Data is a mess. It’s in different systems, it’s duplicative, it’s not clean, it’s not normalized… I can go on and on. And yet data is the lifeblood that you run your business on. How can it not be worth the effort to clean it up and keep it clean? 

Yes, this is a boring and well-trodden topic. However, all of the cool things we want to do with data (addressability, real-time creative decisions, optimized inventory management and pricing, etc.) need clean data to operate.

Poor data quality costs companies $3.1 trillion per year in the US alone. The right data management modernization strategy and execution could mean a 20+% increase in revenue and 30+% reduction in operational costs. Can you imagine if you had automated reporting, predictive analytics, and you could rely on the numbers!? Plus, it could also help you prepare for the ‘death of the cookie’: Google’s promise to remove third-party cookies in the near future.

For the here and now in the media & entertainment industry, clean data will give you a clear answer to business-critical questions, such as:

• How much business did we do with this agency last year? What ad packages? TV/CTV/Digital? What rates? What was the performance? Were they happy?
• What’s our demand forecast for this month? Quarter? Year? Vs. capacity? What’s our plan to close the gap? How much will it cost? Will it be profitable? Should we take this deal or walk away from it?
• How should we package our inventory? What should we charge for it? What’s the lowest we should go before we walk away?
• Is this campaign going to overdeliver? How do we up/cross-sell?
• Is this campaign going to underdeliver? How do we prevent that? What effect will it have on the other campaigns?
• Are we satisfying annual contracts properly?

And — by the way — we could also answer questions about our consumers:

• Is the consumer experience engaging enough? Why or why not?
• What is the LTV/NPS of my consumers?
• Is my consumer satisfied with my product? Why or why not?
• What kind of content is my consumer interested in today?
• Is my consumer about to churn? Why?
• What segment is my consumer in? Yesterday? Tomorrow?
• What kind of ads do my consumers like?
• What is the right level of subscription/payment for my consumer?
• Did my consumer churn? How do I get him/her back?

Through proper data hygiene and management, all of these tasks and business-critical analytics can be automated and all of these questions can be answered. Besides adding more revenue, customer satisfaction, and faster speed-to-market, your employees can be focused on more value-added tasks related to your product and customer. And in the process, your employees will be more satisfied.

As I mentioned before, there’s another compelling reason to make this a priority: the sunsetting of third-party cookies. An ID management solution is just part of this data work. So while everyone is scrambling for an ID management solution (I recently read that there are 80 ID management solutions out there…seriously!), this work should be considered as part of an overall data management solution.

In closing, here are just a few of the components to consider to build a robust data management solution:

• Organizational alignment
• The customer journey and all engagement points
• Cleaning, normalizing, and/or enriching existing/new data
• Business questions that need to be answered in real-time
• How much to rely on out-of-the-box solutions
• Defining ownership and maintenance processes of the customer database
• Integration of custom and third-party systems
• Security

Need help? At Wizeline, we specialize in helping you develop technology products and platforms for better data and identity management, media analytics, customer acquisition and subscription management, and much more. Visit our landing page to learn more.