Evidence of local warming

It was a busy week in London last week. There seemed to be a lot on and for me it was probably a good statement on the health of the industry at the moment. Due to an untimely stomach virus I didn’t make it to the Internet Retailing conference in Hammersmith last Tuesday but by all accounts it was well attended and the feedback was pretty positive.

Wednesday and Thursday last week was a combination on Ad-Tech in London and some vendor events. I was involved in Ad-Tech running a couple of workshops. I also took the time out to wander around the exhibition floor on both days. My impression was that it was very busy and this was confirmed by some of the conversations that I had with a number of the web analytics vendors who were exhibiting there including Omniture, Coremetrics and ClickTracks.

I also came across a couple of new web analytic vendors there as well, such as Hiteye.com. I was wondering why anyone would bother entering such a competitive market especially when you have on of the world’s biggest online companies giving away a product for free. However from chatting to them, they’re seems to be some business there for SMEs who don’t want to give away their data away and also for agencies looking for a white label solution to offer to their clients. Interestingly, I read this week that WebTraffic IQ have just been acquired by a web design agency – signs of vertical integration in some parts of the market after all.

On Wednesday afternoon I hot-footed it from Ad-Tech to the Omniture UK launch event in Soho. Bizarrely it was held in the same hotel that WebTrends launched their Version 8 product a few months ago. Talk about “déjà vu”. It did make me wonder about the odds of two companies in the same (relatively small) industry both holding their launch events in the same (relatively small) hotel in London. Synchronicity I guess.

On Thursday I was back in town attending a breakfast seminar organised by Mercardo, who produce a faceted search and merchandising technology. They have set up an office in the UK and going after that market, particularly in the retail space. The seminar involved an interesting presentation by Paul Simon, SVP of Direct Commerce at Sears in the US. He talked about what he believed are the three keys to success in multi-channel retailing:

  • Aligning the organisation around an integrated multi-channel system
  • Delivering custom centric processes
  • Adopting open and integrated technologies

Listening to him I was struck as to how each of these key strands had quite significant data implications and how you couldn’t do any of these things without getting involved in data, metrics and analysis processes. So for example, to align the organisation around multi-channel systems, everyone must have access to multi-channel data. There must be openness around how each channel is performing. KPI’s and targets must focus on overall performance rather than the success of a channel in a silo.

For customer centric processes, you need customer centric data. You need to focus on the customer as your point source of measurement and understanding rather than the channel. And the adoption of open and integrated technologies means a readiness to focus on the challenges of integrating disparate data sources. This was reinforced by Paul when he talked about the importance of focussing and understanding the right metrics to drive your business forward. “Getting the right numbers right” as we call it.

Chatting to him afterwards, I asked him if he had cracked the problems of tracking customer journeys across channels and he said that it was an area that wasn’t easy and they were still working on it. There had been some success in proving the effect on online activity driving traffic to stores but they still didn’t have a full picture on the offline/online customer dynamics. I guess that proves how difficult it is.

So all in all, a good week for the British online marketing technologies scene I thought. The buzz at Ad-Tech and the vendor activity in launch and promotional events suggests that businesses see a good opportunity in this market at the moment. Maybe this time it’s “the real thing”.

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