Posted by Andrew Edwards on March 8th, 2011 at 6:13 pm

If "engagement is the marketing buzzword of the decade" as imedia's Doug Schumacher has said, then I guess I just went to the decade's most buzzworthy event? It was, after all, called "Engage", hosted by the venerable WebTrends in San Francisco last week.

I will let more august arbiters work on that question of mine, but I will say the event attained a certain buzzworthiness when the assembled multitude descended for drinks and finger food upon a wondrous place called the California Academy of Sciences which is a lot more wondrous than it sounds. Exact Target had a great event in Indianapolis last year at the Indiana State Museum, and maybe this is a trend: let the whale skeleton and the aquarium and the rain-forest-in-a-giant-molded-glass-bubble do the talking.

Whatever the plan, this magical venue lent a heightened air to what was already a sense that you were hanging out with a group that might get on a roll one of these days. Not that WebTrends has never been on any kind of a roll. They are the oldest of the web analytics vendors and at one point were the only game in town. They had a little bean-counter device called "log analyzer" (so cute!) that told you how many hits you had: and the rest is Omniture.

Onslaughts from Omniture have been a major problem for WebTrends (with whom my company Technology Leaders is, in the light of full disclosure, partners). And having known their company for several years, we can assert we've not always been thrilled with what comes out of their piney-wood headquarters in downtown Portland. But now they seem to have thrown down their rucksack in a good place: they have just launched version ten of their on-demand product; their significant base in the old-iron-style software business isn't going anywhere; and they just staged a eye-popping gala event in a venue well beyond the capacity of any nightclub or hotel ballroom.

As for Omniture? We're partners there too. They got capitalized in the public market and went huge. They pretty much took over the web analytics space. Ad agencies fell hard for Omniture though truth to tell, there is not now nor ever was there any much difference in quality or usability between any of the top competitors in the space; and so your prejudice would lean towards whatever you had somehow got introduced to. Agencies (and their enormous customers) got introduced to Omniture probably because of a full-on press by the evangelical sales team at Omniture and all the market buzz a public company can buy. And from old Salt Lake they rended and they tore at Portland until WebTrends was often enough not even mentioned by the up-and-coming digital analyst. But in 2009 Omniture was sold to a company out of California that also made Adobe Photoshop. Adobe/OMTR has made for one of the strangest pairings in the digital space in memory, and was only recently eclipsed by the strangeness of AOL/HuffPo (but who am I to sniff?). In consequence, Omniture has fallen from the pedestal. It is now less an industry powerhouse than a member of the Adobe product family.

And WebTrends, the only web analytics product vendor remaining independent and offering an actual software product (as well as a SAS offering), now takes a turn in the footlights. Or at least that is what it felt like at the event out at the capacious, albino-croc-containing Academy campus out in Golden Gate Park on a night in early March.

Let's take a minute to remember this event was not a webinar nor even a clever Flash movie--and that digital must sometimes give way, in the interests of engagement, to analog: silicon to carbon; Powerpoint to crabcakes and mango martinis.

Engaged? Yes.

Perhaps the next buzz-phrase in digital marketing will be not "engaged" but "committed-to-a-long-term-relationship". Isn't that what we are really looking for from our customers?

I think I'd better stop now.