What’s New at Tealium University in 2014

It’s difficult to talk about what’s new with Tealium University – formerly Tag Management University (TMU) – without taking stock of where we’ve been over the past year. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at 2013 and see what it means in terms of where we’re going next and what’s in it for you the customer.

As 2013 is just about wrapped up, I can say that it was foundational in terms of our educational efforts here at Tealium. When I joined in 2012, there was no formal education or training program and what little documentation we had sat in a dusty ghost town of wiki. This meant that you were far less empowered to manage your digital marketing efforts than you could be and are now.

Continuing the foundational theme, we laid out our educational strategy in terms of getting you, our customers and partners, a solid base of understanding in tag management from which you could truly accelerate your efforts.

We launched this plan at Digital Velocity, our global annual user conference, in January 2013 with Tag Management University. The response, in terms of simple attendance was amazing and our course was set. We quickly followed Tag Management University with a new social learning platform – Tealium Learning Community, or TLC for short – where our customers, partners and staff could collaborate on finding solutions to all the challenges that are a part of digital marketing. In addition to the Tealium Learning Community, we launched weekly webinars that help to spread the fundamentals of tag management throughout our community and mapped out our TMU Boot Camp Tour, bringing live hands-on training sessions to major cities in the US and the UK.

What started out at TMU Boot Camp as half-day introductory sessions on the basics of tag management morphed into full-day sessions that got us deeper into the complexities of our chosen profession. And again, the response was overwhelming – surprisingly so. The message is clear: There is more, a lot more, we could be doing to help you be successful.

While all this was going on, our engineering team was busy building the next-generation digital marketing platform in the form of Tealium AudienceStream – a new audience segmentation, visitor profile enrichment and digital data distribution platform (D3P). This brings us to the most important reason for changing the name of Tag Management University to Tealium University.

Imagine just for a second that you have – through careful analysis – uncovered a key consumer segment, and that if you can intercept them via email within seconds of abandoning their shopping cart that they are much more likely to come back and complete the transaction than they would be if the email arrived even just a few hours later. Further imagine that this audience segment can be enriched with data from their shopping sessions such that the email they receive is highly tailored based on the their individual browsing and buying behavior. How powerful would that be? This is what AudienceStream can do for you.

It’s not just about tag management anymore, we are closing in on fueling the full digital marketing stack.

So what does that mean for 2014 and Tealium University? We have three big trends to address:

• An unquenched thirst for education on tag management and digital marketing
• People, like yourself, who now have a solid handle on the fundamentals and are eager to take their expertise to the next level
• A growing and evolving suite of products designed to meet and break the pain points of the digital marketer and their organizations.

At Tag Management University in January 2013, we had a single track and ended up with attendees from opposite ends of the spectrum from business-centric practitioners to development-centric users. A one-size-fits-all strategy was suboptimal for those audiences. The tasks they face are different, what they are held accountable for is different and even the language they use is different.

So at Tealium University in 2014, we will have separate tracks for business and technical users. The hands-on lab style approach we have used continues to be effective so that won’t change, but the topics and approach will be focused to a specific type of user.

With the recent addition of our entirely new AudienceStream product, there will be a third, general audience track, introducing everyone to the fundamentals of AudienceStream and D3P.

Here’s what to expect if you are a …

Business User

• Getting to Know Tealium iQ – A tour of Tealium iQ’s features and functionality all while getting a solid understanding of core concepts and definitions that set the tone for the rest of the day.
• Future-Proofing your Digital Marketing Programs – Committing to data-centric tag management and the importance of robust data layer design.
• Partnering for Success – Learn best practices for partnering with your technical teams in a frictionless way to ensure an optimal deployment of your tag management system and digital marketing efforts.
• Tealium iQ Fundamentals – Let’s deploy some tags! In this highly interactive, lab-style session we will deploy a fully configured tag management system for a website.

Technical User

• The Tealium iQ Architecture – How our platform is designed to be robust, fault-tolerant, scalable and extensible. From multi-CDN to the internal structure of our client-side solution, learn the architecture of Tealium iQ and how that can help you deploy a robust tag management program.
• Advanced Implementation Use Cases – When simple tagging and point-and-click configuration just isn’t enough. From best practices on synchronous vs. asynchronous tag loading to advanced troubleshooting, come ‘behind the curtain’ and find out what makes Tealium iQ tick.
• Partnering with Marketing for Success – How to help your marketing team understand that business requirements are not technical requirements and how to tell the difference between them. Bonus: How to give up control, be marketing’s hero and still ensure robust performance of your sites.
• Tealium EventStream: The Splunk Use Case – Using Tealium iQ to enable your “Big Data” efforts using EventStream and the Splunk platform.

AudienceStream

This combined track will explore how users can leverage Tealium’s newest innovation to improve the effectiveness of their existing digital marketing applications with enriched, highly actionable customer data.

Don’t forget that Tealium University is your annual opportunity to become a Tealium-certified professional. If you were certified last year, it’s time to re-certify!

To learn more about Tealium University and Digital Velocity, please visit www.digitalvelocityconference.com. If you sign up now, you can save $200 off the list price.

Can’t wait to see you all there!