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Ian Thomas
Closet geek masquerading as a normal human being - elaborate cover story involving a wife & child and an interest in marketing, branding and design.
Interests: Web analytics, opera, music, reading, design, branding, marketing, advertising, software, development, computers
Recent Activity
Does your marketing need a customer graph?
Posted Nov 21, 2017 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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The Electrification of Marketing
Posted Oct 9, 2017 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Is Digital Marketing having its ‘Deep Blue’ moment?
Posted Sep 6, 2017 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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What’s next for the Digital Analytics Association?
Posted May 3, 2017 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Thanks for those additions, Frank!
Solving the attribution conundrum with optimization-based marketing
Accurate multichannel campaign attribution has stumped the online marketing industry for years. But what if the solution is to stop worrying about attribution, and move to an optimization-driven approach? You know those photo mosaic images, which suddenly became terribly popular a few years bac...
Solving the attribution conundrum with optimization-based marketing
Posted Jan 26, 2017 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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6 steps to building your Marketing Data Strategy
Posted Oct 22, 2015 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Merci Laurent! I think this kind of data clean-up is going to become more and more important in the future, as organizations capture ever wider sets of data about their audience/customers.
Ian
Got a DMP coming in? Pick up your underwear
If you’re like me, and have succumbed to the unpardonably bourgeois luxury of hiring a cleaner, then you may also have found yourself running around your house before the cleaner comes, picking up stray items of laundry and frantically doing the dishes. Much of this is motivated by “cleaner gui...
Got a DMP coming in? Pick up your underwear
Posted Aug 26, 2015 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Darrin: It's more the other way around :-)
The seven people you need on your data team
Congratulations! You just got the call – you’ve been asked to start a data team to extract valuable customer insights from your product usage, improve your company’s marketing effectiveness, or make your boss look all “data-savvy” (hopefully not just the last one of these). And even better, you’...
The seven people you need on your data team
Posted Jun 25, 2015 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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The rise of the Chief Data Officer
Posted May 18, 2015 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Is MAU an effective audience metric?
Posted Mar 1, 2015 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Thanks Bob! Good to know someone is still reading...
Ian
Building your own web analytics system using Big Data tools
It’s been a busy couple of years here at Microsoft. For the dwindling few of you who are keeping track, at the beginning of 2012 I took a new job, running our “Big Data” platform for Microsoft’s Online Services Division (OSD) – the division that owns the Bing search engine and MSN, as well as o...
Building your own web analytics system using Big Data tools
Posted Feb 17, 2014 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Google launches cloud-based BigQuery service
Some interesting news today: Google has fully launched the cloud-based BigQuery service that it first previewed last November. From the website: Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets—up to billions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics on demand. The BigQuery service is built on the back of Google’s enormous investments in data infrastructure and exposes some of the clever tools the company has built for internal use to an internal audience. It’s designed to help with ad hoc queries against unstructured data – kind of Hadoop in the cloud with a front-end querying service attached. In this regard it shares some similarities with the Hadoop on Azure service from my illustrious employers. The interesting question with all these cloud-based Big Data services (a list of some of which you can find here, and here) is the acceptability to customers of loading significant amounts of data to the cloud, and dealing with the privacy and security questions that arise as a result. But it is interesting to contrast the significant complexity that attends any conversation about in-house or on-premise big data with... Continue reading
Posted May 1, 2012 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Makul,
I agree that there is a lot of hype around Big Data at the moment. But I do think that there are some companies that are deriving value from it - Microsoft being just one example. As with web analytics about 10 years ago, though, I think that the resources required to leverage Big Data today are still quite considerable. I expect to see the emergence of lower-cost and lower-complexity solutions in the future, which will make it easier for a broader range of organizations to participate.
Cheers,
Ian
Big (Hairy) Data
My eye was caught the other day by a question posed to the “Big Data, Low Latency” group on LinkedIn. The question was as follows: “I've customer looking for low latency data injection to hadoop . Customer wants to inject 1million records per/sec. Can someone guide me which tools or technolog...
*hunts for 'cancel order' option on website...*
WTF Friday: Crocheted Carrots
So I was browsing through Tula’s ever-fabulous blog the other day when I came across a link to NYC-based online shop Blue Tree and some limited edition hand-crocheted vegetables. They’re OK, I thought, if you like that sort of thing, and the carrot would probably make a cute present for your ...
Returning to the fold
Posted Mar 8, 2012 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Er, October. We got married in October, remember? :-)
Knock Knock, I Love You
As if to prove how very much in sync old married couples like me and the Husband are (it’s going to be fifteen years in November for goodness sakes), we both got each other bars of chocolate yesterday from the Knock Knock range of graphic stationery. Love the boxes, and the chocolate isn’t ba...
Big (Hairy) Data
Posted Feb 7, 2012 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard, Part II – metrics
Posted Dec 19, 2011 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Should Wikipedia accept advertising?
Posted Nov 21, 2011 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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Guthrie:
Thanks for your comment. You make an excellent point about the "Audience" dimension. For much inventory, it is more important to think about "who" was sold than the "what" (at least in terms of classic definitions about what "what" means, i.e. site locations, etc.). I will definitely return to this topic later in the series.
Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard, Part I – creating a measurement framework
There is no shortage of pontification available about how to measure your online marketing campaigns: how to integrate social media measurement, landing page optimization, ensuring your site has the right feng shui to deliver optimal conversions, etc. But there is very little writing about the ...
Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard, Part I – creating a measurement framework
Posted Nov 8, 2011 at Lies, Damned Lies...
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