Making the best use of data to build a successful digital strategy
“The first step is understanding the critical strategic value of your behavioural data, and not outsourcing its capture, management, and processing to a third party,” says Annika Jimenez, vice president, Pivotal Data Labs.
Jimenez, who will be addressing the topic of data strategy at WAN-IFRA’s upcoming Digital Media Europe conference in London (20-22 April), recently answered a few of our questions about this area in the following email interview.
WAN-IFRA: When building a digital strategy, what are some things that news publishers should be thinking about in terms of data?
Jimenez: The first thing publishers should realise is, while content is the venerable old king, in the digital world data is the king’s savvy young daughter waiting on the sidelines to assume the throne. There has always been a natural tension in the struggle to define which takes priority – with content usually winning out given its core role in originating subscriptions, readership, eyeballs, etc.
However, in the digital world, any focus on enhancing content viewership (and soon after that, monetising it) immediately gives way to the realisation that success will come down to building the right data instrumentation strategy, the right data infrastructure to capture, process, and extract insights from immense amounts of behavioural data, and the build-out of the right applications to target, serve ads, experiment with content, and serve personalised content.
The companies that understand these truisms, and that respond by building the right data capabilities from the ground up in parallel to best-in-class investigative news, entertainment, etc, will be better able to compete in the digitally-led markets we exist in. As we say often, software is eating the world.
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