sophisticated platform, Jeong was the lead applied science engineer at Demand Media, a leading content platform company, where he led the company’s initiative to build the algorithmic content creation engine based on machine learning algorithms. Prior to Demand Media, Jeong was the co-founder and lead engineer of Neofect, a health tech company based in Korea, and scientist at Opera Solutions, a predictive intelligence technology company, where he developed a US patent for detecting credit card fraud. Jeong received his PhD in Computer Science and MS in Electrical Engineering at University of Southern California.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeongyoonlee

Supporting Nominee Information:
Nicolas Malo, MeasureBowling Organizer, MeasureBowling

For gathering more than 20 cities every 6 months!!! Around bowling parties talking chatting about digital analytics. The biggest digital & social event on Twitter and G+ about digital analytics.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://fr.linkedin.com/in/nicolasmalo/fr

Supporting Nominee Information:
http://www.measurebowling.org
Chris Meares, Vice President, Analytics Consulting, MaassMedia

Chris Meares is by far one of the most knowledgeable professionals in the field of digital analytics. He has the rare combination of technical expertise and business acumen that allows him to bring great value to any analytics project. Chris’ understanding of analytics tools and digital platforms is unparalleled, and he can solve the most complex problems that our clients face. Chris was instrumental to the growth of MaassMedia in 2015, securing and growing clients such as The Nature Conservancy, Penn Medicine, ESPN, Lenovo and NBC Universal. His leadership and dedication resulted in a 75% increase in the size of the MaassMedia team, which he mentors in everything from client management to analytics implementations and analysis. Chris is always willing to share his knowledge, not only with his own team, but throughout the analytics community. He is a regular participant in Web Analytics Wednesdays, DAA symposiums and groups, and digital analytics online communities including his own blog posts that are some of the most heavily trafficked on our MaassMedia website. He was a featured speaker at the DAA Philadelphia Symposium and eMetrics San Francisco. He also assisted the DAA with writing job descriptions for industry as a whole. Anyone who has worked with Chris will agree that his knowledge, the value he brings to clients, and his willingness to help others all make him deserving of the Practitioner of the Year Award.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismeares
Deepak Nair, Vice President, Head of Digital Intelligence, Marketing & Optimization Technologies,
US Bank
Over the last four years at U.S. Bank, Deepak Nair has revolutionized the bank’s digital analytics practice. His vision transformed the company from an early stage web analytics implementation to a mature, advanced customer intelligence organization at the forefront of the industry. By leading both the analytics and marketing technology organizations, Deepak was able to first shape how U.S. Bank collects data, which then opened the door for his vision of integrating all customer touch points applications and using that data to improve customer experiences and cross platform marketing opportunities. His innovation in creating the next best action engine has transformed how U.S. Bank thinks about customer experience, evolving their practice into a model for the industry.

Here are some examples of how Deepak has gone out of his way to use this transformational experience and knowledge to help shape and guide the industry forward:
- Helps shape numerous vendor roadmaps (he is on the customer advisory board of DAA members Adobe and Ensighten)
- Counsels industry analysts such as Forrester on explaining U.S. Bank’s practice and vision for the future
- Advises countless practitioners and companies on shaping their analytics and optimization teams
- Works with partners such as Cognizant to help shape their analytics practice
- Evangelizes his experience and views on how to advance the analytics industry (see below for links)
By sharing his use cases and experiences across a wide variety of mediums, Deepak has certainly influenced the vision for the future of big data and customer intelligence practices. By working with both practitioners and vendors he has helped to shape the future of the industry. Vendors like Adobe, for example, regularly ask Deepak to present to executive and product leadership about how U.S. Bank is refining and expanding its digital marketing and analytics deployments.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepakn5

Supporting Nominee Information:
Peter O'Neill, Analytics Evangelist, MeasureCamp
This guy did what no one did. Take care of Europe and the rest of the world (except USA). He brought Analytics to our door through the creation of MeasureCamp and then, in combination with Nicolas Malo, through MeasureBowling. These guys changed the professional life of thousands of people with FREE events. They just ROCK.

MeasureCamp is a free-to-attend unconference, different to any other web analytics conference held around the world. The schedule is created on the day and speakers are fellow attendees. Everyone is encouraged to discuss and participate in sessions, even to lead sessions themselves. The whole point is that attendees focus on what they find most interesting and useful. There have now been 13 MeasureCamps across six cities with at least four more MeasureCamp cities joining this year.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/peteroneill

Supporting Nominee Information:
Enrico Pavan, CEO, Digital Analyst & CRO Manager, Enrico Pavan
Enrico is an independent consultant based in Italy, specializing in digital analytics and conversion rate optimization. He has worked for several leading Italian and international finance, retail, B2C, B2B companies, as well as for eCommerce, gambling, fashion and travel firms. Over the past 12 years, he has focused on data analysis, usability and A/B and MVT (Multivariate) testing, using testing software such as: VisualWebsiteOptimizer, Optimizely, and Adobe Target to improve the performance of online advertising campaigns and create effective landing pages. Enrico also specializes in mobile marketing tracking and analysis, specifically for financial and B2C marketing and as a complement to direct mail marketing. He has spoken at many major events related to data analysis and has also taught digital analytics at the prestigious University Ca 'Foscari of Venice. In early 2014, Enrico was nominated in the Practitioner of the Year category in the annual Digital Analytics Association Awards for Excellence competition. He is one of the first digital analyst in Italy to have generated the data integration between online and offline, becoming a point of reference for many professionals. He is always looking for innovative ways like using NFC, beacons and proximity marketing. In 2015 he published a chapter for "Applied Marketing Analytics" published by Henry Stewart Publications Philadelphia. Title: "How Date and User Behavior Analysis Impacts Sales - Especially via Mobile"

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/enricopavan

Supporting Nominee Information:
Judah Phillips, Founder, SmartCurrent
Judah Phillips continues to share his knowledge and help people with their careers. In 2015 he continued to lead the industry by writing a new book, Ecommerce Analytics - and seeing his other two books - Building a Digital Analytics Organization and Digital Analytics Primer continuing to be taught by universities worldwide.

On top of his successful analytics consultancy, SmartCurrent, Judah also taught at local Boston colleges. In addition, he spoke at several events and generated major press around analytics and data science - even appearing in a photo and article on the cover of the national Business Journal in May 2015.

Judah also helped other authors get published in 2015 because he is a consulting editor for Pearson, recommending publication of Kim Ann King's "The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing Technology," Andrew Edward’s “Digital is Destroying Everything" and Gary Angel's "Measuring the Digital World."

He's helped lots of people advance their careers very much in the spirit of the vision of how Jim, Andrew, Bryan, and Rand founded the DAA. He even helped with the DAA Boston Symposiums in 2015 and spoke at one. He is a relentless leader in our industry who continues to impact the industry with his ongoing thought-leadership and advocacy. He is a real change agent in digital analytics.

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

Supporting Nominee Links:
Lea Pica, Owner, Lea Pica Consulting
In 2015, Lea Pica has roared onto the digital analytics scene through the launching of her consulting practice and her Present Beyond Measure podcast. Her mission is to arm analytics practitioners and consultants with the tools they need to nurture fulfilling client and stakeholder relationships through thoughtful and actionable data presentation.

She has single-handedly taken on one of the most challenging areas of digital analytics and is helping educate and shape this critical area for our industry. In addition, she has provided individual strategic coaching, conducted webinars and in-person trainings to help share her passion and knowledge.

While Lea has been in the industry for a while, I nominate her as a Rising Star because this year has really been the start of a new facet of Lea's digital analytics career and in the hopes that others in the industry will follow her lead and do the same in the future!

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leasynefakispica

Supporting Nominee Information:
Steen Rasmussen, Senior Partner, IIH Nordic

Having been in the online media and web analytics industry for more than 16 years has served well and enabled Steen to both learn and specialize, but more importantly to spark his aspirations to innovate and keep improving the digital analytics industry. Steen is one of those people who radically understand and sees digital analytics as the underlying engine of the business development and thus he has been specializing in connecting digital analytics data with specific business objectives. Steen aims to not only deliver data in terms of data, but to show the relevancy of it to the business needs and goals. During his long career Steen had made analyses and optimized digital communications for some of the best known Danish, Scandinavian and other globally recognized brands who had been enlightened by his knowledge and sedulity when it comes to digital analytics.

Since its establishment in 2005, Steen has been one of the driving forces of IIH Nordic which have led the agency to become voted Danish Digital Analytics Agency of the Year the last 3 years in a row. Today, the company plays an imperative role in digital analytics in the Nordic region as the largest independent agency in the region with more than 15 dedicated web analysts on staff. In addition, being a Country Chairman for DAA Denmark, Member of Advisory Board for E-Maerket and globally recognized speaker, Steen continues to prove his dedication and passion for analytics and willingness to take a leadership role planning, marketing and hosting 5 or 6 Web Analytics Wednesday Symposium in Denmark every year with a turnout of more than 350 people – every time. As a recognized speaker and specialist at the Google Partner Academy over the past years, he has been sharing his invaluable insights and experiences. He has also shared his knowledge globally as keynote from Silicon Valley, over New York, to Barcelona and Budapest, latest a eMetrics in London. Steen is one of the persons who continuously breathe life into digital analytics through his understanding and willingness to educate how data drives business.

