The Analytics Power Hour
Michael Helbling, Moe Kiss, Tim Wilson, Val Kroll, and Julie Hoyer
Attend any conference for any topic and you will hear people saying after that the best and most informative discussions happened in the bar after the show. Read any business magazine and you will find an article saying something along the lines of "Business Analytics is the hottest job category out there, and there is a significant lack of people, process and best practice." In this case the conference was eMetrics, the bar was….multiple, and the attendees were Michael Helbling, Tim Wilson and Jim Cain (Co-Host Emeritus). After a few pints and a few hours of discussion about the cutting edge of digital analytics, they realized they might have something to contribute back to the community. This podcast is one of those contributions. Each episode is a closed topic and an open forum - the goal is for listeners to enjoy listening to Michael, Tim, and Moe share their thoughts and experiences and hopefully take away something to try at work the next day. We hope you enjoy listening to the Digital Analytics Power Hour.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Jul 16, 2019 • 45min
#119: What Grinds Our Gears - MAS 2019
Have you ever thought it would be a great idea to have a drink or two, grab a microphone, and then air your grievances in a public forum? Well, we did! This episode of the show was recorded in front of a live audience (No laugh tracks! No canned applause!) at the Marketing Analytics Summit (MAS) in Las Vegas. Moe, Michael, and Tim used a "What Grinds Our Gears?" application to discuss a range of challenges and frustrations that analysts face. They (well, Moe and Tim, of course) disagreed on a few of them, but they occasionally even proposed some ways to address the challenges, too. To more effectively simulate the experience, we recommend pairing this episode with a nice Japanese whiskey, which is what the live audience did! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jul 2, 2019 • 52min
#118: Ethics in AI with Finn Lattimore
Did you hear the one about how the AI eliminated cancer? It just wiped out the human race! As machine learning and artificial intelligence are woven more and more into the fabric of our daily lives, we are increasingly seeing that decisions based purely on code require a lot of care to ensure that the code truly behaves as we would like it to. As one high profile example after another demonstrates, this is a tricky challenge. On this episode, Finn Lattimore from Gradient Institute joined the gang to discuss the different dimensions of the challenge! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jun 18, 2019 • 59min
#117: What's in a Job Title? Maybe the Data Shows!
What's in a job title? That which we call a senior data scientist by any other job title would model as predictively... This, dear listener, is why the hosts of this podcast crunch data rather than dabble in iambic pentameter. With sincere apologies to William Shakespeare, we sat down with Maryam Jahanshahi to discuss job titles, job descriptions, and the research, experiments, and analysis that she has conducted as a research scientist at TapRecruit, specifically relating to data science and analytics roles. The discussion was intriguing and enlightening! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Jun 4, 2019 • 55min
#116: Analytics Education at Scale with Justin Cutroni from Google
Remember that time you ran a lunch-and-learn at your company to show a handful of co-workers some Excel tips? What would have happened if you actually needed to fully train them on Excel, and there were approximately a gazillion users*? Or, have you ever watched a Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager training video? Or perused their documentation? How does Google actually think about educating a massive and diverse set of users on their platform? And, what can we learn from that when it comes to educating our in-house users on tool, processes, and concepts? In this episode, Justin Cutroni from Google joined the gang to discuss this very topic! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
May 21, 2019 • 55min
#115: Build vs. Buy with June Dershewitz from Twitch
A simple recipe for a delicious analytics platform: combine 3 cups of data schema with a pinch of JavaScript in a large pot of cloud storage. Bake in the deployment oven for a couple of months, and savory insights will emerge. Right? Why does this recipe have both 5-star and 1-star ratings?! On this episode, long-standing digital analytics maven June Dershewitz, Director of Analytics at Twitch, drops by the podcast's analytics kitchen to discuss the relative merits of building versus buying an analytics platform. Or, of course, doing something in between! The episode was originally 3.5 hours long, but we edited out most of Michael's tangents into gaming geekdown, which brought the run-time down to a more normal length. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
May 7, 2019 • 1h 1min
#114: ITP 2.0? 2.1? Whatever it takes!
We're not sure what's going on with this episode. For some reason, we have a bunch of first-time listeners, and they're all from Apple devices! Maybe it's because the show only comes out every two weeks, and the first-party cookies we've been using to track our listeners are now expiring after seven days! (This is a hilarious episode description if you're well-versed in the ins and outs and ethical and philosophical aspects of WebKit's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) 2.1. If you're not, then you might want to listen to the gang chat with Kasper Rasmussen from Accutics about the topic, as it's likely already impacting the traffic to your site!) For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Apr 23, 2019 • 53min
#113: Getting the Most Out of Conferences
Have you ever attended a conference? Did you know that analysts over-index towards introversion?* Have you ever struggled to figure out how to start a conversation over a cold pastry and a cup of tepid coffee at a conference breakfast? IS there actually a point in developing and executing a strategy when it comes to attending a conference? Is it annoying to listen to people who speak pretty regularly at conferences pontificate about speaking at conferences? Some of these questions are answered on this episode! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page. *We made this up, but it seems plausible.
Apr 9, 2019 • 53min
#112: Demystifying Data Science with Ian Thomas
Are you a data scientist? I mean, are you really a data scientist? What does that even mean...other than a healthy salary increase? On this episode of the show, Ian Thomas, Chief Data Officer for Publicis Spine sat down with the three co-citizen-data-scientists who regularly host the show to delve into the subject! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Mar 26, 2019 • 51min
#111: Automation in Analytics with Erik Driessen
We thought we deserved a break from the podcast, so we went looking for some AI to take over the episode. Amazon Polly wasn't quite up to the task, unfortunately, so we wound up sitting down as humans with another human -- Erik Driessen from Greenhouse -- to chat about the different ways that automation can be put to use in the service of analytics: from pixel deployment to automated alerts to daily reports, there are both opportunities and pitfalls! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
Mar 7, 2019 • 54min
#110: Creating Balanced Teams (and Avoiding Groupthink)
In recognition of International Women's Day, and because it's a really important topic, this is a very special episode. The two straight, white, cisgender male co-hosts of this podcast sat this episode out, while Moe took over the mic for an in-depth discussion with Alison Vorsatz from Fairygodboss and Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian about diversity (a term they both try to avoid) in the workplace. If this episode doesn't change your perspective and compel you to action, you are almost certainly not a human being. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.
