Nasty, brutish and short: The life of the modern CDO

Reading Time: 6 minutes

The 2010s were a big decade for Chief Data Officers: from a standing start ten years ago, CDO has risen to become an indispensable C-suite role, with almost two thirds of Fortune 500 organizations hiring one.

But the role of CDO, especially outside the US, is still poorly defined, and CDOs are frequently not set up for success within their organizations. Is the job a poisoned chalice?

Google’s Ban on Third-party Cookies Could Actually Harm User Privacy

Reading Time: 3 minutes

There was quite a lot of coverage earlier this month when Google announced that they would be phasing out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. The stock price of firms like Criteo, which rely heavily on third-party cookie data for their core business, dipped sharply. The general consensus has been that this was a welcome move in terms of user privacy – but nixing third-party cookies could actually harm user privacy, by making it harder to identify irresponsible sharing of user data.

Read moreGoogle’s Ban on Third-party Cookies Could Actually Harm User Privacy

La Rentrée

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Every September in France, summer-weary parents pack their children off to school for la rentrée (‘the return’) and return to work after the idleness of August. The break from the métro, boulot, dodo routine of daily life enables both students and their parents to throw themselves back into their work and studies with renewed vigor. … Read more

GDPR: Breaking the Third-party Data Habit

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Ah, GDPR. Like the guy (or girl) you matched with on Tinder six months ago who got less interesting the more you got to know them, it just won’t go away. It keeps sliding into your DMs with teasing headlines like, “Data Protection Authority of Baden-Württemberg Issues First German Fine Under the GDPR” or “Washington Post offers invalid cookie consent under EU rules“. And there you were thinking you were done with it back in May, when you sent all your users that “Please respond to this email to stay on our mailing list” email and threw that giant banner about cookies up on your website.

Read moreGDPR: Breaking the Third-party Data Habit

Returning to the fold

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Five years ago, my worldly possessions gathered together in a knotted handkerchief on the end of a stick, I set off from the shire of Web Analytics to seek my fortune among the bright lights of online advertising. I didn’t exactly become Lord Mayor of London, but the move has been a good one for … Read more

Big (Hairy) Data

Reading Time: 2 minutes

My eye was caught the other day by a question posed to the “Big Data, Low Latency” group on LinkedIn. The question was as follows: “I’ve customer looking for low latency data injection to hadoop . Customer wants to inject 1million records per/sec. Can someone guide me which tools or technology can be used for … Read more

What’s another word for “Web Analytics”?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

For as long as I’ve been involved with the field, the term “Web Analytics” has never felt like the very best way to describe, well, Web Analytics – it’s somewhat limiting in many ways (the “Web” part doesn’t help there), and the “Analytics” bit does seem a bit, well, geeky.But another, better, term has never … Read more

Adobe + Omniture = …what?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

By now, almost 12 hours after the announcement, you’ll have heard the news that Adobe is to buy Omniture for $1.8bn. If you haven’t heard, then, I mean, duh. It’s all over Twitter, dude: (As an aside, the guys at Omniture should be proud of themselves that they managed to beat out Joe Wilson as … Read more