Nominee LinkedIn Profile:
https://dk.linkedin.com/in/steenrasmussen
Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google
Krista is a proven leader in her field, driving product and industry growth as one of the leading educational voices in the analytics industry. Over the past several years she has written and promoted content to teach the world’s small and large businesses the value of data driven marketing, how to most effectively optimize their websites and prove ROI, and how to make a name for themselves online. Through these efforts Krista has reached more than 100,000 people with her unique approach to teaching online advertising and digital marketing through scaled programs such as the Analytics Academy and regular online trainings that she hosts.

Internally at Google, Krista has been a leading force in moving the marketing organization to keep data, optimization, and quantifiable measures of impact, both to the end-user and the business, top of mind in everything they produce. She successfully built and ran an A/B testing program for the Google for Work group that resulted in a 30% year over year increase in website results and measurable satisfaction improvement from users. Her methods were revolutionary within the company and she has since worked with several other teams across the organization, including her current team, to implement similar programs to focus on improving the digital experience for everyone. As her online reach has grown, Krista has also been a strong supporter of equality and avoiding unconscious bias in the workplace. She’s been an outspoken advocate for women in tech (see her LinkedIn post below) and a mentor to both men and women looking to grow their careers in digital marketing. She is spearheading an effort within the Digital Analytics Association to create an inclusive digital community for 'Women in Analytics’ to collaborate, share inspiring stories and articles, ask questions and receive support, and participate in mentor/mentee relationships with industry peers. Her recent podcasts on getting started in digital marketing and The State of Women in Analytics are great examples of how she shares her own story to help others develop their own careers and paths.

Krista was recognized globally as the Digital Analytics Rising Star in 2014 and the Digital Analytics Practitioner of the year in 2015 by the Digital Analytics Association. She deserves the ‘Most Influential Industry Contributor’ award because she is an industry expert, works tirelessly to share her knowledge about digital marketing, advertising, and analytics to help others grow their businesses, and on top of it all, is a strong advocate for improving the workplace and creating an environment where everyone is recognized for the skills and successes that they bring to the table rather than their gender.

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

Supporting Nominee Information:

New Technology of the Year (Technology)

Analysis Workspace, Adobe Analytics
In just the four months since release, Analysis Workspace has changed the way analysts and marketers interact with data both at speed and at scale. Analysis Workspace is a new tool in Adobe Analytics which allows users to query data flexibly and quickly to answer questions at the speed of thought. With no limit on the number of queries, breakdowns or comparisons, as well as compelling new types of data visualizations, Analysis Workspace has become widely adopted by analysts and marketers worldwide as their primary tool for doing impactful analysis. It also features project curation, which allows an analyst to provide business users with customized analysis experiences that provide limitless flexibility, but limit them to the dimensions, metrics, segments, and visualizations that make sense and are relevant to them. Comments from users include:
- "I’m very impressed and delighted by all the new functionality! Analysis Workspace has already completely changed my analysis process and the updates to it are phenomenal."
- Another user has said, "The projects and intuitive setup are better than any I have seen."
- Finally, from a CMO: "The new Analysis Workspace is awesome... Overall, the product is being developed in an f'ing awesome way!"
As the new centerpiece of the Adobe Analytics product portfolio, Analysis Workspace is a transformational technology worthy of consideration for the DAA New Technology of the Year award.

In 2015, Adobe launched Analysis Workspace, an original way for companies to analyze, share and utilize marketing data through Adobe Analytics. Inspired by Adobe’s creative heritage, Analysis Workspace changes how data is organized and visualized within an organization. Analysts can manipulate views of data to create polished analyses that they can then curate out to those who need actionable data to make business decisions. This frees up data scientists’ and analysts’ time, and enables marketers and business users within the organization to work with complex data sets – equipping a new wave of “citizen data scientists.”

Key features of Analysis Workspace include:
- Simple, Photoshop-inspired workflows: In Analysis Workspace, it’s simple and quick for users to create and share useful reports. Inspired by Adobe’s legacy creative tools like Photoshop and Elements, they simply drag and drop dimensions, metrics and segments into a flexible data “canvas.” Manipulating complex data sets and sharing “curated” workspaces becomes highly instinctual, without the need for extensive training.
- Intuitive data visualizations: Seeing data in easily understandable and simple visuals (of the user’s choosing) is as important as building the workspaces. Whether it’s a bar graph or a donut chart, visualization is a key part of the analysis and reporting process, allowing users to quickly interpret the information. Leaning on Adobe’s creative heritage, new data is visualized instantly following a simple drag-and-drop of the relevant components. Data sets large and small can instantly be rendered and easily manipulated, allowing for interactive resizing, renaming and swapping between different chart and graph types.
- Unprecedented power, flexibility and speed: Analysis Workspace allows users to compare and dissect data in ways not previously possible. For the first time, it includes powerful industry-leading tools such as Anomaly Detection, Contribution Analysis, Calculated Metrics and a new Cohort Analysis tool. Leveraging Adobe’s experience with tools for creatives, it removed the complexity of traditional analytics’ tools, creating an understanding of data sets that encompass hundreds of dimensions and metrics, thousands of segments and millions of data combinations.
Supporting Nominee Information:
CampaignAlyzer, E-Nor
CampaignAlyzer is a web-based application that acts as a central repository platform where organizations can store their marketing campaign values in one database. Marketing agencies and digital marketers across your organization have the ability to collaborate in tagging various online and offline campaigns to ensure consistency in their campaign tagging.

Our philosophy is to provide robust and simple campaign tagging management solutions. We help digital marketers develop their online and offline campaign strategy and provide support to streamline and simplify the campaign tag management process.

CampaignAlyzer offers more useful features than any other tagging solution. So you can do more to customize the experience.

Main Features:
- Clean Channel Reports
- Role-based Access
- Bulk Campaign Management
- Data Export
- Attribution Model
- URL Shortener
- Analytics-Tool Agnostic
- Tagged URL Case
- Tracking Campaigns Across Multiple Analytics Tools
- Annotations
CampaignAlyzer was built by recognized digital marketing leaders who have proven hands-on experience in campaign tagging. As digital marketers who work directly with organizations of all sizes including Fortune 500, feedback from clients have led us to believe the tagging process today is very inefficient and suffers from many deficiencies:
- It’s cumbersome. The process is manual and often built in spreadsheets, utilizing email to distribute the tagging sheets between divisions and departments.
- It’s slow. The process requires days to weeks of unnecessary time to execute, validate and share. Traditional and manual tagging is also a very labor-intensive which typically involves multiple human resources.
- It’s error-prone. Spreadsheet-based processes requires multiple custom formulas, which have the potential of being miscalculated and updated incorrectly.
- It’s rigid. Manual tagging by nature is not capable of easily adapting to and incorporating changes that occur in business, such as: changing the campaign tracking variables or changing the attribution model; adding extra campaign tracking variables for a new analytics tool; or changing the analytics reporting tool all together.
CampaignAlyzer streamline your campaign tagging into a process that is:
- Efficient
- Timely
- Accurate
- Adaptive
- Business Critical
With CampaignAlyzer, your analysts wouldn’t worry about campaign tags and where they should go, instead they’ll now have more time to do what they should be doing in the first place; “Data Analysis” and measuring the success and the impact of the marketing campaigns.

You need CampaignAlyzer:
- To accurately track your customer Journey
- To successfully manage the tagging naming conventions when multiple marketing agencies are working on various campaigns
- To move all your campaign tagging solutions to the cloud for easy usability and accessibility.
- To separate your campaign management from the Analytics tools for data security.
- For more accurate and clean traffic channels’ report
CampaignAlyzer will help you:
1. Unlock the Power of your Analytics Tool!
Move beyond the visits and pageview reports and see how your marketing campaigns help in creating sales and conversions.
- Discover which Channels Influence your Buyers
Tag, validate, and manage your online marketing programs to ensure you reach your business goals.
- Measure the Real Value of your Marketing Campaigns
Measure the success and impact of your marketing campaigns by aligning them with your on-site conversions and ecommerce transactions. Identify which channels deliver the highest impact.
Supporting Nominee Information:
*In Progress
Ensighten Mobile, Ensighten
Today’s mobile landscape is surging with activity. In fact, Internet Retailer recently projected that the largest 378 U.S. mobile merchants will see 36 percent growth in sales via smartphones and tablets this year, reaching $88.44 billion in revenue. However, according to Forrester Research, more than one half (57 percent) of digital business professionals are still not using any type of mobile analytics to measure and optimize experiences on mobile apps. Ensighten Mobile is the industry’s first unified tag management and optimization solution for mobile apps. Launched as an integrated solution in November 2015, Ensighten Mobile enables marketers to seamlessly deploy third-party analytics and other technologies into their mobile apps, as well as conduct on-the-fly A/B and multivariate testing to ensure the best customer engagement possible, all in real-time.

