8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
7th Big Data & AI For Media Conference
Where Data, Artificial Intelligence, Audience and Revenue Intersect
The conference themes:The global conference inspires participants to create Big Data and Artificial Intelligence strategies, collect data; apply next-generation data analytics in order to understand, target and engage audiences; build new products; and grow revenue.
The audience: The conference is aimed at media and advertising executives and data practitioners.
Microsoft Technology Center
11 Times Square
41st Street & 8th Avenue
7th Floor
8 a.m. to 9 a.m.
Networking registration and coffee
9 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.
Welcome and Overview
Session 1:
9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Big Data and AI: The promise of revenue and engagement
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are the next big digital opportunity, and media companies must invest to compete with industry giants like Facebook, Alibaba,Tencent and Google, which are all investing heavily in AI. You will hear from media companies that are investing in the future of their companies by driving their Big Data and artificial intelligence strategies, thereby enabling audience engagement, personalisation, targeting, product development, efficiencies and revenue-making.
9:45 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Keynote, including fireside chat and Q&A
Marketing and advertising professionals have not been able to fully leverage the billions of terabytes of data available to them because they are navigating an explosion of different tools, facing a lack of transparency, and dealing with walled gardens. In this session, Carrie Seifer, Chief Revenue Officer for IBM Watson Advertising, will cover how the right mix of data, media, and AI technology offerings can help agencies and marketers improve the value chain for their customers. Carrie will describe the media, data and AI-technology offerings that make up Watson Advertising’s portfolio and reveal how they can empower advertising professionals for more confident decision-making to drive superior performance and deeper brand engagements.
10:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Networking break
11 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
CNN’s data-powered audience development strategy
Global broadcasting and digital powerhouse CNN has been expanding its data-driven audience strategy and AI-powered product development, with data playing an increasingly important role in the newsroom and across the business. Herbert will detail how CNN is prioritizing data as the analytics, product development, audience-growing and revenue-making fuel for its strategy.
11:430 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Rethinking processes and solutions to grow audiences and build products at New York Times
Ms. Evans will discuss how the New York Times has changed its culture to be more data-driven, by rethinking processes and creating innovative solutions to grow audiences and create products. The Times data teams apply analytics to produce actionable insights that impact business KPIs, including working with streams from cookie-level data analysis, technology infrastructure, client facing insight generation, progressive profiling, personalisation and algorithm building to increase audience engagement and automate solutions. The team uses a variety of techniques to analyse and leverage data, including predictive analytics, forecasting, data science and warehousing, marketing and advertising targeting, progressive profiling and audience development.
12:00pm to 12:45 p.m.
Panel discussion
12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m.
Networking lunch
Session 2:
1:45 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Audience Analytics: Building a solid foundation for engagement, new products and revenues
The fundamental building blocks of any Big Data and artificial intelligence strategy are strong audience analytics and personalisation practises. The experts will talk about best practices in the media and agency businesses, and how analytics is the gateway to product development, targeted campaigns, and revenue-making.
1:45 p.m. to 2:10 p.m.
How Conde Nast International built an effective analytics operation
Building a data team of numerate, analytical professionals is the foundation for creating analytics and insights best practices, which in turn drive engagement and revenue-making among the 100 websites and apps in 11 countries for Conde Nast International. The media brands include, Vogue, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Condé Nast Traveller which more than 200 million unique users. Austin will describe the process of building the department, and meeting objectives in analytics-driven product development.
2:10 p.m. to 2:35 p.m.
The Dow Jones Data News and Analytics (DNA) platform provides premium news and derived data that powers organizations with insights and data for automated workflows to drive data-driven business strategies. The platform powers Dow Jones products including Factiva, Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, as well as the Dow Jones Data Strategy and Newsroom teams, allowing Dow Jones and its customers to innovate with some of the most important business data in the world. Patricia is the lead for the product, and will talk about how Dow Jones leverages this tool for engagement and profit.
2:35 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Gaining profound insights from billions of news reading sessions using data and AI
What can we learn from a massive live-poll of news readers on the Internet? Parse.ly has gathered data from more than 1 billion monthly devices, on more than 2,500 high-traffic news websites, from readers who collectively perform more than 2 million sessions per minute. Parse.ly‘s data scientists and machine learning engineers have sifted through these data to extract profound insights about news trends, social networks, search engines and device usage patterns, and have leveraged the data to make predictions about offline behaviour.
3 p.m. to 3:25 p.m.
Networking break
Session 3:
3:25 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Data-driven Product Development: Creating audience-first best practices
The first steps in any data strategy are to collect data and apply next-generation data analytics in order to understand, target and engage audiences. The brass ring is to use these deep understandings of the audience is to build new products and grow revenue. The following case studies will show how three companies leveraged audience insights for profit by building new products.
3:25 p.m. to 3:50 p.m.
Data-driven products for subscriber acquisition
Tribune Interactive uses data to inform all steps in the product development cycle, including a combination of data analytics and data science at varying levels of complexity to inform possible directions of design. Machine learning algorithms are built and integrated into existing systems leaving users in control instead of ceding the decision making to an algorithm. Alejandro will talk about how tronc is building automation into the process of product development, including subscriber acquisition on their websites.
3:50 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.
Why blockchain is an essential publishing tool
Jarrod Dicker is former Washington Post’s vice-president of innovation and commercial strategy, who recently left to lead the blockchain for media startup, Po.et. Dicker founded The Post’s research, experimentation and development team (RED), Blockchain technology drives Dicker’s newest venture, Po.et. The technology allows publishers to timestamp their digital works, including text, audio and visual content products. Po.et uses blockchain technology in order to create digital “fingerprints” that can mathematically prove an article hasn’t been altered or tampered with. Dicker will explain why blockchain is the next big, essential element of every publisher’s strategy.
