by Sandra Cabrelle, Managing Consultant, NSW
A modern, multiplatform media organisation offering 68 communities services in their own language, showcasing multicultural, multilingual and First Nations stories as well as an extensive radio network.
Partnering with Altis, this media company had a goal to use data and make decisions through greater insights into audience and customer experience.
The problem
Partnering with Altis, the media company had a goal to use data and make decisions through greater insights into their audience and customer experience.
The company was seeking to develop a new data platform that would enhance its data and analytics capabilities on a new technology stack that would take them into the future.
They wanted to rationalise the number of existing data warehouses and reduce duplication of data to provide more streamlined access to data and allow decision making within the organisation. They were after a new BI tool to report on registered users, online ad tracking, video streaming usage, and digital impressions, effectively and efficiently.
“The Altis team were always there to share their knowledge, challenge our thinking and stepped up to deliver. They never lost their kindness.”
The solution
Altis was engaged to build a new data platform and analytics capability using the technology stack chosen by the media company.
Altis created a future state modern data architecture design to enable the business vision to be realised in a best-practice and scalable manner.
Drawing on business workshops and prioritisation, and using a hybrid waterfall and agile project methodology, Altis established and delivered a cloud based, best-practice modern, data and analytics platform for the media company using AWS, Talend, Snowflake and Tableau Online.
A Snowflake Scaffold was designed for this delivery with a ‘LEGO’ approach in mind, where functionality and features could be added or removed to suit a use case. The scaffold is essentially a collection of meta data tables and stored procedures running in Snowflake that can auto-generate code to bring data from source to target and has the capability to load both structured and semi-structured data.
The new platform allowed the processing of 80 reporting tables and 45 ETL/scripts, as well as 17 reports used throughout the company’s various departments including Sales, TV & Radio Content, People & Culture, Legal, Audience and Finance.
The data processed from the migration of 2 legacy data warehouses, Redshift and Microsoft SQL, came from 9 different source systems. Migration of data processed over 2TB or 15 billion records and an additional 3 new data sources were added that all then went through to 3 downstream systems.
Tangible Outcomes
The data platform has provided the multiplatform media company with greater insight and accessibility through the integration of data from various sources.
The company now possesses an industry-best practice data platform and visualisation tool, significantly broadening access to information across their business. This has allowed them to perform detailed analysis, while simultaneously supporting secure access to data to the business.
The Marketing team, for example, can use reports to monitor promotion effectiveness, and the same data may be used by the Audience team to analyse retention patterns and audience segmentation, while the Content team may look at the same data to determine if a show is better suited for their TV or On-Demand platform from a consumption and experience perspective. The company now has the power in their data to achieve audience and customer success.
