The “thud factor” is a long held practice of consulting firms and agencies in which the value of their engagement is calculated by the client based on the loudness of the final deliverable, contained in an over-sized 3-ring binder, landing on a dusty, outdated conference room table.

Burnout is a serious concern (or should be) for every business. According to the American Psychological Association in their 2021 Work and Well-being Survey of 1,501 U.S. adult workers, 79% of employees reported having had experienced work-related stress in the month before the survey. The survey reported that nearly 3 in 5 employees reported negative impacts of work-related stress that resulted in lack of interest, motivation, or energy.

Over the last 9+ years building 33 Sticks, one thing has become very clear, most people have had more than one negative experience working with an agency. Typically, these bad experiences are caused by one or more of the following common consulting agency tactics…

When we started 33 Sticks, we did so with a promise that not only would we reject the billable hour model but we would become fierce enemies of the billable hour. The model, while long used in the consulting industry, is a broken model that leads to poor results for clients and burned out employees who hate their jobs.

This week, we celebrated 9 years in business at 33 Sticks and as we have been thinking back through the experience of building a brand from the ground up, we have been filled with emotions thinking about the brands and people who have helped get us to where we are today. So today’s article is a bit of a thank you to those companies who helped get our company off the ground.

33 Sticks Co-Founder and Principal Analyst, Hila Dahan, presented an extremely popular session at Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas on leveraging Adobe Analytics Advanced Calculated Metrics. Hila's session focused on using advanced Calculated Metrics to drive deeper insight into consumer behavior.

Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) had a few different deployment options:

1. An Adobe/Akamai-hosted library (ie, your embed code starts with “//assets.adobedtm.com”)

2. An FTP self-hosted library (DTM would push changes through FTP to a location on your own servers)

3. A downloaded self-hosting option (you would manually download after changes and put onto your servers).

Technically, all three of these options also exist in Adobe Launch, though the approach is slightly different. Since I ended up having to get some clarification from Adobe on how to use Launch to copy these methods, I figured I’d document my findings here . When creating an adapter, you have the option of Managed by Adobe or SFTP.

Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Manager has always given developers a chance to define exactly when a rule was called, by firing _satellite.track("insert rule name here"). This is called a Direct Call Rule (or DCR). They didn’t always get a ton of product love- after all, Event Based Rules don’t require work from developers and have so many more options- but many DTM users used them heavily because of the control they provided and how incredibly straightforward they were.

If a tag management solution is the framing of your dream house, the data layer is the foundation upon which your dream house will be built. However very few organizations get ex- cited about laying a foundation, especially the people in those organizations writing the checks. So why should your organization invest needed money and talent to deploy a solid data layer foundation?

This eBook, brought to you by 33 Sticks, is a robust guide covering the history of digital analytics data collection, data layer best practices and governance, and business exam- ples to help make the case for an investment in a data layer.

And that is it! If you are familiar with Adobe DTM, you can utilize this process to deploy YouTube Tracking, using Adobe Analytics, across your entire site in less than an hour.