M&E industry experts discuss maximising use of data science

Data is increasingly powering every element of the marketing mix – source of growth, consumer performance, content creation, mix optimisation and measurement. Every stage of the marketing loop, starting from defining source of business, through consumer insight, strategic direction, campaign planning, implementation and finally measurement & redeployment of learning is defined by data. It supplements intuition, strengthens conviction and drives accountability. 

‘Data Science Beguiling the Media and Entertainment Industry’ was discussed at length on the concluding day of Data Science Congress, India edition, which was held in Mumbai yesterday. The panel was moderated by Bhupesh Daheria, CEO, Aegis School of Data Science. The panelists included Dr Kodliuk Tetiana, Data Scientist, V I Tech Ukraine; Anand S, Chief Executive officer, Gramener; MA Parthasarathy, Chief Product Officer, Mindshare South Asia; and Santosh Bhat, Data Sciences and Analytics Leader, Hotstar. The session was sponsored by Mindshare. 

Commencing the discussions, Anand S said that he was trying to solve the problems of storytelling, data driven content and understanding the customer psyche to retain their interest by using data science. He further noted that India does not have great data journalists, but the country is trying to get there and there is a lot of innovation in storytelling today, where stories can be told in various forms using data as a source. 

When asked whether he considered data science as an opportunity or a challenge, MA Parthasarathy replied that they were two sides of a coin. He said, “It can be a challenge or prove to be an opportunity. The challenge is in understanding what people really want to see, do or experience from brands at any given point of time. Another challenge is that people are losing their interest and attention span faster than ever before. On the other hand, the opportunity is the amount of data that is available; to understand data in depth is to understand consumer behaviour.” 

Speaking on how brands utilise data since it is a complex process, Santosh Bhat said that all companies are trying to create user profiles. While referring to his previous two stints in e-commerce companies, Bhat said that he had managed to create user profiles using data science to know pretty much everything about a customer like their address, browsing behaviour and buying preference, they made optimum utilisation of data science to study the consumer behaviour and further used that data for campaigns and personalisation. While stating that he is trying to do the same thing at Hotstar, Bhat said that since Hotstar does not ask for personal details, they are left with very little information about the consumer and that is an interesting data science problem that Hoststar is trying to overcome. 

Dr Kodliuk Tetiana added here that it is the data scientist’s job to read about new approaches and algorithms that will help them in creating better results for the clients, however its implementation depended on the client. She gave an example of a doctor prescribing medicines to patient and said that the doctor can’t control whether the patient will have the medicines or not. 

Santosh Bhat was of the opinion that the digital medium is not necessarily a great medium as there are some roles that the television medium plays which the digital medium cannot play. “Digital is only a supplement to traditional media. But it all depends on who you are targeting and the geographies that you are looking at,” he added. 

According to Parthasarathy, measurability is one of the key challenges faced at Mindshare. “The more people say there is measurability, the more there are controversies about it and coupled with that is the fact that you have data at various levels. There is some data which is extremely fast moving which is real time data, then there is sales data that comes out once a month or quarterly. The challenge lies in how we pull together all these streams of data and decipher what has contributed how much to the outcome. Very often, measurement stops at output and doesn’t come to outcome,” he noted. 

Anand S summed it up by saying that content is believed to be helping people understand what is happening and advertisements are supposed to be driving people towards certain ads and if we believe in this distinction, then advertisements are doing the right thing because they are an option based model in many cases and they believe if they show you a same ad repeatedly, the brand will make more money and it doesn’t matter whether you like the ad or not. “On the content front, that is not supposed to be the case as very few content today is around presenting as opposed to positioning. The answer to the question of ‘What India is interested in watching’ is as important as ‘What is India being made to watch’,” Anand concluded.

Media
@adgully

News in the domain of Advertising, Marketing, Media and Business of Entertainment

More in Media