Gathering insights at MeasureCamp London 2023 (BONUS)
In this bonus episode of The Measure Pod, Dan asked attendees at MeasureCamp London two thought provoking questions. What is the biggest challenge today that will be gone in five years time? And what will be the biggest challenge in the next five years?
Show note links:
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Quotes of the Episode:
- “…I think our industry is just shifting towards first party data and our industry is just thinking about consent as a matter of cookies and I think that’s a mistake” – Celina Belotti
- “…The biggest challenge in the next five years will be finding people with the right skills, trained on the right platforms, with the right degrees, the right way of thinking, that are technical, that understand data and that understand business..” – Julian Erbsloeh
- “…I think the biggest challenge will be as we adopt AI and virtualise users, virtualise sessions, virtualise data connectivity, doing that in a privacy conscious way” – Matt Bentley
Let us know what you think and fill out the Feedback Form, or email podcast@measurelab.co.uk to drop Dan, Dara and Bhav a message directly.
Transcript
The full transcript is below, or you can view it in a Google Doc.
Intro
[00:00:15] Will: Hello, I’m Will, serving as the marketing manager at Measurelab and also working as a producer on The Measure Pod. So, recently, our colleague Dan and co-host of the show had the opportunity to attend MeasureCamp and posed two thought provoking questions to attendees. So, first up, we asked the question of, what is the biggest challenge today that will be gone in five years time? And these are the responses that we got.
Topic
[00:00:40] Tim Leighton-Boyce: My name’s Tim Leighton Boyce and I work for the Government Digital Service specifically. The problem with that one is I have no idea what’s going to be gone. Right now I do have a feeling that we are severely affected by the quality of our data. We’re making assumptions based on small amounts of data, treating them as representative without really being entirely convinced that they are. So I find a lot of problems around that side of it.
[00:01:11] Daniel Abbasi: I’m Dan and I work for Harnham. I think the biggest challenge, particularly in data teams, is how they’re not connected at the moment. I feel like there’s a few different disconnected areas of businesses that aren’t working efficiently. I think in five years time, we’ll have a better idea to connect a few of these different verticals of data and bring them together to a more efficient team.
[00:01:28] Matt Bentley: So I’m Matt Bentley, I work for Loop Horizon, and I’m their head of data architecture and analytics, we’re a consultancy. So the biggest challenge that we won’t have in the next five years, is the migration away from third party cookie based marketing. It’s going to happen next year, 80 percent of the browser market is going to deprecate third party cookies, and so you won’t be able to market that way anymore. And everybody is going to have to find a solution and the most mature solution at the moment is the one, shameless plug, that we help with, which is migrating large enterprises to a first party data marketing strategy.
[00:02:02] Anna Lewis: Hello, I’m Anna Lewis and I run Polka Dot Data, a web analytics agency. The biggest challenge we won’t have is dealing with the interesting launch that GA4 has caused and, you know, it’s sort of been a bit of a tidal wave, but, you know, that tidal wave will slow down, won’t it? And we will all learn to cope with it and businesses will stop being behind in implementing things like that. So things should settle down soon and by five years, I really hope that things have moved on.
[00:02:31] Carmen Jiang: My name is Carmen Jiang, I work at Vekst. I think the biggest challenge right now, or one of those, is that the threshold into going into GA4 from Universal Analytics. I think in five, maybe in only two years, that problem will be gone because all the orgs will be settling into either a new tool or get used to GA4.
[00:02:48] Celina Belotti: My name is Celina Belotti and I work at Precis Digital. First party data activation is something that I’m very, very passionate about right now because I think our industry is just shifting towards first party data and our industry is just thinking about consent as a matter of cookies and I think that’s a mistake and I think users will be giving up their email addresses and their email addresses will end up nowhere knows where, and that’s a mess and consent is not ready for that.
[00:03:16] Jordan Peck: Hi there, I’m Jordan and I’m a Principal Technical Account Manager at Snowplow. I think one of the biggest challenges that will definitely be gone is availability to quantities of data. For so long, for businesses of small and big sizes, it was really hard to get hold of the volume of data that would allow them to confidently answer questions. That isn’t going to be a problem any longer because, proliferation of data and availability of tools is just going to explode.
