• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer, June 9, 2009

During his opening keynote, Jeffrey Eisenberg, co-founder and CEO of FutureNow, is doing his darndest to provoke attendees of the OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference on this stormy Tuesday morning.

Despite the fact that a “metrics industry” now exists, it has no “experts,” he says.

“Is there anyone in this room who has been doing this for 20 years?” Eisenberg asks. When no one raised their hand, he added: “When I hear someone call me an expert, I cringe.”

Eisenberg -- who admits to not finishing his finance degree because it required taking statistics -- claims to hate deep-dives into data.

What is “precision”? “It’s about confidence level… not about accuracy!” Eisenberg insists.

What about “attribution”? “For the most part, attribution is a dead-end,” he claims. “We’re never going to really know.”

What's another name for the "marketing department," according to Eisenberg? "Fossils." In the future, he predicts, "Lots of those fossils will be moving away."