The Weekly Blog is curated content from the Evolytics staff, bringing you the most interesting news in data and analysis from around the web. The Evolytics staff has proven experience and expertise in analytics strategy, tagging implementation, data engineering, and data visualization.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: IMPLICATIONS ON MARKETING, ANALYTICS, AND YOU

OCCAM’S RAZOR | BLOG

The robots are coming, and this time they’re hunting for marketers and analysts.  Maybe it’s not quite so apocalyptic, but analytics disruption is headed our way.  There are already hints of an automated future for analytics like the Google Analytics mobile app “Assistant” and natural language generation in Tableau.  Fear not though, because there’s hope for marketers and analysts willing to adapt and evolve.

In this post, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist Avinash Kaushik ponders the state of AI and machine learning today, the future of analytics automation, and potential implications to marketing and analytics professionals.  He advises that to prepare for an automated future, you must, “Understand reality. Invest in continuous learning. Adapt. Add new/different value. Rinse and repeat.”

If you need a strategic analytics partner to help you maximize measurement and reporting automation opportunities available today and also help you prepare for an increasingly automated analytics future, feel free to contact us and start a conversation.

THERE’S A DISCONNECT IN CONNECTING MARKETING TECH TOOLS

EMARKETER | BLOG

According to this post, marketers continue to increase the number and variety of marketing platforms, but the promise of full stack integration is still more dream than reality at this point.  Only 3 percent of marketers in a recent survey reported full marketing tech stack integration, while 74 percent reported limited connectivity, no connectivity, or challenges connecting legacy systems.

At Evolytics, we’ve discovered that the key to marketing tech integration is the integrity and accuracy of data flowing between different systems, not just the number of “data connectors” available from a particular platform.  Data must be accurate within one particular tool before it can be useful in another, which is why we recommend conducting data audits before diving into a marketing stack integration project.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM EXPERIMENTS IN CREATING VR CONTENT

GOOGLE | BLOG

Google released a new virtual reality experience called “Tabel” that allows a viewer with a smartphone to observe six different storylines unfold around them with nine distinct audio channels and no VR headset required.

At Evolytics, we love a good puzzle and emerging tech like augmented and virtual reality present unique measurement challenges.  Existing video metrics are widely standardized such as viewing quartiles, completed views and overlay interactions.  But what happens when you take that same video and give it 360 degrees of viewing opportunity?

You could split the six storylines into different measurement “zones” and track time spent in each zone.  You could also track when someone switches between different zones and create a path analysis to see how viewers “travel” across and between different video zones during the experience.  With such exciting analytic possibilities, we’d love to work end to end on such a project, all the way from implementation to analysis and optimization.