Last spring at ad:tech, The Marketing Consigliere had a limited amount of time to spend at the show so he opted to walk around and drill marketers and product managers at their exhibition booths rather than sit with the herd at the keynotes or breakout sessions.

With a huge floor to cover, whom did he choose to visit first? In his hotel room the night before, he pored over the program to read the thumbnails on each exhibitor and found it easy to select the companies to visit. He merely crossed out any company that claimed to be a “leading web analytics company.” That left him a shortlist of companies that perhaps truly, consciously tried to differentiate themselves and leave the “me toos” for any spare time he had.

The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC this week was a different thing; It’s a much, much smaller event with a more focused agenda. With thought leaders like Eric Peterson and Jim Sterne there, the conference space was buzzing with excitement. Much to his pleasure, there was a smaller list of exhibitors, and each of them were worth a visit.

Most of the vendors from his blog, “The Quantitative to Qualitative Spectrum of Marketing Data” were there: Coremetrics, WebTrends, Omniture, Tealeaf, OpinionLab, and Foresee Results.

He had some good talks with “Voice of Customer” (VOC) vendors; Kathy Heldman, CMO of OpinionLab and Eric Head, a Director at Foresee Results, were both able to give me updates on their products and services in this important growing market.

Andrew Eisner of Optimost did a good job explaining some of the advantages of his product, but in light of the Interwoven/Optimost deal, The Marketing Consigliere still thinks that the Omniture/Offermatica pairing offers a better solution for Net-Centric Marketers; Enterprise software + Full service testing = not as efficient or effective results.

He was impressed with the VOC tool demonstrated by LEOTrace, a relatively unknown German company that allows VOC capability to follow a customer to whatever site they may visit and give feedback as they’re visiting.

Sometimes when you visit booths, you get a salesperson who just rattles off the blurbs from the collateral and really doesn’t answer your questions or get you to that “Aha!” point.  Of all the exhibitors he spoke with, he must say that the best “Aha!” came when he was speaking with Richard Sutton, a Senior Account Executive with SiteSpect.  With Richard’s great conversation, The Marketing Consigliere could understand how their optimization via multivariate testing and A/B testing was different from other providers.  He would be willing to believe his claim that their methodology was more efficient, and Richard did a good job in raising his awareness enough to learn more about SiteSpect in the future.

The biggest surprises he had were from two of the smallest vendors at the conference.

Technology Leaders, based in New York City, is building the ability to take feeds from various analytics platforms, consolidate the data, cleanse it, warehouse it, and datamine it so you can see the bigger picture across your enterprise.   This would be great for companies obviously running multiple servers with different analytics vendors – and he means different as in quantitative, qualitative, video, voice, etc. Someday Marketers will be integrated these feeds right and left and will have an amazing insight into their audience. However, The Marketing Consigliere looks at it as a start of a new level of analytics and commend David Millrod, one of the firm’s Managing Partners that he met, for his company’s efforts to do this.

He wishes he could have spoken to Pete Affeld of Numeric Analytics longer; his enthusiasm in explaining using predictive economic modeling for marketers could have kept me awake in those late night, graduate-level economics classes (Z-con) he took for his MBA.

Numeric Analytics‘ Site Analytics tool is a testing and performance measuring tool using both econometric and predictive modeling to optimize the mix and frequency of online ads. Site Analytics is different from mainstream A/B and multivariate testing because it tests ads based on predicted conversions and profit to get a true understanding of the effect of variable ad serving.

Additionally, their Ad Analytics tool measures campaigns by incremental cost and revenue to ascertain the point of maximum profit. It utilizes advanced statistical and econometric modeling to optimize the media spend ROI and identifies the point where ad spend profit is maximized so you know how much, where and when to reallocate an ad spend.

All in all, eMetrics was a great show and from what The Marketing Consigliere heard from others, all of the tracks were very educational and worthwhile.  He hope it rolls into DC again next year.