At last week’s AOP Crunch event, which had as its theme, ‘Audience knowledge: the ‘new’ frontier’, we heard about a new Deloitte / Google report for news and media organisations: ‘Digital transformation through data’. The report focused on how publishers can collect data to drive value.
When collecting data, it’s important to reflect on why you’re collecting it. For publishers, it’s likely to be one or all of the following three reasons: to help improve the user experience, to drive value through more advertising revenue and to support other revenue models, like subscriptions.
The report included a ‘data maturity scale’, where companies were ranked, anonymously, on where they currently stood in the data journey: ‘nascent’, ‘developing’, ‘mature’ and ‘leading’. Two thirds of news / media companies were rated as ‘mature’, 30% as ‘developing’, with just a handful ‘leading’.
The report, presented by Google’s Aurelie Rimmen and Deloitte’s Felix Lepetit, found that most media organisations had a pretty good idea of where they needed to be, but were not entirely sure of how to get there.
As luck would have it, the pair came equipped with three tips on how companies could accelerate their progress:
- Break down silos: It’s important to increase collaboration across the organisation. Often, people in one part of a company have no idea about data collected in another. Publishers should develop KPIs and incentives to encourage collaboration.
- Walk the walk: How tuned in is your top leadership to actually using the data? When it comes to making decisions, too many leaders “revert to gut feeling”.
- Democratise the data: It’s vital to make the data available to the right people in the right way. It’s “not a given that the right people in the company know what’s available”.
