#Belgium
My Early Days on the Internet and the Sale of My First Digital Agency
Yes, I confess. Ever since I got my first Internet connection in 1995, while I was studying in Louvain (Belgium), I’ve been in love with the online world. I didn’t quite know how or why, but my gut told me I’d end up working in Internet. Since then, 25 years have passed (for the Internet and for me, inevitably, too…) and the Internet and its possibilities have evolved tremendously (mine, fortunately, too…).
A New Life Starts, But Some Things Don't Change
As you might have read, Aurélie and I had a great moment in our lifes this week with the birth of our son: Luca
Luca Dechamps Pols was born this Wednesday at 20h34, he weighted 3,260 kg and measured 50cm. It’s too soon to tell from whom he got his looks, but I can tell that he has his mother’s eyes (Russian influence).
I wanted to thank all emails and messages (sms, facebook, skype & twitter) that we have received. It is really a special moment and now we will start discovering how this is going to change our lifes. A friend of ours told me that without doing too complex statistics he could tell that we would spend less time facing computer screens ;-)
Nestlé Creative Family — Integrating Online and Offline eCRM
One of the projects I’m most proud of from the OX2 years is the work we did for Nestlé Belgium on their Creative Family program — an eCRM initiative that truly bridged the gap between online and offline channels.
The project was presented by Diane Faynsztein, Market Intelligence Manager at Nestlé Belgium, and myself at a Marketing Day event. The core idea was straightforward: Nestlé wanted to build a direct relationship with families interested in their products, but they needed a system that connected what happened on the website with what happened in stores and through direct mail.
OX2 Web Analytics Day 2007: Thank You & Feedback
Here’s a little video presenting the Web Analytics Day that took place last week here in Brussels done by Roberto, one of our Design team members.
Microsoft Gatineau — World Premiere at OX2 Web Analytics Day
One of the surprise highlights of the day was Ian Thomas from Microsoft presenting a sneak peek of Microsoft Gatineau — their upcoming free web analytics tool designed to compete with Google Analytics. This was the worldwide first public demonstration of the beta version, and the fact that it happened here in Brussels (home of the privacy-concerned European Commission) rather than in Redmond or San Francisco says something about how seriously Microsoft was taking the European analytics community.
First Web Analytics Wednesday in Brussels
This week, the Web Analytics Association and OX2 just organised a Web Analytics Wednesday here in Brussels. It was the first time we had this event in the capital of Europe and it was a nice event IMHO. I wanted to thank again De Persgroep for hosting this event in their magnificent premises.
18 people showed up (I hope to increase this number for the next edition in a couple of months). As you know, the agenda included some presentations delivered by Michaël Notté, Julien Coquet and myself (I’ll publish another post with a copy of these later on. You can read the agenda here) and it was followed by a networking cocktail. The audience was mainly composed of practitioners, but we had also 1 consultant (beside us) and 2 vendors (WebTrends and ClickTracks).
NeuroMarketing, Web Analytics & Ethics
Last Wednesday, Aurélie and I were exhausted from our previous days (since London we haven’t stopped talking, writing and working), so we decided to buy some easy cooking meals at Delhaize (our closest supermarket – 100 meters) and watch some TV to change our minds while relaxing on the sofa.
We then saw a documentary about the future of advertising on the RTBF (Belgian french speaking public TV station). What kind of publicity will we have in the future? Then a new concept appeared: NeuroMarketing. I was already familiar about NLP, but I never heard of NeuroMarketing.
OX2-Panos IAB Best Efficiency Case + Audience Award Winner
[Image unavailable — original source offline: IAB logo]
This presentation was delivered by Thomas Dusart (Franchise & Marketing Director of Panos) and myself at the IAB NetCafé. The case is also cited in Avinash Kaushik’s book Web Analytics 2.0 (p.379) as an example of integrating online and offline measurement.
This thursday, I arrived from eMetrics at 8 am. I went to a have a little nap as I needed to prepare myself for 2 presentation. One that I was addressing at the CMS Congress and one at the IAB NetCafé as we had been winners (along with other 2 cases) of the Efficiency IAB Best Case of year 2006.
Why This Blog?
My wife Aurélie and I have an interactive agency in Belgium — OX2. Her dream has always been to work with numbers and KPIs. Before OX2, she worked in the insurance and banking sector on Internet-related projects, but she was perpetually frustrated: every time she requested something from the technical team, the most common answer was “it’s too difficult” or “it’s not possible.” Sick of those technical roadblocks, when she discovered our team she was thrilled by the fact that “Impossible” wasn’t in our vocabulary. She decided to work on the agency side.