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How we created a data-rich feedback loop for a global video platform

David Grover
David Grover
Data Architect
Length
3 min read
Date
13 August 2024

Over the past several years, we’ve been helping a leading video streaming platform outperform its competitors by focusing on data. More specifically, making sense of 100s of terabytes of data, which is used by their entire team to create a constant loop of feedback to refine their strategies. 

Today, this project is complex, with custom data apps, analytics dashboards, and a team of analysts, but it all started with a spreadsheet cleanup.

Increasing data availability 

In 2019, the marketing team managed their campaigns in spreadsheets and had to request engineering support to unlock any data for campaigns. This meant long lead times for reports, duplicated efforts, scattered data sources, and a lack of cross-team visibility.

Our first initiative was to increase data availability, which traditionally sat with engineering. If we accomplished this, the marketing team would have more transparency, consistency, and the ability to create a customizable user journey. 

Because of this particular company’s unique campaigns and specifications, an off-the-shelf solution wasn’t possible. So, we reimagined campaign management and analytics for their marketing team with a custom application.

A centralized platform for governance 

They needed a centralized platform for planning, executing, and measuring all marketing communications. A key requirement was consistency with campaign requests, i.e., consistent naming conventions. Most importantly, they requested a single, unified view of customer journeys. 

With these requirements in mind, we built a new campaign management platform. This app integrates best-in-class marketing practices directly into the client’s ecosystem and uses the company’s tools to automate complex marketing proposals and processes. 

A workflow analysis feature helped managers see the bigger picture to uncover process blockers. 

Marketing analytics dashboards & customer 360 

Once the planning platform was up and running, we turned to measurement. With hundreds of campaigns and segments within them, the team now needed to know how campaigns affected their business objectives. 

The analytics products we built measure the impact of marketing with the assistance of a full-time seasoned analytics team. Consolidated user data ensures a clear picture of their user and subscriber base. Our analytics team provides their marketing team with data, analysis, and insight across their products and services and user engagement channels when they need it. 

The next step in their data journey was a customer 360-like data platform that allowed us to build campaign target sets. With this, their marketers can access all the signals and analytics they need to build smart campaigns quickly.

Altogether, their data products process 100s of TBs of data every month. Their marketing team gets access to thousands of predictive signals to define automated multi-platform, multi-channel, responsive campaigns.

Our ongoing relationship has enabled this successful video streaming platform to make sense of its data, ultimately leading to better decisions.

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