Takeaways from Tealium's Digital Velocity EMEA

I was pleased to attend Tealium's Digital Velocity in London last week. It was an excellent opportunity to network, considering that Adobe replaced their annual EMEA Summit with a much smaller event. I did not realise it was the first Digital Velocity EMEA event in four years, i.e. since the pandemic. It was also an opportunity for Tealium to reveal its latest features, notably its Moments API and sneak peeks about future features.

At the pre-event networking, I was delighted to reconnect with familiar faces. Among them were Marcus Stade and Patrick Mohr, the dynamic duo from the MohrStade digital agency in Munich. Their agency, a regular sponsor of MeasureCamps across Europe, has been a significant contributor to our industry. The event also drew a diverse crowd, with several more Germans and a few German-speaking Swiss in attendance. Peter Meyer, another MeasureCamp attendee from Aller Media in Copenhagen, was also present. We need a secret handshake so that MeasureCamp attendees who do not know each other can recognise each other.

During the main day, I met Charles Barnsley on my LinkedIn network but had never met before. I also met my former manager at Barclays, Jesal Shah, and former colleagues, Luwito Tardia and Mihail Dobrinski, who are also at Barclays. Legal & General, my employer, also sent a large contingent between the Cardiff and London offices. James O'Keefe, my director, spoke twice, and my colleague Josh Williams also participated in a panel, all on the main stage. Iwona Posel, another MeasureCamp attendee and Digital Analytics Implementation Manager at Vodafone was also there. I was pleased to meet Dajana Pjatak from Stockholm and Malgorzata Marcinkowska from Poland. Finally, Station10, a London-based digital agency with which we work closely, also sent a few people.

The venue was the same as last time, the former Whitbread brewery in the Square Mile, better known outside the UK as the City of London, so it was well located. This was the first Digital Velocity event in person since 2019, and the first thing that surprised me was perhaps the smaller attendance than last time. The theme of the day was moments that matter. Tealium's new Moments API, a game-changer in leveraging zero-party data, was a major highlight. As companies face challenges with the loss of third-party cookies, zero-party data can be an exciting alternative, and Tealium's Moments API is at the forefront of this shift.

A Moments API suggests that Tealium focuses on interoperability and sharing data with other Tealium products, notably its tag management solution, Tealium IQ. You can create tag management rules to deliver tags, such as marketing pixels, based on zero-party data from the Moments API. Tealium claims that such experiences result in a more engaged audience which converts more, i.e. makes a purchase or behaves in a significant way for the company using these tools. Tealium collects such zero-party data in real time. As interoperability is one of the critical strengths of Tealium products, I would expect their Moments API to work with third-party tools, too.

The most intriguing claim was how Tealium could reconcile visitors across domains. Typically, the solution consists of passing a visitor identifier as defined on the first web domain to the URL of the first page of the second web domain in the query string. It's a time-tested technical solution we find across digital analytics stacks, but your mileage may vary. When it fails, your digital analytics clickstream tool, usually Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Piwik, Matomo or Piano, will report the landing on the second domain as the start of a new visit rather than the continuation of a visit that started on the first web domain.

Claims that Tealium does not rely on such a solution made me wonder whether Tealium is using some form of fingerprint, i.e. a collection of technical settings such as the operating system name and version, the browser name and version, and the IP address, but also more obscure settings such as the fonts installed on the machine, checking the browser history for the most commonly visited websites, and many more. When you consider each of these settings individually, these are of little to no value, but their combination is as unique as your fingerprint, or rather, a unique identifier for your browser. Such fingerprints fall under the same regulatory frameworks as cookies: GDPR and PECR in the UK.

Fingerprinting may not be a regulatory breach. Such solutions are a cornerstone of the banks' fight against online fraud in online banking. Perhaps Tealium has found a way to create a fingerprint based not on the usual technical settings of the visitors' browsers but on the zero-party data that feeds into their Moments API. Still, any technology allowing the stitching of visitors across web domains will fall under the usual regulations mentioned above.

Tealium has also claimed identity graph resolution across devices. Visitors engage your online platforms with different devices, such as their mobile phones during working hours and their commute, but on a desktop or laptop at home. Traditionally, digital analytics clickstream tools face challenges when recognising them as the same person. Cookies are device-specific, and so are fingerprints. A common solution, though terrible from a user experience perspective, is to prompt the visitor to log in upfront.

Other websites reward visitors for sharing a social media identifier such as an email or using functions such as logging in with Google or Facebook. Since the customer is likely to have logged in with these social media platforms, the experience is improved, but the need to share their online identity remains. The IP address is too unreliable as people will jump on various Wi-Fi networks, all with different IP address ranges. These networks are probably using DHCP, which allows them to assign new IP addresses over time, changing daily or every few days, rather than a fixed IP address.

A small remark about how tags tend to piggyback more tags caught my attention, too. As your tag management system (TMS) loads one tag, we often see that tag invites other tags to run on our websites, doing so against our knowledge and the knowledge of our customers. Tealium is aware of that challenge and may put control over piggybacking back into the hands of the TMS administrator. I would not be surprised to see piggybacking becoming a significant bone of contention in our industry and see our data regulators step in unless the vendors can agree on standard rules. Piggybacking may become switched off by default in Tealium IQ and all other TMSes soon. Some tools, such as Evidon, specialised in surfacing piggyback information by generating a visual representation of how concerning the issue was. Evidon and similar companies might have to fight for survival and become the next Criteo.

Another small remark about how the prevailing opinion about digital analytics works better when running server-side than client-side may be incorrect was also interesting. In the past five years, we have seen browser manufacturers curtailing the power of cookies. Several solutions have emerged to reestablish the intended expiry date of these cookies by funnelling the web traffic via our own web servers rather than directly from the visitor to the tags providers. The Tealium speaker challenged the idea that server-side could only be better. A few years ago, a new programming paradigm emerged eight years ago called Isomorphic Javascript. The concept implies that Javascript code can run both on the client and the server. O'Reilly even published a book on the topic. Time will tell whether Isomorphic Javascript has found a home in Digital Analytics.

The event would not be complete without another round of networking, followed by a three-course dinner. The dinner was tasty, and I am not sure who I should thank for the wine as I found the name absolutely hilarious: Baron de Badassière. I had no idea a badass baron was producing red wine somewhere in France. The wine was excellent. As a senior Tealium executive sat at our table, I could not miss this opportunity to sell him the idea of adding a user script manager to their product offering, either as part of Tealium IQ or as a standalone product.

A user script manager is much like a TMS, but just for yourself. I use Tampermonkey, the only user script manager I have encountered so far, to host many Javascript snippets that automate much of my work. But I cannot understate my concerns for when Tampermonkey's sole programmer decides to do something else with his time, perhaps help the badass baron. Sadly, I could not convince him that letting a citizen developer like me automate SaaS of all stripes would suit Tealium. It is to the sounds of cheesy mash-ups, what else do you expect from a city that brought you fine establishments such as Club de Fromage, that I decided to return to my hotel.

#MeasureCamp #DigitalAnalytics #Tealium #DigitalVelocity #EMEA #LANDG #WAWCPH #CBUSDAW

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