Sydney-based big data aggregator, Contexti, has developed a solution to improve audience engagement for Seven West Media (SWM) during the broadcaster's most popular sporting events.
The company partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudera to deploy a solution which forms the core of the broadcaster’s data capability as improve audience engagement during major events.
Contexti was engaged to assist in the design, build, and management of a data platform to support SWM’s evolving digital strategy aimed at delivering deeper insights into viewer behaviour.
Following a six week engagement between Contexti and SWM, the solution was first run as a pilot program for SWM’s coverage of the 2016 Australian Open Tennis event, before being expanded to support coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games in Australia.
Contexti founder and CEO, Sidney Minassian, told ARN the broadcaster recognised the shift broadcast television consumption and understood the need to adapt to modern viewing habits.
“The audience is no longer sitting in front of the TV waiting for ads,” he said. “They are on their tablets or computers watching exactly what they want to and not what traditional broadcast feeds to them.
“Seven West have been a fantastic partner to work with because they truly understand the importance of this shift and the power of big data to help develop new ways of engaging with the audience.”
The solution managed the large data volumes into the usable data sets to drive a suite of dashboards which were then delivered to key stakeholders each day to provide executives access to critical audience metrics throughout the event.
“Underpinned by Cloudera’s sophisticated data analytics platform, Cloudera Enterprise and an array of advanced digital strategies, Seven West Media is leading the innovation in content and audience experiences," Minassian added.
"Together we were able to uplift the organisation’s data and analytics capabilities, delivering new insights to personalise the viewer experience and deliver higher ROI for their customers."
The data solution runs on AWS with a Cloudera enterprise data hub, Minassian said that without the power of the two platforms an eight person organisation such as Contexti would not have been able to engage with a company the size of SWM.
“They give us the backing and the trust in the platform to help us go after these deals,” he added.
Seven West Media head of data architecture, Sharmaine Salis, said there were two key data challenges that the organisations needed to solve.
“Firstly, the variety and complexity of the data sources meant that we needed a mature and enterprise-grade open-source data management solution at the core of our data ecosystem," Salis explained.
"The second challenge for us was the highly variable nature of the events that generated the data, with huge events like the Rio Olympics needing to be supported over and above business-as-usual demand. This drove our decision for a cloud-based solution.”
Salis said this same data was used to underpin an audience engagement program.
More than one million people registered on the Olympics app or website during the event and each user’s level of engagement with the content was tracked across over 200 daily variables and these were used to trigger highly targeted and personalised emails aimed at increasing user engagement.
Contexti now provides the offering to SWM as a managed service on an ongoing basis and is looking to expand beyond sporting events to reality TV series and other offerings.
Chris Player is attending AWS re:Invent 2016 as a guest of Amazon Web Services.
