Brands seeking that seamless human to computer communication have been likened to chasing the ‘Starship Enterprise’ dream, by head of digital at Sky UK.
Speaking at Ashton Media’s Marketing Tech Symposium, David Fisher shared his personal and business views on the role marketing tech plays and how Sky is constantly forming new data and ad tech partnerships to improve its understanding of the customer, and that customer’s journey.
“Not only are we the UK’s biggest advertiser, but in terms of media sales we are the third or fourth biggest sales house in the UK so we have a unique perspective on marketing technology,” Fisher said.
“The transformative effect of data, the power of addressability and the impact of technology. Data underpins everything we do at Sky.”
Fisher, who was previously head of brand partnerships at Guardian News and Media for nearly five years, began by referencing a Star Trek episode in which the Starship Enterprise spaceship crew agreed to give all their data to the spaceship.
“My personal view is that when you think of the Silicon Valley business leaders, in reality they are all science fiction nerds so where they all want to live is on the Starship Enterprise,” Fisher said.
“Some of them, such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are even building out their own space rockets.”
He said the Starship Enterprise is like the internet of things (IoT) and is about that seamless human to computer communication.
“It’s about computers that know everything. Ultimately what was happening on the Starship Enterprise is that the entire crew signed a data agreement to give all their data to the computer on the spaceship,” he explained.
“While a boring episode, and signing agreements with your washing machine or oven won’t happen overnight, actually, people have data agreements with companies like Sky already and we think that it’s that type of seamless communication between human and computer that is is where we are heading – with things such as our chatbots and using Amazon Echo.
“Marketing technology has a big role to play in this.”
We have always been a data company
Fisher explained that entertainment companies like Sky, which already have a router, a satellite dish and many other devices in the house, are best placed over utility companies and white goods manufactures, to help create that smooth IoT-style way of communication.
Sky, which says it is Adobe’s biggest customer in the UK, turns over about £12.9 billion in revenue, has 26 million households across Europe, a 94% UK weekly reach and of the 11 million households in the UK that have Sky TV, eight million of those households now have active Sky Go, its offering via internet delivered media.
“We have always been a data company. Data has the power to be absolutely transformative to our business in every regard, we have been on a real journey to drive and develop the amount of data that we hold, that we own, that we aggregate or that we buy,” Fisher said.
“We now hold a whole load of panel data, consumption data, behavioral data, massive amounts of first party data from CRM and a huge amount of third party data that we buy in.
This is an ongoing journey. It’s a limitless pool in which individual data points are not used to drive particular decisions, but combinations of different data points are used to drive acquisition.”
Closer to home Foxtel and MCN are on a trajectory to follow Sky's path in the UK.
Telling the data story
Fisher said Sky has been doing a “fair amount of thinking” about how it tells the data story. He explained that despite there being areas where there are huge amounts of data, such as earthquake pre-warning systems, the economy/inflation rates or even data regarding outbreaks of flu, knowing or having key data on these things doesn’t matter if it can’t actually do you any good.
However, he said there are three key areas where data is increasing in terms of its power. That's sport, weather, and media. All are areas rich in data that have unique technology and innovation behind them that make them great areas to invest in.
“It’s important to remember among all this data that it’s about people,” he said. “It’s about customers and that means sometimes the data will be telling you things that actually isn’t manifested in the results and that’s because there are people at the end. This idea that there are audiences and customers is really really important.”
He concluded that a huge part of using marketing technology is to bring together online and offline with the aim of achieving a single customer view.
“It’s about improving targeting and efficiencies across more and more platforms. Be it simple segmentations, such as excluding current customers from targeting of things they already have, using marketing to drive products; interest retargeting; sequencing marketing messages and of course, personalisation.”
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