Ensighten Mobile features the company’s patented no-SDK (that is to say, no software development kit required) technology for mobile apps. Previously, marketers struggled with optimizing native mobile apps, which typically rely on integrating SDKs into the app one by one – a very manual process. If marketers desired to optimize or personalize content within native mobile apps while using SDK tag management or optimization technology, they would need to work with software developers to make every single menial change, then re-submit to the app store and wait for changes to be accepted. And of course, it relies on consumers downloading the latest version of a company’s app to make sure the changes make it onto their devices. These dependencies on average add three months to the app release cycle, increase development and agency costs, as well as opportunity costs when an app isn’t optimized to its fullest potential. Ensighten’s patented technology short-circuits all this process, enabling marketers to optimize native mobile apps instantly, avoiding the time-consuming cycle requiring software developers, IT release cycles and re-submission to app stores.

Furthermore, Ensighten Mobile is the industry’s first mobile optimization solution to incorporate three critical marketing functions into one solution: analytics, tag management and optimization. As Ensighten Mobile is integrated with Ensighten Manage, the company’s tag management solution, users are able to extend any third-party technology into their apps.

Ensighten Mobile provides out-of-the-box lifecycle metrics, empowering marketers to immediately understand how users are engaging with apps. Moreover, Ensighten Mobile allows the easy and real-time test and swap of any mobile technology on mobile apps, allowing marketers to measure ROI of those technologies before fully committing to their mobile marketing strategy. In addition, Ensighten Mobile allows A/B and multivariate testing within apps, enabling marketers to easily see which pieces of content – copy, images, etc. – are resonating and impacting conversion.

With mobile apps, both marketers and app developers have a role to play. Marketers need to be empowered to change tagging and experiences on the fly, as they do in Web environments, and app developers need to make it happen from a technical perspective. With that in mind, Ensighten Mobile allows users to access the solution from the persona of both a business and technical user. Ensighten Mobile facilitates workflows across both groups, helping establish consistency and governance across technical mobile teams and non-technical marketing teams. For example, marketers can use the solution to notify technical teams to complete a workflow. The tool unifies both groups and ensures a quality app experience, from all perspectives, without requiring traditional months-long publishing cycles.

Customer Success: Vivint, a leading smart home technology provider, uses Ensighten Mobile to easily implement analytics tracking in its mobile apps. The need for flexible app development is central to the success of Vivint since its Vivint Sky mobile app is the primary interface to the customer’s home. Before using Ensighten Mobile, Vivint’s app cycle was severely slowed due to the long App Store approval process. With Ensighten Mobile, Vivint is now able to take control of their software, enabling the company to optimize their mobile apps in real-time, simultaneously reaching end users and improving the customer experience.

Dozens of other major brands are using Ensighten Mobile, including Home Depot, United Airlines, Getty Images, RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland), and Marriott International.

Supporting Nominee Information:
IQ Envoy for Branding, Visual IQ
Over the past few years, more and more marketers have embraced advanced attribution as a way to measure, predict, and improve their marketing performance. But to date, attribution has primarily been a direct response (DR) exercise, providing DR marketers with a clear line of sight between their efforts and conversion behaviors such as leads, purchases, and registrations, as well as financial factors such as ROAS, ROI, and lifetime value.

Marketers responsible for branding, on the other hand, have followed a much bumpier road. For decades, brand marketers have had to rely on survey-based methodologies to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. But survey-based methods pose a number of challenges, including small sample sizes that skew results, insights that lack statistical significance, and infrequent reporting that comes too late to inform campaign optimizations.

Moreover, many organizations wrestle with analyzing and optimizing multiple brand engagement activities into a single “common currency” in order to understand performance. In fact, a 2015 Visual IQ study (attached below) revealed that 80% of US and UK-based brand marketers feel that measuring the impact of branding efforts is more challenging than measuring the impact of direct response efforts. When asked what obstacles they face when it comes to measuring brand performance, 46% of marketers cited they lacked advanced measurement tools and/or methodologies, with another 40% percent citing an inability to calculate a single engagement score metric.

In September 2015, Visual IQ introduced IQ Envoy for Branding, a revolutionary new technology specifically designed to overcome the measurement challenges that have plagued brand marketers for years. IQ Envoy for Branding is changing the way brand marketers operate by providing the tools they need to effectively measure the true impact that each media channel and tactic has on brand engagement.

IQ Envoy for Branding offers brand marketers more control and accountability than ever before by providing a single currency to measure and optimize brand engagement across channels and tactics on a more frequent and granular basis than survey-based metrics. Leveraging the Visual IQ platform’s core algorithmic attribution model, the product automatically incorporates multiple brand engagement activities, such as website interactions, video views, rich media ad interactions -- or any other brand engagement activity defined by an advertiser -- into an overall key performance indicator (KPI) metric known as a TrueEngagement Score. For the first time, brand marketers have access to a unified view of their media’s true impact on brand engagement, and the ability to optimize their efforts at a granular level (keyword, placement, creative, etc.) in order to drive incremental brand lift. Additionally, brand marketers can measure de-duplicated reach across channels, devices, and publishers, and quantify each brand engagement activity’s impact on conversions.

Since its release, Visual IQ’s branding measurement solution is already proving to have a demonstrable impact on organizations and the effectiveness of their branding efforts. During the initial beta period, three brands representing the retail, financial services, and technology sectors recognized a staggering 19% average lift in brand engagement in just three month as a result of using IQ Envoy for Branding. Following the beta tests, the first live client achieved at 23% lift in brand engagement across three digital channels and 16 different brand engagement activities.

Supporting Nominee Information:
- Branding Measurement in Today’s Accountable World: A Tale of Two Marketers
- Visual IQ Introduces Advanced Attribution Platform Upgrades Designed for Brand Marketers
Persona, Blueocean Market Intelligence
Over the last few years, we have seen tremendous change in the digital industry. Given norms and business rules no longer hold up in today’s multi-touch, multi-dimensional, customer centric world. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are not as effective nor do they represent the new age of dynamic and interconnected markets.

While working on an advanced segmentation exercise using traditional segmentation methods, Blueocean Market Intelligence realized the importance of combining digital footprinting with customer reviews and feedback to enable an outside-in view of consumer business, in contrast to a typical heavy emphasis on the inside-out viewpoint. This notion also further supported the importance of catching the customer early in the digital journey. Regardless of the industry, we see that customers are getting more and more impatient - demanding personalized attention, enjoying instant gratification and living in the advent of global connect made possible by companies like Amazon. Blueocean Market Intelligence set out to develop a standalone, highly configurable and custom technology platform that could help global businesses connect the dots and provide a more prescriptive segmentation and mass personalization solution, rather than running the same, less than compelling campaigns and offers.

Introducing PersonaTM, Blueocean Market Intelligence’s 360 customer segmentation solution that enables mass personalization of business connections. Using proprietary NLP techniques, machine learning algorithms and digital footprinting exercise, we have seen our clients successfully migrate from using a confused set of EXCEL-based segmentation results to actual ‘real-time’ knowledge of their customers, creating a far-reaching competitive advantage.

As a platform, PersonaTM opens up immense possibilities for driving more improved marketing communications effectiveness by enabling specific customer targeting based on a specific algorithm. The platform combines the power of both social and digital – creating linkage between enhanced segmentation, personalized communication, targeted campaigns, consumer insights and a customer level propensity score. Including:
- Reveal real-time insights for an individual
- Create micro and outside-in customer segments
- Integrate CRM or other data sources
- Achieve a customizable score – Propensity, At-Risk, etc.
- Identify power users and remove noise
- Work in both B2C and B2B environments (social relevancy vs. propensity to buy)
- Provide overall customer interaction with brands and products as well as individual customer behaviors and brand interaction
- Ascertain direct or indirect impact to business performance measures, using customer behavioral scores arrived at by using their digital footprint as benchmark Using PersonaTM as the vehicle for advanced customer analytics, global marketing teams are able to market to customers at an individual level and remain more competitive and relevant than ever before.
Supporting Nominee Information:
- www.blueoceanmi.com
- https://youtu.be/R1a1n7OyKbA
Signum, Quantifind
Quantifind helps brands explore, understand and change their impact on revenue. Our on-demand insights platform, Signum, uses explanatory analytics to inform important marketing decisions around campaigns, sponsorships, creative direction, product, and brand strategies. Quantifind's clients are some of the world’s most well-known brands spanning multiple industries including movie studios, telecom, retail, and consumer packaged goods.

Why is Signum different? Signum by Quantifind offers the best of multiple approaches to marketing data in a single solution:
- Ties marketing activities to revenue
- Explains why marketing is working
- Reveals smarter questions to explore
- Discovers new revenue opportunities
- Does all this in real time
- Uses explanatory analytics
What does “explanatory analytics” mean, and why is it a valuable technology? Explanatory analytics allow marketers to understand how and why business decisions translate into financial outcomes. This accomplishes two things: marketing professionals can validate the success of past actions by discerning which decisions drove revenue, and more importantly, this information can be used to guide future actions. For example, by using exploratory analytics, marketers are able to understand which factors are driving revenue among certain demographics as well as answer questions to improve marketing programs and drive revenue. A beverage company accustomed to seeing sales peaks in the summer might know that sales spikes haven’t been as high over the last few years. Why is there a decline in the average spike? Which messages or demographic groups should the company target in the future in order to grow revenue?

