Interview with Eric Peterson
Question 1 (asked by Corry Prohens):
I am amazed when I see how many things you seem to be involved in simultaneously. Just off the top of my head: authoring books, speaking, blogging, doing the web analytics Wednesday thing globally, user group moderator, industry research, job board, panelist, consultant, CEO… – you must be a miracle worker when it comes to time management… but it makes me curious what your core business is at this point. What do you personally spend the most of your time on these days?
Answer:
The core business of Web Analytics Demystified is strategic web analytics consulting; I work closely with a very select list of clients to help them better compete in the online channel by improving their use of the great technology and staff they’ve invested in.
My work is very customized for each client and usually pretty involved, but it’s more interesting and much more gratifying than pretty much anything I’ve done before. By virtue of my experience in the industry, my own web analytics practice, and my time as an industry analyst I have developed the unique skills necessary to help clients take a truly strategic view of their investment so that we’re able to work together to identify and fill the gaps.
The good news is that for all the other stuff you listed I am privileged to be working with amazing talent who help me get the job done. I am co-authoring white papers with brilliant guys like Joseph Carrabis (NextStage) and Josh Manion (Stratigent); I am invited to speak at great conferences like the Online Marketing Summit and Emetrics by great guys like Aaron Kahlow and Jim Sterne; June Dershewitz from Semphonic helps me keep Web Analytics Wednesday going in the right direction; guys much smarter than I am moderate the Yahoo! group (Mike Wexler, Dylan Lewis, Jim Sterne, and W. David Rhee); and knowing that I can call you with job-related questions makes running the job board a bunch easier. Plus, my wife Amity keeps me honest, humble, and always moving in the right direction … as you can see, I get a lot of help from my friends!
Question 2:
So much of your business seems to have been built around your personal brand in web analytics. What is that like? Do you think that you have more pressure - being essentially Eric Peterson, Inc. as well as CEO of WA Demystified?
Answer:
Yeah, it’s kind of strange being as well known as I am in the digital world, but I do my best to support the community while maintaining that balance between “what is good for all” and “what is good for the Peterson/Demystified brand.” I personally think that the Web Analytics Forum I founded in 2004, the Web Analytics Wednesday events I co-founded in 2005, my writing and research that I give away, and a bunch of the stuff I have done for the WAA are good evidence of my commitment to something larger than just me, my company, and my brand. I have the amazing luxury of being able to give away some of my time, my work, and my expertise as I see fit to support the global web analytics community, and I try and do my best to help out those people and efforts I think are important to how this community will develop.
I’ve committed up to $10,000 of the profits from my consulting business to sponsoring emerging Web Analytics Wednesday events around the world, and the great folks at SiteSpect and Coremetrics have both matched my commitment. We’re taking profits right out of our brands and sinking them back into nascent global web analytics networking efforts, and with record numbers of participants (and tons of new sponsors joining us) this effort is having a tremendous impact. I’m also working closely with members of the Web Analytics Association Board to make the WAA a Community Sponsor of Web Analytics Wednesday, opening up WAW events to the WAA to more actively recruit members in places like Beijing, Mubai, Johannesberg, Sydney, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janerio where Web Analytics Wednesday events are happening!
What does the Demystified brand get out of my support of Web Analytics Wednesday? Aside from slightly less profits at the end of the year, I personally get to go to be each evening and wake up every morning knowing that “Eric Peterson, Inc.” is having a positive impact on our community. Every month more and more new people sign up for these events, and our global community becomes a little bit tighter even as it is rapidly expanding. You’ve been to these events Corry — for what they are they are pretty cool. No fees, no dues, no signing stuff … just (mostly) free drinks and nice people and good conversation. Super-amazing-wonderfulness (as Avinash might say!)
If for some reason your readers haven’t heard of Web Analytics Wednesday, they should check out http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday
Question 3:
What are the next steps in the growth of Web Analytics Demystified? What should we expect to see evolving there over the next 2-3years?
Answer:
A great question, but one I’m not sure I want to answer publicly. At this point I have great business partners around the world (Semphonic and Stratigent here in the U.S. and OX2 and Satama in Europe) and am able to be pretty effective on both the strategic and tactical level thanks to their support. I am also keenly aware of how difficult it would be to build a traditional web analytics consulting firm — both because it would force me to compete with people I really like, but also because great web analytics expertise is difficult to find and increasingly costly to keep.
My greatest hope for Web Analytics Demystified is that I will be able to continue to provide great value to my clients around the world, great value to the web analytics community through my writing, presentations, and brands, and be a good dad to my kids.
Question 4:
You have acknowledged (or at least I think I remember you acknowledging) that web analytics and offline marketing analytics is going to continue to grow together in most companies. Do you worry about what that means to “web analytics” as we know it now – as a standalone discipline?
Answer:
Nope. On the contrary I am pretty excited about “web analytics growing up” and becoming more integrated into the larger business ecosystem. Think about the stuff candidates tell you during the screening process, Corry … they tell stories about management not understanding web analytics, not valuing the work they do, not listening to recommendations, not being willing to make the incremental investments necessary to make web analytics work as a formalized set of core digital business processes, right? People come to you because their job sucks and the business prevents them from being effective.
