Superweek 2026 – Day Five
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Value, Coaching, and the AI Tsunami
By Day Five, something had shifted.
The technical debates were still there. The AI questions hadn’t gone away. But the tone moved from “what is happening?” to:
Who are you going to be in this new world?
Pricing. Positioning. Coaching. Survival.
The final day wasn’t about tools.
It was about leverage.
Who Wants to Bill a Million?
Robert Petkovic – Pricing as Strategy
Robert’s talk was less about billing a million and more about becoming the kind of consultant who can.
He drew a clean distinction:
Analytics implementation is linear and tactical.
Consulting is non-linear and deeply human.
Setting up tracking follows a sequence.Strategic advisory does not.
One of the more provocative lines:
Juniors can do 90% of the work at 50% of the quality.
That gap is where trust lives.
Robert’s view: hiring seniors isn’t about ego. It’s about reducing ambiguity and increasing confidence.
Then came the commercial gut punches:
“You’re too expensive” usually means “I don’t know how to sell you properly.”
Lousy clients ask price first.
Mature clients ask capability, timing, then price.
The biggest takeaway?
Raise your prices.
Price filters clients. Cheap attracts noise. Expensive attracts expectation.
He offered a practical heuristic:
You’ll know you’ve found your price when 50% of your proposals are rejected.
That’s not bravado. That’s calibration.
He strongly favoured:
Project pricing over hourly
Retainers over projects
Minimum six-month commitments
Clear carry-over rules (only one period)
Hourly rates are for juniors or short tactical engagements. Strategic work should not be sold in six-minute increments.
And a subtle but powerful point:
A retainer isn’t just recurring revenue. It’s an access charge. You’re reserving capacity that could have been sold elsewhere.
Capacity awareness, pipeline analysis, and offer rejection rates aren’t finance admin.
They’re positioning diagnostics.
Debugging Beyond the Console
David Vallejo – Client-Side Power Moves
David delivered a pure practitioner session.
Move beyond standard debugging tools. Use browser APIs. Intercept behaviour.
Understand what scripts are really doing.
Key concepts:
CookieStore API with change listeners
Monitoring document.cookie usage
Monkey patching and proxies (debugging only, not production)
Performance API to detect blocked hits
This isn’t about replacing tools like ObservePoint. It’s about having deeper control when things go sideways.
In a world where third-party scripts, Shopify apps, and injected code quietly break tracking, client-side literacy is defensive infrastructure.
Not glamorous. Essential.
Moneyball With First-Party Data
Vishnu Vankayala – The Analyst as Coach
Vishnu reframed the analyst entirely.
Not as a reporter. Not as a technician. As a coach.
MMM is slow. Weeks and months. Valuable, but strategic.
But marketing teams need “matchday attribution” — hours, not weeks.
His framework:
A “play” consists of:
Business goal
Signal
Audience
Guardrails
Review cadence
The analyst defines the signals. Sets the rules. Calls the plays. Reviews performance.
Without cadence, you’re not coaching. You’re commenting.
That line hit hard.
Irregular contact is commentary. Regular cadence is coaching.
Automation handles the mechanics. The human handles the judgement.
This talk quietly synthesised half the conference:
Signal design (Day Two).KPI clarity (Day Three).Activation frameworks (Day Four).AI leverage (Day One).
The analyst survives not by answering faster.
But by calling better plays.
The AI Tsunami
Julien Coquet – Strategy, Survival, Adaptation
Julien didn’t sugar-coat it.
The AI wave is not hypothetical. It’s structural.
The mistake is either:
Dismissing it as hype
Or worshipping it as salvation
Both are avoidance.
The real question:
What concrete steps must analytics professionals take now?
Across the week, the answers have been consistent:
Clean and standardise data
Build durable first-party infrastructure
Focus on signal quality over signal volume
Move from reporting to activation
Develop judgement, not just querying skills
Stay human in the loop
AI reduces the cost of execution. It increases the cost of strategic clarity.
The tsunami doesn’t reward those who type fastest.
It rewards those who think clearly.
Day Five, Distilled
The final day made something very clear.
The future of analytics isn’t about dashboards.
It’s about:
Pricing your value
Protecting your capacity
Debugging deeply
Coaching consistently
Designing signals
Surviving intelligently
And above all:
Becoming strategically indispensable.
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