Partner spotlight: Dan Jennings, Co-founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash
We sat down with Dan Jennings, Co-founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash, to discuss AI hype, data foundations, and what’s next for measurement.
In the fourth episode of our partner spotlight series, Didomi's Global Lead - Server-side, James Ensor met with Hookflash's Co-Founder & Head of Analytics, Dan Jennings.
Watch the recording below to learn how Hookflash started and how the agency operates, Dan's opinion on the changes AI is bringing to modern marketing, and his top recommendations for businesses. Or keep reading for an overview of the conversation.
Dan's hot take on AI, and how to use it without losing your edge
Dan co-founded Hookflash after leaving a large global agency, wanting to get back to hands-on problem solving and get away from red tape.
The team at Hookflash covers analytics, CRO and SEO, and also sets aside time each month for experimentation. Some of what comes out of it, like a model linking search queries to purchases, is something Dan deliberately refuses to call AI:
The thing that annoys me, I would say, is the overuse of the label of AI.
- Dan Jennings, Co-Founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash
Prompted by James to deliver this "hot take", Dan explained that in his opinion, a structured prompt or simple automation with an AI badge slapped on it is deceptively low effort, and something he and his team encounter regularly when vendors pitch them tools.
That doesn't make him an AI skeptic, however. He recognizes the potential of the technology and shares a simple framework for getting reliable answers from an LLM:
- Give it context
- State your objective
- Make a specific demand
- Ask it to explain what it's doing
That last step is critical to him since it allows you to fact-check the sources and actually understand the answer provided, one of the risks that comes with LLM use:
The risk that you run into when using AI is that you use it for everything and then you slowly start to not know anything.
- Dan Jennings, Co-Founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash
Using LLMs as a tutor (not a crutch), Dan mentioned, can be a great way to build your own skills instead of eroding them.
Get your house in order: Recommendations for businesses
Asked what he typically finds when auditing a business, Dan explained one question always comes right away:
It's the first thing I check on someone's website: is consent working?
- Dan Jennings, Co-Founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash
Consent, he broke down, is one of the most common issues he finds. It's often either not respected, or enforced on paper but misconfigured and leaving large volumes of traffic unassigned. Another blind spot is Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), which wipes out cookies set by client-side scripts after seven days of inactivity. A visitor who clicks a paid ad and comes back 10 days later is counted as a new, direct visit.
When Dan's team fixes this, direct traffic drops and the credit moves back to paid channels, which can be an unwelcome surprise:
It does just mean that everything you were reporting on previously was wrong.
- Dan Jennings, Co-Founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash
But the upside is that reporting is accurate from that point on. This is also where server-side tracking helps, though Dan is clear that moving to a server is only a first step. The real gains come from deploying everything in a first-party context, and from using the clean data to drive action, whether that’s a test, an SEO recommendation or an audience passed back to an ad platform.
What does the future of data hold?
Looking towards what's next, Dan expects that building a tracking setup will continue to get easier as tools improve, while the underlying challenges (including browser restrictions and ad blockers) are not going away. If agentic commerce takes off, for example, he believes it will add to the need for measurement, rather than replace it:
It’s still the same solution. It’s just a different problem latched onto the front of it.
- Dan Jennings, Co-Founder & Head of Analytics at Hookflash
Whether users browse the web themselves or send an agent on their behalf, the data will still need to be collected and sent for measurement.
Watch the full video to get the complete picture of this very insightful sit-down, head to our YouTube playlist for more interviews with experts, and visit the Hookflash website to learn more about the work from Dan and his team.
The author