At some point, and I really do think this will be tied to getting over the idea of “internet marketing” and starting to think about capital-M “Marketing”, the business is going to grok the need for real, robust analysis coming from the digital channels. Everyone is going to wake up to Tom Davenport’s observation that most of what we call “web analytics” is just glorified reporting and start to ask how they can do real analysis —predictive analytics, modeling, regression, etc. — against all this data pouring out of our computers, our cell phones, our PDAs, our video game systems, our interactive TVs, and so on.
Does this create a risk for some of us? Absolutely! But I think it creates a far greater opportunity. An opportunity to see our efforts valued throughout the organization and rolled into Davenport and Harris’s idea of competing on analytics. It’s actually funny you ask because my core talk in the second half of 2008 is called “Competing on Web Analytics” and it delves into the transition you asked about. Your readers can subscribe to my speaking calendar at http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/link_list.asp?l=Speaking%20Engagement if they’re interested in learning where I will be presenting that talk.
Question 5:
As a recruiter, I am curious: Could there have been any job on the planet (within marketing or analytics) that you would have taken had it been offered to you when you instead of starting your own firm? If so, what could it/would it have been?
Answer:
Nope. I have had the great honor of working for and with some of the most intelligent, hard working, and serious minded executives in the web analytics industry over the last ten years. While each of them have taught me something valuable, the most important lesson I took away from my experience is that I’m pretty keen on being able to make my own decisions and control my own fate. I suppose I like being successful and all that but, I gladly traded self-determination for financial gain when I left Visual Sciences and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
That’s actually one thing I kind of like about our industry. With a few (unfortunately high profile) exceptions, most of us aren’t driven by money. The best consultants I know spend as much time trying to find balance in their lives as they do find billable hours; the rock-stars that you help place are looking as much for an opportunity to have impact as they are riches; and the giants whose shoulders I stand on, guys like Sterne, Eisenberg, and Novo, have given far more back to the community at this point as they have taken out. I think that’s great.
Question 6:
How real and how eminent are the legislative threats to web analytics?
Answer:
Sadly I think they’re both very real and increasingly eminent. While I believe that Brodsky’s bill in the New York House has lapsed without action, there is apparently a new bill in the House and Senate in Massachusetts and another in Connecticut that would require notification for tracking (a good summary is here: http://www.wickedlocal.com/belmont/news/x390626994/Internet*privacy*bill*stirs*concern*among*advertisers) As you know in my “Future of Web Analytics” (download from http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/link_list.asp?l=Presentation) presentation I gave in New York I am predicting that we will see some type of legislative action in the relatively near future. Just the fact that it keeps coming up should be reason enough to be concerned, much less when you start to examine some of the stuff that is happening in Europe (Steve Jackson at Satama has a great piece on Phorm here: http://www.blackbeak.com/2008/06/15/bt*shows*bad*phorm*in*its*bid*to*improve*behavioral*ad*targeting/)
Personally, having spent a fair amount of time looking at the issue of cookie deletion, I am pretty frustrated with the ongoing specter of legislation around tracking but I think it comes back to one very important idea: there is no real value proposition for the consumer associated with tracking cookies. Better advertising? Better web sites? Remembers your preferences? Keeps you logged in? Not enough, especially when juxtaposed against inherent consumer fears about being “discovered” in what is supposed to be an anonymous medium. Unfortunately I think it is too late for tracking cookies to recover and so it may just be a matter of time before they’re rendered obsolete — which is why I am so interested in how mobile platforms are developing. In mobile there is an obvious value proposition for the consumer: let us track your behavior and we’ll lower your monthly bill. The carriers can pass the cost along to the content providers and everybody wins — content providers get true visitor tracking, possibly with core demographics and geo-location included, and consumers save money. How awesome is that!!!
Question 7:
Finally, let’s get you on record for some completely unimportant important issues:
Favorite Baseball Team: Hate baseball, sorry. Barry Bonds ruined the game when he cheated his way to that record.
Favorite Football Team: Gonna have to go with the Bears, having grown up watching Walter Peyton work under Mike Ditka.
Favorite Basketball Team: Hmm, Michael Jordan’s Bulls (see previous answer) and the Portland Trailblazers (assuming Greg Oden is healthy this year.)
Childhood Ambition: Professional Skateboarder. I was a sponsored amateur as a youth and had a full-sized half-pipe in my backyard. This is back when Tony Hawk was a kid and the Bones Brigade videos were blowing our minds. Ahh, the fantasy of youth, huh?
What happened to the pony tail?: Donated it to Locks of Love so that a child suffering from alopecia areata can face what is an increasingly difficult world.
What kind of car do you drive? Porsche 911 Cabriolet, but I work from home so more often than not it sits covered in the garage.
What did you get on your SAT’s? Didn’t take the SATs in the midwest. Took the ACTs after partying at Alpine Valley for a long weekend with the Grateful Dead. I think I ended up with a 29 composite which was pretty good considering the situation but probably not enough to get a job at Google. Oh well.
Favorite non*work*related and non*family related activity: I guess I’m pretty boring, really. I spend most of my non-work time (and some of my work time) with my kids. They’re two and five and I am really pretty into being a dad. My little guy is learning to ride a scooter and play the drums (he’s two!) and my daughter is into bugs and biology (I have a background in science) so I do my best to walk away from the computer, turn off the iPhone, and be as good a dad as I’m able.
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