Explanatory analytics also gives marketers the ability to explore various correlations and test their human intuition against the data. It’s more than just tracking data; they can also start to discover new opportunities. And because they understand why things are correlated, they have more confidence in actually acting on the data. In short, explanatory analytics allow a user to understand the stories hidden in their data and to take confident actions, all without resorting to technical jargon or black boxes. Businesses need to make strategic bets based on data, but without the confidence that comes from understanding how data insights translate into strategy, it becomes difficult to make mission-critical strategic bets. Who should be paying attention to and using explanatory analytics? Anybody who is in a strategic position to make big decisions, overwhelmed with data and doesn't know how to map said data into strategy.

Quantifind presently works primarily with CMOs and marketers, as they possess the authority and operational know-how to be in the sweet spot for this type of technology. However, Quantifind is not just throwing one tool to one person. People work in teams, and in today’s collaborative digital workplace, they all need to speak the same language. As Quantifind grows, its users will expand to include executives outside of marketing, up to the CEO. Quantifind also partners closely with in-house analytics and social media teams, providing them with the solutions that help reveal the full business value of the data they’re working with every day. Does a marketer have to be a data expert to use explanatory analytics? No. The product should speak the language of the customer – like Signum does. Quantifind believes the human shouldn’t have to learn the machine’s language.

How does the product speak the language of the customer? Does that have to do with the metrics used?    It’s often important not to focus on just a metric. It’s more about the story. Numbers are necessary, but not sufficient to form a strategy. The metric needs to fit into a context that includes where the company has been in the past, what the competitive landscape may look like, and what the potential elasticity is for that metric. Language that describes upside and opportunity follows from this.

Signum Stories:
1. Informing Product Strategy for a Quick Serve Restaurant. Question Asked: What is driving breakfast sales, and how do we improve them? Sample Insights Delivered by Signum: - Breakfast sales are underperforming with teenagers (target demographic) because they need a ride from their mom - Underperforming with females because the coffee program is weak - Caffeinated beverages represent a strong opportunity to drive new revenue. Impact: Signum was able to highlight that the best opportunity for the brand’s program to be successful was to promote their caffeinated products. The brand moved their new coffee launch up 6 months early and coffee sales doubled. The brand also began to assess new marketing strategies for reaching teenagers around their breakfast products.

2. Helping Beverage Company Renegotiate Sponsorship. Questions Asked: How effective is our NFL sponsorship, should we renew, and if so, how? Sample Insights Delivered by Signum: - Revealed that the sponsorship was not driving sales as effectively as the brand had previously believed - Revealed ways to derive more value from the sponsorship. Impact: The beverage company successfully renegotiated their NFL sponsorship, and secured a $9 million increase in sponsorship placement value (including branding on the practice field). Signum's analysis provided a template for ways to further boost the effectiveness of other sponsorship activities across the organization.

3. Soda Company Makes a Big Strategic Bet. Question Asked: Which health concerns are negatively impacting beverage sales? Sample Insights Delivered by Signum: - A “particular ingredient” had the largest negative impact on beverage sales, specifically with women - Cancer and obesity led the list of perceptions of the dangers of this ingredient. Impact: Signum was able to identify which ingredients were impacting sales in a negative way. After years of declines in beverage sales across the category, this brand was able to engage in a major brand re-launch to showcase the change in ingredients.
Supporting Nominee Information:
http://www.quantifind.com
Watson Trend, IBM
Digital Analytics has been long defined as the set of activities that transform digital data into insights that create business value. Practically speaking, Digital Analytics has long been the domain of aggregated analytics on clicks and purchase behavior. During the Holiday 2015 shopping period, that definition was dramatically expanded.

Over the summer, IBM had been thinking about how shoppers tend to use their social networks to inform their purchase decisions -- especially during the holidays. However we realized the inherent limitations with this approach - that the people who may be best suited to provide the best purchase advice may not be in my immediate social network. We dreamed about using the cognitive power of Watson - the Jeopardy winning computer system - to harness the collective digital conversation of BILLIONS of people on the planet. And we set out on a fast paced, three month initiative to see if we could put the power of a new breed of digital analytics into the hands of SHOPPERS, as well as retailers.

On November 11, 2015 IBM Watson Trend (www.ibm.com watsontrend) was introduced as an app on iTunes, Google Play and available online at www.ibmwatsontrend.com. Watson Trend was built with the same digital analytics know-how as IBM's traditional Digital Analytics Benchmark, which has for years delivered insights into HOW shoppers were buying digitally. But this year, the Watson Trend app was introduced to deliver deep digital analytics insights to shoppers on WHAT was trending, and WHY. Now, digital analytics was being leveraged in the form of Watson Trend to put the power of cognitive computing in the hands of individual shoppers!

Watson Trend delivers these unique insights by analyzing tens of millions of digital conversations about purchases on social media, blogs, message boards, forums and ratings & reviews on eCommerce sites. Using the cognitive power of IBM Watson, the app then understood each conversation, grouping them into trends, and determining the overall strength of each trend on a daily basis. Furthermore, the app uses Watson natural language capabilities to uncover the WHY behind each trend, often uncovering unique insights into what was the driving reason or demographic behind each trending product. Lastly, the app forecasts the trend strength of each trend three weeks into the future so that shoppers could see whether this trend had staying power or was just a blip on the radar.

Consumer and news outlet response to Watson Trend was overwhelmingly positive. The app was featured in The Wall Street Journal, NY Times, CNBC, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, CBS, Fox Business, AdAge, and countless other quality news outlets. In fact, the app received coverage from around the globe in over 15 different languages. Shoppers responded by downloading the app and giving it an average of a 4+ review on both iTunes and Google Play. For the week surrounding Black Friday, iTunes featured the app as a "Best New App" as well.

Watson Trend was able to shine a bright light on trends that were on the cusp of going mainstream (e.g. Apple Watch) before it happened, while also introducing shoppers to new, emerging products that they may not have otherwise heard about (e.g. Meccanoid robot). In some cases, such as with Lego bricks, Watson Trend was able to inform shoppers as to what sets were likely to sell out during the holiday season so that they could make their purchases early!

Supporting Nominee Information:
XC Logic Platform, Conversion Logic
The Conversion Logic XC Logic Platform is a purpose-built solution to the challenges of multi-channel attribution. The platform uses the Ensemble Method to deliver accurate, predictive results through a sophisticated yet simple-to-use UI built to empower and inform the marketing practitioner. The Ensemble Method, XC Logic's "secret sauce", trains multiple state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, and combines their predictions together to deliver the most accurate, unique and flexible model for each client. In this way, it outperforms traditional and competitors' attribution models which rely on a single algorithm. While individual models each have strengths and weaknesses, a one-size-fits-all approach can be inaccurate, limiting, and ultimately less effective than XC Logic's "wisdom of crowds" approach. Finally, XC Logic was built with the media practitioner in mind. Its interface and engine combine the most powerful data science with the most actionable insights, so end users have the information they need to effectively optimize their media spend. With XC Logic, attribution is never shelfware – it’s a critical component of the media practitioner’s toolbox.

Supporting Nominee Information:

Most Influential Vendor/Agency (Company)

Acronym
One of the unique qualities of Acronym, the global digital and search marketing agency, is that its staffers aren’t planners or buyers but digital consultants empowered by proprietary technology. David Sprinkle leads Acronym’s Analytics Practice, specializing in tool implementation, analysis, and site optimization. In 2015, David’s team undertook a particularly challenging website analytics project for one of the world’s largest luxury goods marketers. The company had 20 different websites but its internal stakeholders lacked the skills to properly maintain them. As a result:

1) Website data was unreliable
2) It took an inordinate amount of time to extract meaningful insights
3) The internal processes around campaign tracking were extremely painful, slow, and often wound up not working anyway (meaning there was no data around the brand’s paid marketing campaigns).

Moreover, because of how the company was sending data to Adobe, it was incurring tool costs that were about three times what it should have been based on traffic volume—an amount in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

David and his team met extensively with the client’s stakeholders then worked with its developers to completely re-launch the company’s web analytics. At the same time, they created a number of new campaign tracking spreadsheets that drastically simplified the work the client had to do every time it wanted to launch a new campaign.

The results: A direct savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in tool costs, as well as vastly more reliable data. Additionally, David and his team reduced the time it took the client to pull critical reports that used to consume a week each month; now it gets the same insights in a couple of hours. Meanwhile, campaign launches that used to take about a quarter of one employee’s time can now be completed in minutes.

