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Technical Marketing Handbook

Technical Marketing Handbook

Written by: Simo Ahava
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About this listen

 Technical Marketing Handbook is a podcast series that seeks to explain technical topics that everyone working in digital (marketing/analytics/advertising) should know about. Guests are invited from a wide variety of technical disciplines, such as browser engineering, search engine design, tag management, online analytics, digital advertising, and anything else covered by the vague umbrella of “technical marketing”.© 2021 Simo Ahava All Rights Reserved Politics & Government
Episodes
  • TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava

    TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava
    Dec 14 2021

    It’s time for the last episode of 2021! I’m taking a little holiday break and will return in 2022 with new episodes.

    (Remember that if you want to suggest a guest for me (please do!), you can send me an email with your suggestion: simo (at) teamsimmer.com. I’m looking for a (more) diverse cast of guests; people who can talk with absolute expertise and authority about some aspect of technical digital marketing.)

    In this episode, we’re treading in self-help territory again. Building and maintaining expertise in any given field is hard until it isn’t. I share some of my strategies for how to keep that baseline and foundational level of expertise strong and healthy, as I firmly believe that’s the only way to branch out to more advanced topics in the long term.

    The best strategy? Engage and help others, and make knowledge sharing a reflex. When you impart your knowledge on someone else, the net gains for you are resounding.

    Thank you so much for your support. This podcast has been a wonderful journey, and I hope you’ve enjoyed listening as much as I’ve enjoyed hosting the episodes. Thank you to all my wonderful guests, too!

    Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

    Topics
    • 00:00:00 – Introduction.
    • 00:03:52 – A flimsy analogy between house construction and learning new things.
    • 00:06:35 – Tenets I live by when building and maintaining my expertise.
    • 00:07:43 – Why engaging in discussions and communities is the best way to incubate a solid baseline of knowledge.
    • 00:09:14 – Focusing on problem-solving and answering questions is a great way to structure your own learning, too.
    • 00:10:38 – Make knowledge sharing a reflex.
    • 00:15:08 – Parting words – Thank you for all your support in 2021!
    Notes and references
    • TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava
    • TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava
    • Measure Slack community
    • Simo Ahava’s Twitter
    • Simo Ahava’s Blog
    • Simo Ahava’s YouTube channel

    The post TMH #13: Take Care Of Your Expertise with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.
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    17 mins
  • TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava

    TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava
    Nov 30 2021

    It’s just Simo Ahava alone, again. But this time it’s somehow fitting, as the topic of this podcast is motivation.

    Over the last four years or so, I’ve been really struggling with motivation, trying to stay excited about working in data and analytics.

    I’ve been writing an analytics blog for eight years now, I’m still very active in a million different practitioner communities, and we founded Simmer with my wife so that we could scale up this type of work to an even larger community.

    But it’s the actual work with data and analytics that’s got me in a slump.

    In this podcast, I want to share four reasons that contribute to my motivation issues. I think they’re familiar to most who work in analytics.

    I’ve also curated some ideas for overcoming these motivation slumps. I think they work because, well, I’m still here, right?

    Please indulge me in this particularly personal and anecdotal episode. Thank you.

    Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service.

    Topics
    • 00:00:00 – Introduction.
    • 00:04:24 – Data as a byproduct and a side effect.
    • 00:09:11 – The drawbacks of introducing data and analytics work to the surrounding organization.
    • 00:15:15 – Silos in the organization increase the disconnect between the ends of the data pipeline.
    • 00:19:17 – The meta discussion and dichotomies within the digital marketing industry are exhausting to follow.
    • 00:23:12 – Remember: Your work matters. You matter.
    Notes and references
    • HiPPO: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
    • TMH #10: Communication Struggles with Simo Ahava

    The post TMH #12: Missing Motivation with Simo Ahava appeared first on Simmer.
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    28 mins
  • TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco

    TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco
    Nov 16 2021
    We’re back with a special guest! This time around, Adam Greco of Amplitude graces us as the star of this podcast episode. Adam is one of the most industrious people in digital analytics. His work with Adobe Analytics (and its predecessor, Omniture) is globally recognized, and Adam’s been instrumental in popularizing the Adobe Analytics platform and making it one of the “big two” vendors in marketing analytics (in addition to Google). Recently, Adam shifted gears and stepped into the world of product analytics. At first glance, it looks like just a change of a label – analytics is just analytics, right? Well, not quite. Turns out that the focus is very different when comparing, for example, Amplitude (the company where Adam’s now the Product Evangelist) and Google Analytics. Product analytics focuses on the product (duh). The uncertainty of the acquisition, on which marketing analytics is predicated, isn’t present in the product analytics context. When collecting data from the product itself, many of the problems that marketing analytics vendors are struggling with, such as how to stitch identity and how to collect cross-device data, are trivial to solve in the product context, where the users are logged in for most of the time. But at the same time, marketing analytics tools are gravitating towards product analytics schemas (such as the event-based data model), and interestingly tools like Amplitude are taking steps to include acquisition data, too! Adam joined me on this podcast to discuss all of the above and much more. It’s rare to get a chance to talk with someone who’s seen the emergence, the triumphs, and the declines of the entire, multi-gazillion dollar digital marketing industry. Adam shared fascinating insights on where he thinks our industry is moving towards. You don’t want to miss this episode! Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service. Topics 00:00:00 – Introduction00:06:22 – Adam explains what product analytics is.00:10:48 – Do product analytics vendors mainly compete against homegrown telemetry systems built directly into products?00:13:39 – Why does it seem like the marketing analytics vendors are migrating to the event-based data model that tools like Amplitude have been running since day 1?00:16:55 – What is the appropriate balance between having a system that tells the users how to read and interpret the data vs. giving users the tools to do the analysis however they like?00:20:10 – What is the Apollo project (by Search Discovery), and how is it relevant to what Amplitude is doing?00:23:13 – Is Amplitude trying to become a be-all end-all analytics suite, handling both acquisition and product analytics?00:26:50 – Which is the easier approach: marketing analytics vendors becoming more product analytics -minded, or vice versa?00:30:48 – How relevant is it to figure out the data collection part in these days? Data pipelines are becoming more complex and scalable – does it really matter what happens at collection time?00:33:47 – Are analytics platforms like Amplitude trying to solve for CDP (customer data platform) use cases, too?00:35:11 – What approaches are there to resolving and tracking users’ identities? How does amplitude solve this?00:39:23 – Why has the marketing industry relied so much on third-party cookies?00:40:48 – Many analytics tools use machine learning to fill in the gaps when data is not available. Is this relevant for product analytics vendors like Amplitude?00:43:31 – If you could change anything about Amplitude Analytics at the snap of your fingers, what would you do? Notes and references AmplitudeFirebaseGoogle Analytics 4Adobe Experience PlatformMixpanelHeapSnowplowWhy I Joined Amplitude (Adam Greco)Apollo by Search DiscoveryWhy Product And Marketing Need To CollaborateIntroducing The Amplitude Google Tag Manager Template The post TMH #11: Product Analytics with Adam Greco appeared first on Simmer.
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    48 mins
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