Short Review of the Omniture Summit (London)

by Jonathan Kay on Monday, 24th May, 2010

My new laptop is finally working so I can now write a short review of last weeks’ Omniture Summit.

First off, many thanks to Omniture for a great programme of content and hospitality. I was out of the office for 2.5 days but it was definitely worth it.

So, what did I learn?

• The Adobe takeover seems to be making sense as we saw a few demos where Flash creation had tracking code enabled practically seamlessly. The business goal is to enable a move from content creation to content creation and optimisation.
• Brian Thaut did an amazing job of presenting the best bits of the Omniture Report Suite in less than 10 mins with a very slick live demo.
• There are two new Facebook monitoring / reporting tools on their way (I’ll wait to see what the cost is before getting too excited).
• Omniture’s SearchCentre product is moving from single channel [just ppc] to multichannel.Matt Belkin commented that he spends 90% of his analysis time using Discover rather than SiteCatalyst. I have a similar ratio too, so if you don’t have Discover get haggling with your account manager.
• Reaffirmed my opinion that Insite is a product worth reconsidering for a particular client.
  I need to read up on www.microformats.org
• The search presentation highly recommended http://www.marketsamurai.com

Martin Lindstrom

I had a hangover on Fri morning but Omniture did wonders by getting Martin Lindstrom to give the opening keynote. This was perhaps the best presentation that I have seen – captivating, interesting and delivered in a very engaging manner. What’s the 1st fact that I remembered – “you can blend an iPad”

A few sound bites

Here’s a few one-liners from the seminars that I attended:

• “The industrial age of the digital revolution”
• “Leap from marketing metrics to business metrics”
• “Marketing will strategically inform other business functions and invert accountability”
• “Smart phone sales will be greater than PC by close of this year”
• “In Japan 20% of commerce is on a mobile devise”
• “Optimisation is about hyper-targeting”

Something unexpected, and awesome
The Thursday night party included a set by Beardyman, and increabible beatbox artist. If you’ve not heard of him before, he seems able to make any noise or tune just using a microphone and he seems able to defy the laws of physics. Check out his site.