Company Website:
acronym.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
Adobe
As the cornerstone of Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC), Adobe Analytics is the world’s largest enterprise marketing analytics solution, measuring nearly 8 trillion server calls annually for 140,000 marketers, business users and analysts around the globe. Its enables customers to create a holistic view of their business by turning customer interactions into actionable insights through advanced analysis capabilities and intuitive and interactive dashboards and reports that users can sift, sort, and share in real-time. This past year, Adobe Analytics continued to increase its market share of enterprise analytics customers, reaching an impressive 62 percent of Fortune 50, 57 percent of Fortune 100, and 34 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Adobe Analytics’ Fortune 500 customers include:
- Top 6 Entertainment Companies
- 9 of Top 10 Tech Companies
- Top 4 Healthcare Companies
- Top 5 Telecommunications Companies
- Top 3 Internet Services Companies
In addition, Adobe Analytics has consistently been recognized and praised by analysts, having been noted as a leader in Forrester’s most recent The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics Q2 2014 report and Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics 2015 report.

Regardless of its current success and influence in the industry, Adobe is continually evolving the solution. Efforts include adding new analytics and visualization capabilities, and building in tighter integration with AMC’s other seven solutions in order to better enable marketers to take more action on big data and make more customer-focused marketing decisions. Adobe Analytics’ 2015 additions include:
- Analysis Workspace: a new smart data discovery platform, which is helping companies democratize data-driven insights and equipping a new group of “citizen data scientists” by making it easier than ever before for marketers and data analysts to get answers from their growing customer and marketing data. Adobe did this by improving the flexibility of Adobe Analytics’ web-based tools and enabling analysts to curate analysis projects for their business partners. With Analysis Workspace, marketers and analysts can move from static reports to flexible reports, giving internal stakeholders a workspace where they have the ability to act on real-time data to inform their decision-making.
- Contribution Analysis: a new big data learning engine that intelligently identifies “causes” or contributing factors for changes in trended data and anomalies. This saves analysts countless hours by automating hundreds of reports comparing and contrasting results to deliver statistically-relevant conclusions about correlation and causation. It also automatically curates actionable customer segments based on its conclusions to drive immediate action from insights.
- Customer Attributes: enables marketers and analysts to combine descriptive data with online behavioral data to augment customer analysis. This enables users to pipe in data from a CRM system or any other source of online or offline enterprise data as an added analysis dimension (e.g. loyalty program levels). By combining online behavior with customer attributes, analysts can uncover new customer segments, behaviors and other insights to optimize their campaigns.
- Calculated Metrics: removes the lengthy implementation period previously required to get a new metric. The calculated metrics builder allows users to create new metrics on-the-fly, that apply historically, without updating implementation. This capability also enables advanced users to segment, share and curate metrics to remove clutter for business users.
Company Website:
http://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud.html

Supporting Nominee Information:
Alight Analytics
Alight Analytics®, a company based in Kansas City, Missouri, delivers global marketers powerful and actionable marketing analytics. Alight eliminates cumbersome data gathering by combining online data, offline data, sales data and custom data sources together systematically for a single source of truth, which in turn creates clean data with which to analyze. As a pioneer in the space, Alight has been helping marketers solve their data problem and reach unparalleled levels of analysis since 2007.

ABOUT CHANNELMIX
Alight’s main product is ChannelMix®, a data-as-a-service marketing data aggregation platform. The ChannelMix marketing data platform uses a library of consumer and transformation classes written in Python. The application housing these classes interfaces with a long list of data-sources and is designed to be configurable for the differing needs of our clients. The consumer classes pull data from the data sources, and pass that data to the transformation classes. Here, data is reconfigured into a form that is simple to ingest into our cloud-based, peta-byte scale, analysis oriented data warehouse. These data consumers and transformers are designed to operate in a horizontally scalable fashion that allows Alight to quickly pull and load data from an ever-increasing list of sources.

The operation of this system is controlled by a Python application that makes use of a NoSQL database system to hold the required information that is added to a queue. Jobs are added to the queue using cron style schedules with configurable retries and error handling/logging. The never-ending queue is monitored by automated processes to configure new consumer/transformation applications as needed.    In addition to loading this data into our data-warehouse, ChannelMix is capable of placing the data on FTP Servers and other file stores (which we do for back-up purposes as well as data delivery.) Alight can also supply this data to a cloud-based database of the client’s choosing for ingestion into other Business Intelligence/Visualization tools. Lastly, ChannelMix uses statistical outlier tests to check the quality of the data. These tests run separately from data ingestion to monitor internal processes and identify any data sources that are behaving abnormally, which helps Alight’s Data Scientists keep client data in check, and help clients react quickly to abnormalities found in their data streams.

HOW CHANNELMIX IS USED
ChannelMix can be consumed in one of three different ways, depending on the needs of the client: ChannelMix Feed, ChannelMix Self Service, and ChannelMix Full Service. ChannelMix Feed, ideal for companies with dedicated business staff and business intelligence tools already in place, provides the most control over how data is organized and displayed. Data is cleansed and aggregated through the ChannelMix platform and fed nightly for storage behind the client company’s firewall, allowing the client the ability to create performance reports, analyze results, and build dashboards. ChannelMix Self Service works similarly to Feed; however, with Self Service, Alight administers the data management aspect of the client’s data. In addition, Alight teaches clients how to use state-of-the-art data visualization tools to maximize analysis. Finally, with ChannelMix Full Service, Alight acts as the data aggregator, platform service provider, and business analyst. Not only does Alight manage the client’s data, but also finds opportunities in that data. Alight’s professional services team joins the client’s. Alight’s web tracking professionals, data aggregation specialists, business analysts, and data scientists bring insights to companies poised to take advantage of all of these competencies. With ChannelMix, clients are freed from the irritation of hours of manual data management, allowing for more time to analyze their Marketing data. And with ChannelMix, a BI tool agnostic solution, clients have the ability to use whatever visualization tool they are most comfortable with. Ultimately, the ChannelMix platform acts as Marketing’s data engine, solving the industry’s data problem.

HOW CHANNELMIX HELPS CLIENTS
ChannelMix has been a major asset to clients, as it has averted hours of manual data munging. Some clients in particular have suggested they’ve been saved up to 80 hours of manual data collection and connection a month, giving them back two whole weeks to reallocate to actual data analysis. What’s more, clients are provided holistic data that helps with the clarity of analysis. As Gary Sakin, Monsanto’s Global Digital Communications Lead, notes, “Before working with Alight we had an online program and an offline program that frankly lived on a flowchart. After partnering with Alight we have an integrated data/dashboard that combines all offline and digital activity in one place. We now have a true decision-making tool through a scalable integrated platform that allows us to understand program results in real time through data feeds on a national, regional, state or even county level. The insight gained through this dashboard continues to add value in how we approach and continually enhance our advertising efforts.” Alight’s commitment to clean, aggregated data makes it an essential vendor within the field of marketing analytics. Through its process, Alight has saved companies hours of low-level data management and provided unmatched data analysis. Consequently, it is deserving of the Digital Analytics Association’s Most Influential Vendor Award.

Company Website:
www.alightanalytics.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
- https://www.alightanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Multi-Brand-Geographical-Case-Study.pdf
- https://www.alightanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Alight-Analytics-Marketing-Attribution-Case-Study.pdf
Analytics Pros

Analytics Pros has been a huge help on projects large and small. When we have an emergency they're quick to respond and invaluable in diagnosing very tricky problems. And when we want to take our analytics to the next level, they have the talent and knowledge to provide the support we need for strategizing, implementation, and doing complex analysis on the new data we're collecting.

Company Website:
https://www.analyticspros.com
Blueocean Market Intelligence
We live in a multi-dimensional world with hyperconnected customers and changing advent of digital economies, and sound business decisions come not from data sources kept in silos, but rather from the synthesis of information. Businesses understand the value of synthesized information, but are rarely equipped to triangulate information from multiple data streams available in the age of Big Data. In a world with increasingly larger volumes and complexity of data, it is essential to have a well-triangulated and complete view of information that originates from sources as diverse as social channels, online feedback, personal customer interactions, customer surveys, sales transactions, customer support feedback, and many others. Gone are the days when EXCEL-based, automated dashboards were enough to answer key business and strategic questions, and stakeholders were content looking at customer touchpoints across different channels as separate entities.

Since our inception, Blueocean Market Intelligence has challenged conventional, fragmented decision making and instead focused on helping companies meet the challenges of today with a transformative and holistic approach called 360 Discovery which produces true intelligence designed to drive data-driven decisions.   With the advent of Big Data technologies and advanced BI platforms, organizations are increasingly investing in building not only more complex data lakes, but teams of data engineers, data scientists, statisticians, business analysts and BI experts who can analyze petabytes and terabytes of data daily. Since day one, Blueocean Market Intelligence has followed an APP-driven approach which encompasses using different data sources to integrate in a single platform to enable more simplified analytics and data view for marketing and sales teams by deploying apps over the analytics infrastructure. Our more than 1,000 analysts provide effective and timely decision support for sales, marketing and product planning. With a company culture centered on innovation, creativity and data exploration, it has allowed us to be nimble, continuously adapting to and developing emerging technologies and processes that meet the needs and desires of companies leading their industries.

