Data view or déjà vu?

Following the Future of Media Research conference, Paul Collins of IMGROUP says that the media industry needs to take stronger ownership of the challenges data now presents.

One of the surprises about some of the early discussions during 2015’s Mediatel Future of Media Research conference was how much reference there was to the good old days – the days before the availability of vast amounts of data, before the programmatic debate; the comfortable days when everything was as it had been for a long time.

There were some views from those in the industry that getting the data right is someone else’s problem. Is no one prepared to take ownership or “have a go”?

Data, big or not, useful or not, is here to stay. The opportunities and challenges it brings must not be ignored and those who embrace it will prosper. It seems like those inside the media industry are trying to ignore data – too big, too scary.

This smacks of fear of the unknown, stopping adoption in this market. It need not.

The finance, retail, and leisure industries all successfully approached, understood and exploited data insight years ago. Insight is even more applicable in media and advertising, markets which should benefit most from innovation learnings from other industries.

To paraphrase Sir Martin Sorrell and the guys from innovation accelerator The Bakery, frequent guests at Mediatel conferences: innovation tipping points often come from outside, as those on the inside fail to spot the opportunity, fear it, or cannot change fast enough. That point is almost here, and needs embracing from the inside, now.

An easier approach to insight

There is a proven, clear, faster way to leveraging data and turning it into insight:

– Yes, there is substantially more data
– Yes, the data is held in an increasing variety of ways
– Yes, a lot of that data is external
– Yes, you may need a “big data” solution to store all of it
– Yes, approaching it from nowhere is hard, as you cannot see the wood for the trees…or the insight for the data.

But there is another way to approach it which we have adopted time and again:

How about agreeing what it is you want the data to tell you – identifying the nuggets of insight which will make a difference? Once you know what you need, you then identify the data from which the insight is derived, calculated and visualised. Then connect it up properly.

This is a very focused approach, tailored for your business, and very different from the ‘bung everything in a big pot and see what we get out of it’ big data/data warehouse method adopted by many in-house IT or less thoughtful external BI suppliers.

It’s also far more powerful than the pretty visualisations implemented without reference to the correct underlying data strategy – see my article “Lipstick on a Pig” for a deeper discussion of this.

What you will find is that this new data view is substantially smaller than expected, and, if filled correctly with the right constituent tools and placed in a prime location, will not only deliver this insight but will also help drive the adoption of an insight-driven business model.

Paul Collins is head of comms, media & entertainment at IMGROUP.