• by Stephen DiMarco , April 6, 2010

The combination of a well-organized, results-oriented conference capped off with some of the best skiing in the world, makes the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City one of the most valuable events for online marketers and agencies.  The conference itself continued the Omniture tradition of merging great speakers - Seth Godin and John Battelle were the main keynotes - with great content. If it sounds like I am overly effusive, it's because the Omniture Summits are that good.

 

There were three major themes that emerged during the conference:

Omniture and Adobe are a great match - This was the first Omniture Summit since the company was purchased by Adobe, and the Adobe influence was clearly there.  But more importantly, Omniture and Adobe spent a good deal of time explaining why these two companies should be together under one roof.  While this was more for the investment community, Adobe positioned Omniture as one of the basic building blocks for its online platform strategy, and credibly asserted that that there needs to be a strong connection between Adobe's creative tools and Omniture's analytics platform.  While at first it was difficult to make sense of the acquisition, it has become increasingly evident to me that tightly coupling creative and analytics creates efficiency.  By making it easier for creatives to embed code to track content consumption, Adobe will provide marketers with better, more integrated analytics, that extend beyond IT departments and permeate the marketing function.

Social media and Web analytics are a great match - Last year, the Omniture summit was focused on ROI (recessions will do that to you).  This year the realization among advertisers and agencies was that they need to be able to understand and evaluate new social media outlets and have a plan for how to measure and use them.   It was amazing what a difference a year can make - last year, social media was an interesting area to experiment in.  Now it is an urgent need, with Facebook users spending, by our numbers, almost three times as much time on Facebook as on traditional portals.   Omniture put the exclamation point on this by announcing their integration with Facebook to allow marketers to buy and optimize ads on Facebook from within Omniture applications.  This direct media purchasing from within Omniture is another exciting development for marketers.

Third-party dataand Web analytics are a great match - Because it's still relatively new compared to other measurement practices within companies, Web analytics historically existed in a silo and was viewed as a separate "thing" from the rest of the traditional marketing and analysis.  These walls are quickly crumbling as marketers engineer drive-to-web campaigns that are both more effective and more measurable than the old ways. With this, there is a concerted push underway to integrate third-party data into their analytics platforms in order to get a more complete view of the consumer, and Omniture is leading the arms race.  This is particularly true in the CPG category, where pure Web analytics can't completely demonstrate the success or failure of an online marketing tactic.  To that end, several companies touted the integration of their data into Omniture including Comscore, Experian, and 24/7 Real Media, as well as Compete's own Genesis integration.  With all of this new data available within Omniture, 2010 is shaping up as the year Web analytics breaks out of the silo.

Admittedly, these three trends are not new to marketers. But what is new is the immediacy that they will have on our businesses, based on aggressive innovation, development and partnership execution from Omniture. If you're looking for new evidence that marketing, technology and data are becoming entwined, creating new analytics, skillsets and strategies, you don't have to look much further than Adobe-Omniture. See you in SLC next year...