Over the years, as an analytics and insights leader with a unique 360 approach, we have been able to successfully help clients tap into the “untapped” potential of data analysis, including:
- Support confident, data-driven decisions in a world of information explosion
- Drive business impact to the topline and bottom line
- Address the constant pressure to do more with less with amplified return on investment and attribution
- Provide increased scalability, speed and global reach for agile solution deployment
- Thrive (not just survive) in the digital, social and mobile world. With the continuous of analytics companies, we understand that leading companies have a choice when it comes to their provider.
With the proof represented by our firm stability and scale, business maturity, IP and technology-enabled solutions (such as Persona, Minerva, Synergist, LiNK and UTAP), and a respected list of Fortune 500 and 1000 clients, Blueocean Market Intelligence has been able to successfully develop centers of excellence with a 360 lens to enhance analytics maturity while delivering continue value throughout the entire customer life cycle.

Company Website:
www.blueoceanmi.com
Hub'Scan Inc.
After being voted Technology of the Year at the 2015 DAA Excellence Awards, Hub'Scan has gained considerable reputation and proven the value of quality assurance for digital marketing platform. This influence was made even more concrete with strategic partnerships with major digital agencies and by signing deals with worldwide digital brands in luxury, automotive and retail among others. After an extensive evangelisation campaign, Hub'Scan has spread the word about data quality as an essential part of digital business processes. By doing so, the Boston-based software company has garnered considerable influence as an independent, impartial and reliable provider of digital marketing quality assurance services.

Company Website:
http://www.hub-scan.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
- http://www.havasmedia.com/press/press-releases/2015/havas-media-group-launches-a-next-generation-meta-quality-barometer-to-increase-online-inventory-quality-and-tackle-ad-fraud
- http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hubscan-ex-recognized-by-the-daa-as-most-innovative-disruptive-technology-for-digital-analytics-499061291.html
IIH Nordic

In the analytics community an agency with a track record of more than 10 years is a rare bird indeed. But this is indeed the case with IIH Nordic.

For more than 10 years IIH Nordic had been revolutionizing the way companies utilize digital analytics data to drive their business goals and objectives.

In this way both IIH Nordic and its founders, Steen Rasmussen and Henrik Stenmann had been specializing in using the growing amount of data we have today in a way that will help the companies understand their markets better and form the new business strategies accordingly. Both partners are today trainers in the Google Partner Academy sharing their insights and experience freely.

Today IIH Nordic is the true image of the data driven agency offering a wide range of services from SEO to Marketing Automation, but the common denominator is still data.

With a staff of more than 50 people where more than 80 % are certified in Google Analytics and with a dedicated staff of more than 15 digital analysts besides the specialized analysts in PPC, social, SEO and persuasion IIH Nordic today delivers more digital analytics power than any other player in the region.

This is also reflected in certifications and partnerships with companies like Google, Adobe, Tealium, Innometrics, Ensighten, Terradata, Seachmetrics and IBM to just mention a few.

At the same time IIH Nordic have actively been pushing the Digital Analytics Association in the country to actually become the country in the world with the highest share of Certified Web Analysts and Google Analytics Certified Partners per capita.

With 5-6 local Digital Analytics Symposiums yearly since 2008 IIH Nordic have provided a consistency and proven a stabile factor in establishing Denmark as one the key places for digital analytics globally and today attracting between 300 and 400 people to the events with international speakers like Jeff Sauer, Mike King, Steve Jackson, Matthias Bettag, Chris Goward and Eric Peterson.

During the last 10 years the company had made analyses and optimized digital communications for some of the best-known brands in the region and through open training programs have shared their knowledge on Google Analytics, digital analytics strategy, social media measurement and online media measurement with thousands.

Furthermore, the company had been specializing in the Nordic region in particular and thus becoming highly specialized for the local Danish, Norwegian and Swedish markets. However, the agency still enjoys international recognition from sharing the insights at eMetrics, SMX, IMC and other international conferences.

IIH Nordic is one of the top innovators when it comes to digital analytics and they have not been restraining from sharing their knowledge all over the world.

IIH Nordic is not a marketing agency with an analytics angle – it’s an analytics agency with a marketing edge and deserves to be rewarded as such.

Company Website:
www.iihnordic.dk
Intellignos
About Intellignos
Intellignos is the leading Big Data Analytics company for the Americas, part of Havas Media Group, that develops proprietary know how focused on help companies improve their competitive situation through the strategic use of the information.

About the nomination
Intellignos nomination came from its clients, all global corporations, that work with Intellignos for many years. The following are some of the reasons that companies like Mercado Libre, Telefonica, The Walt Disney Company, FOX Channels, among others, provide for the nomination.

Intellignos is making an incredible approach helping startups to get a better insight in his analytics, growing their companies with the use of business intelligence.

Always ahead of the curve, professional and focused leadership.

Intellignos has been working with us for many years both as consultants and as partners providing executive education for companies.

Intellignos helped us to know the value of web analytics information.

Intellignos developed an ad-hoc and dynamic attribution model that helped us have a better understanding of how each marketing channel was responsible of the company’s results and then, improve our predictive power. Since the model uses a Machine Learning algorithm the predictive certainty increases with our experience.

Free contributions Intellignos made in 2015 to the Analytics Industry
- 2015 Big Data Analytics Dictionary
- 2015 KPI Book for Publishers
Clients: The Walt Disney Company, Unilever, Google, FOX Channels, DIRECTV, City of Houston, Venture Hive, Telefonica, Wayra, LAN, Mercado Libre, MovieCity, Nintendo, Televisa and Whirlpool among many others.

Partnerships: ADOBE Enterprise Solution Partner, Google Analytics Certified Partner, Google Analytics Premium Reseller, Google Clould Platform Partner, Google Analytics Certified Trainer, IBM Business Partner, Keepcon Certified Partner and Klipfolio Registered Partner.

Intellignos performance: Intellignos multiplied its revenues per 10 in the past tree years.

Company Website:
www.intellignos.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
LunaMetrics
I am nominating LunaMetrics for THE Most Influential Agency of the Year award, for their continued excellence in the field and their dedication to digital analytics education. Started by Robbin Steif over ten years ago, LunaMetrics works with clients to strategically implement and interpret digital analytics, as well as increase traffic through measureable and sustainable tactics.

Already a Google Analytics Certified Partner and Google Analytics Premium Authorized Reseller, in 2015 LunaMetrics joined the inaugural group of Google Tag Manager Certified Partners, demonstrating proficiency and past customer successes with the tool. LunaMetrics continued to grow its impressive client list across all industries: ecommerce, publishing, higher education, technology, and non-profits, to name a few. LunaMetrics cohosted a Google Analytics Premium event with Google in the Spring and added two new case studies throughout the year.

2015 was a great year for LunaMetrics, with many digital analytics achievements and an increased public presence in the digital analytics industry. In October, LunaMetrics published “Practical Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for Developers,” a comprehensive guide combining analytics strategy, step-by-step instructions, and industry best practices. As one of the first books to tackle the subject in such depth, it received high praise from industry juggernauts Paul Muret, Avinash Kaushik, and Simo Ahava as well as a forward by Daniel Waisberg.

The book was written by Jonathan Weber, LunaMetrics’s data evangelist, with help from the collective knowledge of the entire LunaMetrics team. In addition to the book, Jonathan has also been key in raising awareness of the power of data for businesses of all sizes. With LunaMetrics, Jonathan travels the country leading Google Analytics seminars and Google Tag Manager Workshops. His work in the industry includes initiatives like the Media Impact Project, where along with industry, academic, and metrics experts, Jonathan debates the role of analytics in media and the power of measurement resulting in articles and whitepapers.

In addition to Jonathan, LunaMetrics team members have taken the stage at national conferences, joined academic roundtables, and conducted webinars that focus on digital analytics strategy and its potential uses. It’s this type of visibility that has allowed LunaMetrics to attract top talent and grow its workforce by almost 40% in 2015, largely in the analytics department; growth that was reflected with their second-annual Inc 5000 award.

Not only does LunaMetrics take on projects for nationally recognized clients and contribute to industry events, but it also holds public trainings in Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Google Tag Manager in 13 cities across the U.S. Thousands of marketers, webmasters, business owners, and agency employees took advantage of these classes in 2015 to build their company’s data power. One of most notable contributions that LunaMetrics has made to the analytics world is through its consistent blog publishing. Taking cues from emerging trends, client experiences, and questions from trainees, the high-traffic blog is updated with the intent to inform a wide audience of data enthusiasts - from those just getting their toes wet to the deep sea data divers. The blog offers simple explanations to complex topics, step-by-step instructional guides, clever workarounds, strategy and opinion pieces, and more that are helpful for individuals implementing analytics solutions or agencies trying to add competencies or clarify best practices.

The discussion section of any blog post is filled with informal Q&A, giving a face and personality to the author and the blog audience. The community created around the LunaMetrics blog is largely unmatched in the analytics community. In conjunction with their book in October and in an effort to ease the learning curve of Google Tag Manager, LunaLabs was formed on the LunaMetrics site in Fall 2015 with an initial collection of Google Tag Manager “recipes.” These downloadable collections of Tags, Triggers, and Variables allow agencies and individuals to implement basic tracking solutions through Google Tag Manager without having to duplicate their efforts.

