With the shift to the direct-to-consumer model, audiences have more information and entertainment options than ever before. Competition is only getting fiercer, and industry players are producing ever-increasing quantities of content to attract larger audiences. In the process, Media & Entertainment (M&E) organizations are stockpiling massive amounts of valuable data. In fact, 25% of the world’s data will be entertainment data by 2025. To stay competitive, M&E companies must make sense of it all, leveraging insights to reduce operating costs while simultaneously generating more revenue from delivering content.
However, possessing a treasure trove of data is one thing; fully harnessing it is quite another. M&E companies are struggling to unlock valuable insights with overly complex legacy workflows and business intelligence solutions that aren’t able to support today’s heavy, data-driven needs. That’s why improving data actionability and relevance is one of the top 5 initiatives M&E executives say they need to implement in order to make better use of data. M&E organizations struggle to maximize their data because:
Big data is often inaccessible to business users
Many existing business intelligence solutions require advanced skills in SQL, leaving M&E teams to field requests to experts to query data. This causes bottlenecks and time delays, resulting in slow decision making and undermining the ability to deliver engaging, data-informed audience experiences.
Traditional spreadsheets don’t scale for big data
Many M&E teams still use traditional spreadsheets as their main tool across all activities, but they don’t scale for big data—the higher the volume of data, the slower the spreadsheet processes, leading to more chances for the data to become corrupted and making it practically impossible to glean valuable insights.
Extracting, moving and combining data is cumbersome and introduces the risk of poor data
The time teams spend on non-value-added tasks like manual data gathering, consolidation, verification and formatting leaves little room for the type of analysis and strategic planning M&E teams need to build better relationships with audiences.
In addition, these workflows bring with them the risks of accidental data manipulation and stale data. Incorrect data leads to inaccurate forecasting and flawed decision making, which can have costly consequences. Inaccuracy also impacts your ability to deliver the personalized experiences that audiences have come to expect.
Fortunately, M&E organizations can now maximize their data with the combined power of Google Sheets and BigQuery
M&E teams can now bring the power and scale of BigQuery and the familiarity of Google Sheets together with Connected Sheets. Connected Sheets helps M&E companies harness and collaborate on massive amounts of data, making it easier to understand and quickly respond to today’s dynamic landscape. It offers familiar tools like pivot tables, charts and formulas so you can analyze and visualize large datasets to enhance each business area with continuous analytical agility. Connected Sheets helps M&E teams drive engagement with personalization, provide higher quality viewing experiences and develop data-informed content strategies by:
1. Democratizing data analytics
With no SQL skills required, Connected Sheets enables self-service analytics, freeing everyday business users from the time delays and bottlenecks associated with legacy workflows. With the ability to bring together and translate siloed data across an ever-changing and evolving business environment, Connected Sheets empowers everyday business users to glean insights by giving them a comprehensive view of things like audience behavior patterns and content performance. This enables teams to better anticipate what audiences want. For example, uncover:
- What kind of content viewers engage with the most
- What devices are used most often to consume different types of media
- How long videos are watched
- And much more…
2. Accelerating speed to insights
Connected Sheets enables M&E teams to say “bye bye” to manual data gathering. Uncover actionable insights faster and quickly respond to market opportunities and areas for improvement with the ability to access, analyze and visualize billions of rows of BigQuery data in Google Sheets with no performance issues. For example, more quickly predict and prevent customer churn by pulling in your BigQuery data on frequency of complaints, resolution time, source of complaints and geographical distribution of complaints. Analyze this data using pivot tables, charts and formulas to pinpoint problem areas and optimize the customer experience.
3. Ensuring you have the most up-to-date data
M&E companies need to engage with their audiences and adapt to their demands in real time. Connected Sheets makes this easy by enabling event-based, real-time decision making. The live connection to BigQuery means data is easy to refresh and always up-to-date, so you can deliver on-the-mark, personalized audience experiences, generate tailor-made offers and increase engagement and spending. For example, improve ad targeting by analyzing conversion data to uncover which demographics are responding well to a particular campaign. Use these insights to adjust campaigns on the fly by optimizing accordingly.
Connected Sheets also enables you to spend more time on analysis and strategic planning with scheduled refreshes that improve workflows and streamline reporting and dashboard creation. For example, use scheduled refreshes to pipe data into marketing dashboards—for search, social, email, traditional media and more—that can be updated automatically with the freshest data every single day (or as often as you’d like).
4. Enabling secure sharing and collaboration
With Google Workspace’s enterprise-grade security, sharing and collaborating on insights in Connected Sheets is risk-free and easy. You can control permissions to limit who can view, edit or share, and users can perform analysis in the sheet without fear of jeopardizing the integrity of the data in BigQuery. Share and collaborate on insights cross-functionally to build a data-driven culture that taps into collective intelligence. For example, share dashboards with marketing to help determine the best time to run promotions.
Unleash the full power of your data with SADA
Our experts can help you mobilize Connected Sheets and leverage your big data assets for more profitable customer engagement. As a two-time Google Cloud Global Partner of the Year and recipient of the Google Cloud Data Analytics Partner Specialization, we’ve helped leading M&E organizations accelerate their data analytics priorities. If you’re looking to solve smarter with data, let’s talk.
