“What am I doing here?”

Read Yves-Marie Lemaître‘s post on what attending MeasureCamp means to him.

                                               
“What am I doing here?” This was the basic feeling I had, attending my first MeasureCamp, in March 2014, the first ever occurring in Pimlico.

I was then 47, but feeling shy like a trainee on his first day, in front of these 20-something guys, looking so cool and at ease with each other. I had only a vague idea of what a Tag Manager could be doing, had never (ever) used Google Analytics, and only discovered on that very day what such acronyms like CRO or DSP stood for…

Four years later, in the first days of 2018, I can say that I have attended a total of 11 MeasureCamps in 4 different towns, 6 of them in London, and that I even have the honor to lead the organization of MeasureCamp Paris as of 2018.

So what happened?

On that Saturday in March 2014, I could have chosen two paths. Keep a low profile, listen to the less complicated talks, and wait for the evening pub time, to be able to talk to a few sympathetic people. But, I would not be where I am now.

Instead, I went to “exotic” talks (the ones with titles I would not understand), discussed about various analytics topics I really did not master, with people I had never met, and eventually prepared my own session. A topic I felt more at ease. More oriented towards data collection. Its title was “Anticipating the cookie ban : How will Measurement work?”. And the first slide started with this question: “Is a cookie ban thinkable?“
I chose a slot just after the morning break, a bit hidden, in a 20-people room. There came 40, some standing, some even half-sat, half-lying in the middle of the room. A burst of questions, opinions, possible answers and drawbacks… And what looked then a grim but unlikely perspective is now a reality, and most of what we have discussed on this day is useful today, including that last idea of pushing for a renewed legal frame at EU level…

MeasureCamp is all you could think, but a boring thing. It namely is an innovation lab, a think tank, a proof of concept, a fireside chat, and above all a must do. So, like an instructor to a wavering first-time skydiver, I shall say: “go, go, go!”