Business Need
A+E Networks is a global entertainment media company that has six blockbuster brands including History, Lifetime, and A&E, and reaches 330 million homes across 160 markets in 39 languages. A+E Networks has an extensive line-up of shows and movies that they want to bring to the homes of their subscribers, both on television as well as online digitally.
As A+E Networks interacts with its customers using different channels and touch-points, there is an opportunity to share the data that has been collected to understand its customers at a deeper level and allow A+E Networks to leverage that data to provide a much more enriched customer experience.
Technology Solution
The data that has been collected by A+E Networks over the years have been at an aggregate level, and quite siloed. Each brand has an understanding of its customers at an overall level for programming purposes, but it has been difficult for A+E Networks to share information of a customer across the organization and communicate with individual customer at a personal level.
To address this need, Zettalytics worked closely with A+E Networks to design the data architecture. Collaborative, they reviewed all the systems in place that currently collected data by each brand and from each channel, in order to get a clear sense of the project scope. Based on the type of data being collected and the volume, together A+E Networks and Zettalytics formulated the recommended data architecture and technical infrastructure to allow A+E Networks to house the customer data in a central location and begin to understand each customer from an organization point of view.
Leveraging services provided by Amazon AWS, A+E Networks relied on MongoDB and Redshift to scale based on the volume coming into the database.
The existence of this enhanced data has allowed A+E Networks to slice and dice the data using Tableau. They are able to segment the audience according to a set of criteria, and further discover any additional characteristics that may not be apparent initially.
Technology Stack:
- MongoDB for Data Staging
- Redshift for Data Warehouse
- Tableau for Data Visualization
- AWS for Infrastructure and Hosting
Benefits
Looking at each customer from a holistic perspective, A+E now has a thorough understanding of their customers at a detailed level. They can isolate groups of customers that they want to target for a specific new show that they are launching.
They can get a better sense of the characteristics of the customers they have, and expand their acquisition tactics to acquire more of those people who are currently not A+E customers. This allows them to become more efficient in ad buying and reduce waste. This also allows them to reach the right people to tune into their shows and increase linear viewing lift.
Ultimately, A+E wants to provide the most relevant content to their customers, and this better understanding of their customers because of the enriched data helps them achieve the goal.
