Recommendations

Although there are many factors, and a combination of such factors, that management can affect as it helps move the organization along a path toward utilization of audience data for business benefits, there are some factors that stand out as characteristics of the best in the M&E industry. Consider the following guidance from these industry leaders:

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  • Identify your company’s top audience analytics business priorities and factors that affect the success of the priorities. You can’t do it all. A ‘big bang’ project approach to big data doesn’t work. Although M&E companies able to derive more value from data and analytics have enterprise-wide analytics strategy, they take an iterative approach to project execution. 
  • Assess availability of data, skills, technology, and processes that are needed for decisions that affect the top business priorities. Audience analytics is not only about data, and it’s not only about analytics. Success comes to those that invest also in technology, people, and processes related to the full analytics lifecycle – from data acquisition and preparation to data analytics and interpretation of results.
  • Demonstrate executive involvement in audience analytics projects by encouraging, promoting, and sponsoring analytics projects and driving the data driven culture. Top level managers must ensure that sufficient funding is in place, reward systems are implemented, and opinions based only on ‘gut feel’ are not accepted. A data driven culture must also embrace sharing of data and best practices among business units as well as between business and IT groups.
  • Ensure that the outcomes of data analysis are actionable to their intendent recipients. It’s not enough to deliver a nugget of great insight without the ability to operationalize it within marketing, sales or other business processes. Trusted data that takes too long to deliver or incomplete data that is delivered in real time are equally useless to decision makers. Current audience analytics solutions must enable self-service data access by business managers and staff to enable agile decision making.
  • Experiment with new technology, data, and analysis techniques to rapidly iterate through potentially influential insights. In recent years there has been an explosion of technology choices and data sources that has brought with it new opportunities as well as challenges in deciding on the most appropriate building blocks for an effective audience analytics solution. When needed, leverage the expertise of external service and technology providers in the industry.