[00:03:42] Will: We then asked, what will be the biggest challenge in the next five years? And this is what people had to say.
[00:03:48] Tim Leighton-Boyce: You know, we’re in a game of cat and mouse where for whatever reason, various vendors are quite keen on pushing the idea of privacy. And meanwhile, we’ve got another side of the industry, which tends to include the people at conferences like this, who are desperately keen to be using data. And yeah that is a big, big problem. The volume of the data is going down, the flaws in it are becoming more and more apparent.
[00:04:14] Julian Erbsloeh: The biggest challenge in the next five years will be finding people with the right skills, trained on the right platforms, with the right degrees, the right way of thinking, that are technical, that understand data and that understand business. All of those things at the same time.
[00:04:28] Daniel Abbasi: I think the large workforce that we have now will keep increasing over time and it’s how we actually create those more distinct roles for certain specialisms and potentially a lower workforce than we do have now.
[00:04:40] Matt Bentley: I think the biggest challenge in five years time for our industry will be the adoption of AI. So, again, everybody’s talking about cookies, it’s been happening for a long time. I think that cookies are going to continue to go away. And there will be a need to utilize AI for things like recessionization, creating virtual users, creating virtual sessions, connecting disparate data from different websites together. I think the main challenge will be one, getting all of that working and how do you validate that? And how do you validate the models and train the models and so on? That’s going to be a big challenge. The other thing is going to be privacy and making sure that we honor user privacy still as we’re doing that, because although the AI will create virtual users, you’re still targeting real individuals.
[00:05:22] Matt Bentley: And I had a really interesting conversation with a guy who worked in healthcare modeling, where they do a lot of drug testing now against virtual models, machine learning, they don’t do a lot of drug testing, they do like really small samples of patients, and then they extrapolate the rest. And I said, oh you could use that modeled data because it doesn’t relate to an individual in marketing. And he said, yes, but sometimes the modeled data is so accurate that you’re actually targeting one or two people, and so you’ve got the same problem. So I think the biggest challenge will be as we adopt AI and virtualize users, virtualize sessions, virtualize data connectivity, doing that in a privacy conscious way, and you know, and then the regulation that comes along with that and how we, how we make sure that we don’t end up inadvertently breaching user privacy.
[00:06:07] Anna Lewis: What I’m going to say is, the biggest challenge in five years is probably going to be working out, you know, whether or not people actually can save data anywhere and all that privacy malarkey. And then also the other challenges are going to be, I think it’s actually going to be more fun because there’s going to be a wide range of more tools available. I think with less market saturation from Google, I think that’s where we’re going to move to. And I think that actually learning more tools is going to be part of the challenge, that’s also part of the fun of where we go.
[00:06:39] Carmen Jiang: I think GA4, I mean Google in general, opens up a lot of opportunities. One of those is that they are giving the raw data, and export it into BigQuery for free. And a lot of smart orgs are going to catch the opportunity and jump on the bandwagon and then if they partner with a smart agency, with a smart partner, they will be able to merge a lot of the different data sources together. But the next challenge comes in, how do you harmonize that data in the most efficient way and how do you visualize it and how do you extract insight into it? I think that would be the next challenge, a more advanced challenge.
[00:07:14] Celina Belotti: I think a lot of people will be unemployed because of AI and we’ll have AI making so many decisions and also I think that the internet might be under risk because with you know, those, like those interfaces that Google is building, people won’t need to go through websites anymore and they will have to, they will be able to purchase straight from Google and, you know, websites will be gone.
[00:07:39] Jordan Peck: With all that extra data, data governance, data observability, access and cloud security and all that kind of stuff is only going to get more and more complicated and harder to solve.
Outro
[00:07:53] Will: And that’s it for this week. So we’re currently in the process of planning out our next season, which we’re hoping to launch in the next couple of weeks. So keep your eyes peeled for that. But for now, thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.
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Further reading
A step-by-step guide to migrating scheduled queries to Dataform
How to set up a Dataform repository with GitHub & Google Cloud integration