It really is no question why LunaMetrics should be considered for the Most Influential Agency Award. This diverse group of data lovers is continually sharing its knowledge with the digital analytics industry, whether through consulting and public trainings or through their various contributions with their book and online blog. For over ten years and particularly in 2015, LunaMetrics has been a consistent and influential voice in the analytics industry.

Company Website:
www.lunametrics.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
MaassMedia, LLC
MaassMedia, LLC is a boutique digital analytics consulting firm that partners with all types of organizations to break through the clutter of their digital data. Headquartered in Philadelphia with offices in Boston, DC, Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta and Vietnam, MaassMedia provides services across the digital analytics landscape, including advanced implementation, custom data visualization, mobile and social analytics, advanced statistical analysis and testing and optimization.

We were founded in 2008 by Aaron Maass, former head of e-commerce at Comcast and one of the early pioneers of tag-based web analytics. Since then, MaassMedia has grown 45% year over year in revenue for the past seven years and has helped some of the world’s largest companies improve their online customer experience, optimize their digital marketing initiatives and generate incremental revenue via digital channels.

Over the past 7 years we have worked with dozens of clients including Comcast Business, ESPN, NBC Universal, Lenovo, Verisign, Coldwell Banker, Publishers Clearinghouse, First Data, Eastman Chemical, W.L. Gore, Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton, Mars Drinks, RIA Financial, Penn Medicine and the Philadelphia Flyers.

We approach digital analytics with a broader view than most marketing service providers because we don't provide any tactical marketing services and are completely vendor agnostic. We are 100% focused on performing strong analyses that are objective, holistic and results-driven.    And because our business depends on the quality of the professional services provided by our people, we put a lot of time and energy into identifying, hiring, training and retaining some of the best and brightest digital analytics talent you can find in the industry.

At the end of the day, our clients hire us because we help them unlock insights in data that allow them acquire and retain more customers and make better business decisions. Building on the deep knowledge and industry expertise of our talented team, we always strive to provide exceptional value to our clients. As we like to say, "You see data, we see data differently."

MaassMedia's reputation and influence in the digital analytics industry is evident by the following:
- 7 years in business
- Over 60 major clients served
- Staff have spoken at over 15 major conferences and events including eMetrics San Francisco, American Marketing Association, J.Boye, DAA D.C. Symposium, DAA Philadelphia Symposium, Conversion Conference, SES, OMI, Google Analytics Summit, Adobe Marketing Summit, Web Analytics Wednesday
- Over 130 published blog and research articles
- Appearances on Sirius XM Business Radio
Company Website:
www.maassmedia.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
Nabler Web Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

It's an 11 year old digital analytics consulting firm who has produced hundreds of analysts over these years and have been an incubation centre for budding analysts in India. They have always given them a platform to initiate their digital analytics journey. They have been managing the performance reporting for some of the prestigious media agencies in North America. They have been providing project and retainer-based services to large enterprises in the field of implementation and conversion audits, tag management, data visualization, building marketing data marts, testing & optimization and KPI workshops. They are also the solution partners for Adobe, Google, Tableau, Klipfolio and Tealium in SEA.

Company Website:
www.nabler.com
Supporting Nominee Information:
http://analyticsindiamag.com/nabler-the-digital-analytics-company/
ObservePoint

ObservePoint helps data-informed companies trust their data and better serve their customers through the application of best practices in tag auditing. As any web analyst in the trenches will admit, web analytics is hard. Reports from different analytics tools often don’t match and conflict. Tracking breaks impacting reporting and site functionality. And manual audits of web and mobile app analytics implementations are expensive, time-consuming and still prone to human error.

Founded in 2008 by John Pestana and Rob Seolas, ObservePoint pioneered automated web and app analytics auditing. ObservePoint’s global network audits millions of pages every month to report data loss, inflation and leakage to web analytics managers and stakeholders of some of the world’s leading enterprise companies. ObservePoint’s patented WebAssurance™ technology carefully combs through all the code on each webpage on a site, looking for errors and gaps in reporting caused by data corruption, inflation and leakage.

AppAssurance™ is a cloud-based solution that scans an organization’s mobile app, analyzing 3rd-party vendor implementations for integration and functionality errors. By validating functionality and data quality, users maximize the ROI on their mobile app investments and gain a competitive advantage by achieving accurate business insights. ObservePoint’s Data Quality Assurance Platform ensures that customer data is accurately collected, utilized, and safeguarded, giving their organizations the confidence to make better decisions based on better data. ObservePoint has increased annual revenue 100% year over year for the past three years. In 2015, ObservePoint secured a 231% increase in new bookings from 2014. The dynamic growth of the company is evident of the delight and success customers find in the product.

Company Website:
http://www.observepoint.com
Search Discovery

Search Discovery has been a leading agency since 2004. Since launching our analytics practice in 2008, we have built a reputation for leadership and collaboration in the industry. It is my pleasure to submit Search Discovery for consideration as 2016's Most Influential Agency. Search Discovery is best known for Satellite, one of the industry's first tag management systems, which was purchased by Adobe in 2013. Since then, SDI has continued our commitment to technical leadership. Search Discovery's consultants have contributed to and continue to evangelize the W3C's Consumer Experience Digital Data Layer as an industry standard for organizing digital data. SDI continues to innovate through dozens of implementations of the data layer, developing best practices for digital data layers, and by building functions to make deployment and management of digital data layers easier. This year, Search Discovery became one of the first Google Tag Manager Partners to become certified through the new GTM certification program.

Search Discovery has built and deployed one of the industry's first processes for extracting raw Google Analytics data via BigQuery, importing it into big data tools, and ultimately visualizing that data for flexible analysis. Search Discovery has partnered with DOMO to become one of the industry's first and leading agencies to be able to deploy customized solutions for the tool. This work with DOMO will pave the way for a new generation of digital analytics practices for streamlining and distributing data analysis.

Search Discovery consultants continue to help others in the industry grow through frequent speaking engagements at several conferences including eMetrics Boston, SuperNova South, DAA Symposia and others. SDI's analytics practice lead is one of the co-hosts of the popular "Digital Analytics Power Hour" podcast where a number of analytics topics are discussed with valuable insight and humor.    Perhaps the most compelling example of SDI's influence is the investment we make quietly and individually in the lives and careers of both our consultants and clients. Our collaborative approach to consulting is based on our commitment to key values of pioneering, humility, creativity, and craftsmanship (oh, the irony of touting "humility" in an award submission). Our earnest and somewhat quirky culture has allowed us to build strong and lasting relationships in the digital analytics community. These relationships allow us to both positively influence, and be positively influenced by other top professionals as we work together to advance the digital analytics industry.

Company Website:
www.searchdiscovery.com
Society Consulting

Society Consulting is one of the largest and fastest-growing privately-held data and analytics consultancies in the country. Society consultants are continually recognized for their deep talent and professionalism, and the company has created a culture of growth, leadership, and passion within the consulting team that is very unique in the industry. The company thrives on helping clients succeed by understanding the core analytics challenges and providing an intelligent and achievable path to success.

Company Website:
www.societyconsulting.com
Standing Dog Interactive

Recognizing the explosive growth of technology while fulfilling its promise to use data-driven methods to create holistic digital strategies for its clients, Standing Dog Interactive has created a dedicated department for Digital Marketing Technology, analytics tracking, dashboard creation, tag management, advanced event tracking and much more. This is just one of the many reasons the company of nearly 70 employees deserves to win Digital Analytics Association’s nod as Most Influential Vendor/Agency.

While our 10-year-old agency has worked with digital analytics since its inception, the establishment of this team has allowed us to dig deeper and provide clients with actionable insights and better KPIs by tracking actual user interactions. This, in turn, has helped our clients in the hospitality, senior living, apartment management and shopping verticals make stronger marketing decisions when it comes to their SEO, paid and social media campaigns.

Over the last two years, the agency has invested hundreds of hours of time so employees can learn JavaScript, jQuery, RegEx, Google Tag Manager and event tracking, which allows us to pull any data type that can be interacted with onsite and pushes it through Google Tag Manager into Google Analytics, onsite events, third-party pixels, eCommerce tags, etc.

This new knowledge has allowed us to expand our company’s service offerings to include placement of AdWords, Floodlights and all third-party pixels, eCommerce tracking, dataLayer creation and placement, dataLayer, JavaScript and CSS selector variables, custom dimensions and metrics, unique user Ids, goal funnels and filters all placed through Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, instead of by our clients dev. team.

We have also developed new product offerings that are geared around our new skill sets, including, GTM setup and implementation, full site event categorization and creation plans, targeted onsite messaging and remarketing based off of user interactions, third-party pixel migration and integration plans, large scale call tracking, custom dashboard creation, advanced Google Analytics setup and implementation, website new build or migration consultation services and excel/API tool builds. These new service offerings have opened up new client possibilities, while increasing the company’s overall abilities and efficiency.

