Choosing the right event to speak at: Thursday’s daily brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and are we saying goodbye to point solutions?

If we are, I hasten to add, there’s a long way to go. There are plenty of them out there. By “point solution,” I mean software aimed at accomplishing a specific and quite narrow task. Integrate a number of point solutions — or more likely plug them into one or more hub systems like a CRM or a MAP — and you have the makings of a stack.

But with the galloping acquisitions of 2020 and 2021, we’ve seen a number of high profile point solutions (more or less) expand into broad offerings designed to meet a wide range of needs. Think of Demandbase, which is on the way from being a top-of-funnel ABM solution with programmatic advertising attached, to a multi-faceted B2B go-to-market suite. Look at any of the CMS/ecommerce players, building out their offerings with CDPs.

And now look at the former Kenshoo. From SEM and social and retail marketplace advertising to a market intelligence, omnichannel activation and testing platform, powered by AI (through the Signal Analytics acquisition), and designed to serve the booming ecommerce/D2C space. A new name too: Skai.

Are we seeing true consolidation at last?

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

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What marketers should know about data governance and tracking script management 

Many companies conduct data governance. In many cases this involves managing tag, scripts, and pixels placed on websites for tracking and analytics purposes.  This effort aims to ensure that data is correctly collected, site performance remains acceptable, and that there is no old or extraneous tracking on digital properties. 

There are multiple stakeholders who have interest in tag and pixel management, including members of the paid search, SEO and analytics teams, as well as developers working the marketing team. It is important to have a regularly scheduled meeting with the crucial stakeholders involved — a monthly cadence will likely suffice. It will also help to have a dedicated channel in a collaboration tool like Microsoft Teams or Slack set up for ongoing coordination efforts on an ad hoc basis.

Data governance activities related to pixel and tag management don’t just happen on their own. Someone should own and oversee this effort to ensure that stakeholders remain in the loop and meetings are regularly held. This designated process owner should also ensure that involved stakeholders remain involved and that the entire team listens and addresses the perspectives and needs of the others.

Learn more about best practices here.

Choosing the right event to speak at

If your goal is to speak at industry events but you’re not sure where to begin or which events you want to pitch a session for, start with your goals.

Goals: Why do you want to speak? Is it for thought leadership, personal branding, PR for your company or just to develop your speaking skills? Are you looking for payment, coverage of travel expenses, or maybe you don’t want to travel and will only speak virtually. Think about what you want before you start. It will help you narrow down opportunities later.

Research: Next, do some research and find out which events are presenting material that match your expertise. You can often find that information on a conference website including past speakers and session topics. At the same time, you’ll want to take a look at the demographics of the audience, especially if your goal is PR for your company or to develop business relationships. Demographics of the audience can often be found with exhibitor and sponsorship information. If you can attend an event you are interested in speaking, that’s best.

Getting ready to pitch: You’ve done the research and chosen a few events you’d like to speak at but the research doesn’t stop here. Now you need to get specific. Many events series have multiple events. You’ll need to find out the dates of the specific event you want to speak at and determine when they are accepting proposals. Find out if there is a theme for that event so you can make sure your proposal goes along with the theme. You’ll also want to make sure you understand their proposal process. Will the event producers get back to you if they are not interested in your proposal? When will the final sessions be selected? Will your proposal be kept and considered for future events?

Extra tips: If you know someone who has previously spoken at the event you’re interested in, ask if they are willing to recommend you. If you’re new to speaking, build up your speaking profile by starting with some small or local events (e.g. local AMA meetings). If you can get a video of yourself speaking at one of those small events–even if you have to bring a friend to film you on your iPhone—do it. Some event producers will request videos. If you have one it will increase your chances of being selected.  

I’d love to know what you find easy or difficult about pitching session ideas for events. What has your experience been? Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected].

Lotame’s Panorama ID wins more industry support  

In the race to offer alternative identifiers for the post-cookie environment, data solutions vendor Lotame has added digital advertising platforms MediaMath and PubMatic to its Panorama ID ecosystem which now includes more than 17 partners.

Differentiating Panorma ID. We asked Lotame how its Panorama solution is differentiated from other high-profile identifiers like Unified ID 2.0, developed by The Trade Desk, and LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution.

Pierre Diennet, Lotame’s VP of Product Management, told us: “Unified ID 2.0 proposes a universal sign-on to the Internet. Similar to LiveRamp’s authenticated approach of identity solutions reliant on only email as an input, we believe consumer adoption will hover around 20%. That leaves out 80% of the unauthenticated, open web.”

Diennet doubts that marketers will be satisfied by the scale of login and email-based audiences. “Unlike these deterministic solutions, Lotame Panorama ID requires no authentication, meaning no consumer login or email passed.”

A probabilistic solution. If Panorama ID is not based on deterministic first-party data — like logins — how does it work? “Lotame Panorama ID is powered by our patented graphing technology,” said Diennet. “That master graph connects all types of device identifiers (desktop, mobile, CTV) and customer-specific IDs, and the behaviors attached to them, such as auto intender, baseball enthusiast, dog lover, into a single ID.”

Why we care. The pitch of Unified ID 2.0, among others, is that deterministic first-party data will come to replace cookies, and publishers need to find imaginative value exchanges to persuade users to give up uniquely identifying information like a login or email (or in Asia, more frequently a phone number). A focus on collecting first-party data, it’s hoped, will grow the 20% known audience segment Diennet referred to.

Lotame is betting that won’t be enough, and with Panorama ID is adding probabilistic data back into the mix. “Lotame understands that there will be many identity solutions that power digital advertising, which is why we’re working to be interoperable with all in order to give our clients the best possible coverage,” said Diennet. “No one solution will satisfy all needs.”

Read more here.

Whoa, whoa, whoa… Not so Fastly

As we saw on Tuesday morning, it takes an error from just one CDN to bring down dozens of notable sites like CNN, Twitch, the New York Times, Reddit, Hulu and more. Just before 6 a.m. ET, users began reporting issues across these sites. The disruption was caused by a service configuration error, said San Francisco-based CDN Fastly, which was the root of the outage.

Yesterday, Fastly explained that the error was triggered by a single (unnamed) company updating its settings. Apparently, Fastly had inadvertently introduced a bug into its code in May — a bug which would only be triggered by specific actions by a customer in specific circumstances. And that’s exactly what happened.

Why we care. The internet is made faster and — usually — more reliable by edge CDNs like Fastly which bring the delivery of data closer to end users. But incidents like this bring home how much we all rely on high profile cloud computing platforms like AWS, as well as less well-known entities like Fastly, for the internet experiences which run both the economy and our personal lives.

Quote of the day

“Marketing leaders of this generation needs to have deep understanding and experience in: a) Sales, distribution and GTM, b) Martech and all forms of digital/traditional media, c) Brand building. Without all three, you won’t be able to “increase sales profitably”- goal of marketing.” Arindam Paul, Head, Marketing & Strategy, Atomberg Technologies