#OX2
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.
Web Analytics in Europe — BarCamp Buenos Aires
This month, Juan Damia asked me to participate in the first BarCamp in Argentina, taking place in Buenos Aires. I was thrilled by the invitation, but there was no way I could fly there — I had trips lined up to the Canary Islands, Washington, and Stockholm in the coming weeks, and the schedule just didn’t allow it.
So we found another way. I recorded a 10-minute video in Spanish presenting web analytics cases from our European practice, and Juan played it during the event. I also connected online for the Q&A session afterwards, which made for an interesting cross-Atlantic exchange — Buenos Aires on a Saturday afternoon, Brussels on a Saturday night.
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.
Visiting Avinash at Google in the Valley
The Friday following Emetrics, while Aurélie was attending the Predictive Analytics two day course, I was invited by Avinash to visit him at Google. I have to admit that I was pretty excited with the idea to visit Google’s offices as I didn’t attend the GAAC training in Dublin. So after a nice breakfast with Matthew and Jim I took a cab and went ahead to Mountain-view.
I had a taximan from Morocco that while driving was always looking to the back as we were having a very engaged discussion about the political situation of his country (in a Arabic influenced french). I have to admit that I regret to have launched the conversation as when we arrived at the highway I was afraid that we would get into an accident. But fortunately I got safe to Google’s HQ (a bit shaky I have to admit ;-)).
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 Supports Baobab — And I Surf the Office
This ‘uncategorized’ post to give our support to Scripta’s initiative BAOBAB. For this end of year they created a campaign called “Ma Dernière Heure” (My Last Hour). The concept is simple: donate your last hour’s salary to BAOBAB’s charity cause.
Some agencies and companies created a little movie for the occasion. Here’s ours — in which I attempt to surf through the OX2 office on a chair with wheels while the team cheers me on. Let’s just say the landing could have been better:
Web Analytics ROI (WAROI) in the Advertising Business Model
Last week Aurélie and I were discussing about ways of calculating the ROI of a Web Analytics project. As we see that many companies (specially in the media sector) don’t find WA a priority, we wanted to present them with a formula that would allow them to view the tremendous ROI made possible with Web Analytics.
As we often say when making presentations, accountability is becoming more and more a must reach for marketers and companies in general. This means that when dealing with any investment we need to be able to define the ROI of this investment. We see more and more marketeers needing to report and justify their budgets. Based on this, we propose a little help for the eMarketeers in the media industry wanting to invest in Web Analytics.
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.
Web Analytics Journey Index (WAJ)
This morning, I was surfing through different blogs to get some insights about people’s thoughts on the eMetrics Summit. Aurélie and I just attended it. It was a great event. Jim, I think it’s the best investment I’ve done this year! And I must admit that we’re still digesting… ;-)
While surfing Technorati, I saw on Robin’s blog a title that quickly cached my attention: “eMetrics Summit: Eric Peterson vs. Matt Belkin”. When I saw the title, I was intrigued to read the content. The post describes the different views of Eric that has proposed processes as the next Web Analytics next ‘hot topic’ versus Matt defending the importance of quick wins.
Digital Convergence & Future of Web Analytics
This morning I was reading an article in the magazine CNBC European Business (September 2006) by Joe Figueiredo “Come Toguether”. It starts like this: “Although sometimes obscured by the fog of hype, a real convergence of the information, communication and entertainment industries is under way in Europe.”
It’s not a magazine that I read often but Aurélie told me to read the article. So I took my cup of coffee, a little cigarette and started reading. All kind of thoughts & ideas were emerging as I was reading so I took notes and I wanted to share with you some of them in a brainstorm mode.
Web Analytics & Multivariable Testing (MVT)
It’s been almost over a year that I’ve been looking into A/B & Multivariable Testing (MVT) and was thinking of integrating these kinds of capabilities inside our content management systems. As we have been building CMS since more than 6 years, for us building up the different pages and combinations was really a simple thing. The questions began to emerge when we wanted to report.
The following questions were raised by the IT and Web Analytics business units.
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.