Because of Standing Dog’s forward-thinking approach and openness to allow employees to not only learn but utilize new technologies on “live” clients, I feel this spirit captures the essence of what DAA stands for and propels us into the lead for Most Influential Vendor/Agency for this year’s Awards of Excellence.

Thanks for your consideration!
Michael Ulrich
Director of Digital Marketing Technology

Company Website:
www.standingdog.com

PS: I have attached an example of just one our ideas that shows the creative ways we are using marketing technology to deliver better ROI due to relevant messaging and retargeting.

USING EVENT TRACKING TO BUILD BETTER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

What we are tracking: No Availability Event Example (Hospitality Clients)
This event allows us to track when people search for hotel dates at a specific hotel, and when no dates are available, the no availability event fires. Through the use of jQuery or JavaScript that we have written, the event tracks the hotel name (if the client has multiple hotels), the date of the event, check in & check out dates, promo codes if any were used. For more advanced reporting capabilities, we also create custom dimensions and push them into Google Analytics. These custom dimensions can then be used as a secondary dimension that can pull reports in the events section that are centered around any one specific custom dimension or data point (event date, check in & check out dates, hotel name, promo code)

Example 1: No Availability Event Multiple Hotels

Example 2: No Availability Event Single Hotel

Why we are tracking:
This event stores especially useful marketing information that can be pulled for later use. This event can also be used to trigger remarketing and retargeting campaigns, and unique onsite messages that are relevant to the visitor because they are triggered by actual user interactions.

Use Case Scenarios: These are examples and not specific to any specific client

Onsite Messaging: (Spring Engage)
When people don't find the dates they are looking for on the hotel they want to stay at, this event is triggered, allowing custom messages to be shown directly to them directing them to either a sister hotel in the area, or offering a small discount for booking on another date.

Retargeting/Remarketing: (Many 3rd party pixels)
When people don't find the dates they are looking for on the hotel they want to stay at, visitors can also be retargeted or remarketed (cookied) using any number of 3rd party pixels that can be optimized, so when they leave the site they get relevant remarketing messaging letting them know if they come back the can receive a discount for staying on a different date or at another hotel in the area.

Synopsis:
This is just one example of how we can create custom digital marketing campaigns geared around onsite events that are triggered by actual user interactions that help you build better marketing campaigns that have more relevancy, better timing, and unique messaging. These campaigns will resonate better with the visitor, speak to an immediate need, and return higher ROI for your client.
TMMData
Headquartered outside of State College, Pa. with offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City, TMMData was established in 2008 by co-founders Bob Selfridge and Chris Walsh. For more than seven years, the company’s data intelligence software as a service (SaaS) offering has enabled midâ€ÂÂÂÂlevel to enterpriseâ€ÂÂÂÂscale organizations to easily access, aggregate, analyze and normalize data from nearly any source. Analysts, managers and executives can utilize TMMData’s SaaS to manage large amounts of online and offline data, driving increased productivity in data manipulation and efficiency in organizational decision-making.

TMMData’s unique platform streamlines the often complicated process of collecting, organizing and cleansing data, allowing businesses to easily transform information into intelligence. The company currently provides flexible data management SaaS to customers including Comcast, Sony, FedEx, Blue Cross Blue Shield, T-Mobile, Rowan University and the Pennsylvania State University, among others.     This past fall, TMMData was named number 657 (part of the top 15 percent) on Inc. Magazine’s 34th annual Inc. 5000 list, a ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The 2015 Inc. 5000 list celebrates entrepreneurship and innovation and is organized according to the percentage of revenue growth from 2011 through 2014. During this time, TMMData better than quintupled its revenue and increased its workforce more than sevenfold. TMMData’s listing on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list is a testament to its continued growth and ability to create customized data solutions for companies of all sizes.

In addition to working with clients, TMMData shares their expertise with the industry by contributing its knowledge to the larger digital analytics community through regional and national speaking engagements and thought leadership columns, including speaking at the Big Data Innovation Summit and publishing a contributed column for Datanami titled, “How to Talk to Your Boss About Needing Better Data Quality Tools.” Most recently, Mr. Selfridge will be listed as one of 2015’s Top 100 People by the Pennsylvania Business Central and Marcellus Business Central in its January 22 issue.

Client Case Study
A medical staffing company that filters prospect interactions in the tens of thousands from 20 different third-party vendors in varying formats turned to TMMData to help the company automate its lead generation process to reduce the number of hours its staff was spending manually sorting through lead data. This process had resulted in hundreds of frustrating man hours spent sifting through prospect data from several different sources creating a large margin of error and delays in lead delivery generated from manual errors and reporting inefficiencies. Implementing TMMData allowed the company to automatically convert data to a standardized format, updated internal sales records and delivered real-time prospect information – saving the company more than 50 staff hours per week, which equates to a cost savings of more than $100,000 annually. Additionally, lead delivery time was decreased by 48 hours.

Company Website:
tmmdata.com

Supporting Nominee Information:
Visual IQ
It would be hard to find a vendor that is more influential than Visual IQ. The company has been changing the way marketers think and how they practice analytics since its inception in 2006. As an innovator in marketing attribution, Visual IQ first made an impact on the market through its creation of the industry’s first algorithmic attribution management solution. Its IQ Intelligence Suite of products replaces inaccurate last click and subjective, rules-based measurement approaches by providing marketers with a science-backed understanding of how each marketing channel, campaign and tactic contributes to their overall marketing objectives.

Throughout the years, Visual IQ has remained committed to transforming the way marketers buy media and connect with customers and prospects through the introduction of a number of industry “firsts.” Visual IQ’s technology was the first-of-its-kind to combine and analyze data from both online and offline channels to offer an all-encompassing approach for understanding marketing performance. Visual IQ was also the first company to offer a media spend recommendation product, which elevated the science of attribution from analysis to optimization; the first to bridge the gap between media performance and audience characteristics; and the first to automatically push attributed metrics into media buying execution platforms.

So it’s no surprise that Visual IQ’s commitment to innovation and delivering extraordinary value to clients would carry into 2015, when the company looked to tackle a problem that has plagued marketing organizations for years – branding measurement.

Consider today’s marketing and advertising ecosystem. Its increased trackability and measurability has given birth to data-driven, analytically savvy direct response marketers who have a clear line of sight between their efforts and conversion behaviors such as leads, purchases, and registrations, as well as financial factors such as ROAS, ROI and lifetime value.

Marketers responsible for branding, on the other hand, have followed a much bumpier road. For decades, brand marketers have had to rely on survey-based methodologies to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. But survey-based methods pose a number of challenges, including small sample sizes that skew results, insights that lack statistical significance, and infrequent reporting that comes too late to inform campaign optimizations. Moreover, many organizations wrestle with analyzing and optimizing multiple brand engagement activities into a single “common currency” in order to understand performance. In fact, a 2015 Visual IQ study (attached below) revealed that 80% of US and UK-based brand marketers feel that measuring the impact of branding efforts is more challenging than measuring the impact of direct response efforts. When asked what obstacles they face when it comes to measuring brand performance, 46% of marketers cited they lacked advanced measurement tools and/or methodologies, with another 40% percent citing an inability to calculate a single engagement score metric.

To meet these challenges, Visual IQ introduced a new enhancement to its IQ Intelligence Suite in 2015 that – for the first time – provides brand marketers with the tools they need to effectively measure the true impact that each media channel and tactic has on brand engagement.

This new branding feature offers brand marketers more control and accountability than ever before by providing a single currency for branding measurement and optimization across all channels and tactics. Leveraging the Visual IQ platform’s core algorithmic attribution model, the product automatically incorporates multiple brand engagement activities, such as website interactions, video views, rich media ad interactions, and more, into an overall key performance indicator (KPI) metric known as a TrueEngagement Score. For the first time, brand marketers have access to a unified view of their media’s true impact on brand engagement, and the ability to optimize their efforts at a granular level (keyword, placement, creative, etc.) in order to drive incremental brand lift. Additionally, brand marketers can measure de-duplicated reach across channels, devices, and publishers, and quantify each brand engagement activity’s impact on conversions.

Since its release, Visual IQ’s ground-breaking branding solution is already proving to have a demonstrable impact on organizations and the effectiveness of their branding efforts. During the initial beta period, three brands representing the retail, financial services, and technology sectors recognized a staggering 19% average lift in brand engagement in just three month as a result of using Visual IQ’s branding measurement solution. Following the beta tests, its first live client achieved at 23% lift in brand engagement across three digital channels and 16 different brand engagement activities.

First, after first, after first. Now that’s what I call influential.

Company Website:
www.visualiq.com

Supporting Nominee Information:

Awards for Excellence 2016: Nominees

Congratulations to the 2016 Awards for Excellence Nominees

Digital Analytics Rising Star (Individual)

Practitioner of the Year (Individual)

Most Influential Industry Contributor (Individual)

New Technology of the Year (Technology)

Most Influential Vendor/Agency (Company)

USING EVENT TRACKING TO BUILD BETTER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS