Ten years into an analytics career, I had never been to a single analytics conference. The first one I ever attended was Marketing Analytics Summit, and I got there through Jim Sterne. I had taken his Analytics Cohort class, which made him roughly the only person in the building who knew who I was. Then he did something generous and slightly reckless: he invited the unknown guy from his class to write intro songs for the speaker lineup.

Nobody was warned. Between sessions I walked out and played a personalized parody for each keynote: Prince for Jim’s generative AI talk, OutKast for data literacy, Britney Spears for finding insights in wicked environments, The Who for Lea Pica’s Hollywood storytelling, the Police for the birth of an analytics practice, and the Beatles for GPT at Coca-Cola. It was the first speaker-parody set I ever wrote. I made quite the impression.

That room changed the trajectory. Kelly Wortham saw the songs and decided Experimentation Island needed the same treatment, and the speaker-song tradition has followed me onto every stage since. When people ask where the bit started, it started here.

And between all that, the Analytics Power Hour got a live theme song too, because the microphone was already on.