News UK chief: data drives everything

News UK chief data drives everythingThe head of business intelligence at News UK – the publisher of The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun – has hailed the firm’s new data strategy, claiming it not only drives business and marketing decisions but also gives readers more of what they want.
Andy Day joined News UK in 2013 from O2, where he was head of CRM, and was handed a brief to build a business intelligence team with the responsibility of looking at all things data.
In a blog post on Computing.co.uk, Day said the company saw an opportunity “to put customers and their data at the heart of the business, trading on consistent facts across the board, and using data-based insights to improve, yet not replace, our instinct-driven journalism”.
He added: “We use data to help develop the content we put in the papers, identify new business opportunities, personalise our marketing efforts, better manage our distribution and improve a whole host of areas across the company. But just as importantly, it enables us to provide an improved service for our customers and readers, too.”
News UK’s data assets include newspaper sales, digital news readership, subscription data, web-traffic information and data from brand extensions, such as Sun Bingo, Handpicked, and The Sunday Times Wine Club.
“With more than 200 different sources of customer information and 50 million pieces of transactional data captured every day, we have significant complexity to deal with,” Day explained.
Over the past 12 months, News UK has invested in a technical architecture that mixes traditional data-warehousing technologies with state-of-the-art big-data tools. Amazon Redshift and SAS analytics capabilities sit alongside Google’s Big Query, Hadoop, R and Python.
Day, who started his career at Claritas before switching client side for spells at Sky and Orange, added: “At the heart of building our data and information capability is the customer. The key guiding principle for News UK is to make sure there is a clear value exchange between the customer and the business. We use our customers’ data for their benefit.”
He explained how the editorial team now use readership data, gathered from digital devices as well as the likes of Twitter, to clearly define the likes and dislikes from a content perspective for each reader.
However, it is not all down to the machines. Day concludes: “It would be a crying shame if we simply let [the data] do the work and ended up in a world where differentiated and distinctive content no longer existed.”

2 Comments on "News UK chief: data drives everything"

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