4:15 p.m. to 4:40 p.m.
Developing the formula for SCMP’s latest data-driven product, Abacus
South China Morning Post is one of the most influential media companies in Asia. Acquired by AI giant Alibaba last year, SCMP has been ramping up its data-driven business practices as well as exploring forays into AI. SCMP’s Korey Lee, will talk about how data and analytics play a role in the conceptualization, development and refinement of Abacus, which is SCMP’s latest China tech product targeting the U.S. audience. Lee will detail SCMP’s new product development best practices, and revenue opportunities for their growing data operations.
4:40 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.
Panel discussion
5:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Closing comments
5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Cocktail Reception
Microsoft gathering space, 7th Floor
Session 4:
9 a.m. to 9:35 a.m.
Keynote: How Bing News Grows User Engagement with AI?
Microsoft uses AI technology to understand news content context, including tagging, classifying, ranking and targeting. Ting Cai will give examples of how Bing News leverages AI and data technologies to provide the right content to the right users at the right time and on the right channel.
Session 5: 9:35 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.
Data transformation: How data is changing the agency and media advertising landscape
Around the globe, premium publishers and broadcasters are struggling to compete for share of growing digital advertising revenues versus the global digital giants. Premium ad exchanges offer a way for publishers and advertising companies to effectively compete. Speakers will discuss the challenges and opportunities of building a data-driven advertising network from scratch, and leveraging data and AI for audience segmentation, targeting and revenue.
9:35 a.m. to 10 a.m.
LMC leverages data from premium publisher reach, engagement for profit
The Local Media Consortium is working with its advertising network members to leverage the breadth of data generated across its 1,700-property footprint to enhance revenue and engagement across the local media landscape.
10:25 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.
Networking break
10:50 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.
Video advertising network: How AI has enabled more insightful and efficient campaigns for Unruly
Artificial intelligence is enabling more precise targeting in video advertising campaigns, and therefore more effective campaigns. Kenneth will present case studies of precision-targeted campaigns across the Unruly network, including their newest targeting technology, emotional testing and targeting. Unruly EQ and Unruly Custom Audiences are the new tools to give advertisers the data they need to maximise the emotional, social and business impact of their video ads. Unruly is owned by NewsCorp., which publishes the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic among other titles around the world. Ken will discuss the importance of its media company relationship in the success of Unruly’s campaigns.
11:15 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
12:00 p.m. to 1 p.m. Networking lunch
Session 6:
1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Data and AI-Driven Advertising and Subscriptions: The promise and reality of higher yields
Media companies around the world ultimately implement data- and AI-driven strategies to achieve the brass ring: incremental revenues. Speakers will discuss strategies and case studies about how their companies leveraged technology to drive a healthier bottom line with advertising and subscriptions
1 p.m. to 1:25 p.m.
Machine learning: Powering advertising and audience
AI is reshaping advertising strategy for businesses worldwide. Practical applications in machine learning are paving the way for the future of media buying. Ireland’s leading Newspaper and Online publisher Independent News & Media (INM) have adopted such applications across their business. Brendan Hughes and Marian Slevin will discuss the role that machine learning has in enhancing campaign performance and identifying audience intent.
1:25 p.m. to 1:50 p.m.
1:50 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.
Schibsted’s subscription model predicts purchases, drives conversions with targeting
Schibsted’s data scientists built a prediction model to identify which news readers are most likely to buy a subscription. By measuring news readers’ digital engagement on Aftenposten over 2 weeks, Schibsted’s data scientists can identify groups of users that are 3-4X more likely than the average to purchase as subscription. Further, the data science team that is experimenting with the model have seen a 22% lift in conversions and a 35% reduction in cost per order in a controlled experiment, and 5X increase in conversion rates for telemarketing.
3 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Networking break
Session 7:
3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Artificial intelligence: Cutting through the AI hype to build revenue and audience with machine learning, NLP, predictive analytics and beyond. Speakers will discuss how AI technologies are leading the way for innovation at their respective companies.
3:30 p.m. to 3:55 p.m.
Data and AI powers advertising, editorial and workflow at Washington Post
Through its Arc Publishing suite of tools, the Washington Post drives its editorial, advertising and other key departments using AI and data tools to create efficiencies, new products, grow revenues, improve workflow and drive audience immersiveness. Marburger will speak about the use of Arc Publishing tools to create new products for the Post’s consumers.
3:55 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.
Styria Media’s AI transformation
Velic has developed Styria Media’s data department from the ground up, concentrating its efforts on revenue. The biggest triumph was leveraging computer vision in the classified business, both on the seller’s side with object recognition for ad placement, and visual search features for buyers, as well as a recommendation engine and personalization based on NLP for news portals. Marko’s presentation will focus on monetization using AI, as well as practical and strategic perspectives on data in media companies today.
4:20 p.m. to 4:45 p.m.
China’s billion-dollar, AI-driven, mobile-first news operation
Bytedance is one of the first companies in the world to launch mobile-first products powered by machine learning technology. The billion-dollar startup’s flagship product, Toutiao, has become the largest AI-based content discovery and
creation platform in China. Mr. Liu will discuss how AI is leveraged to tackle the industry problem of fake news, in order to give users a more relevant,
broadening as well as reliable content experience. He will also share some cases in which AI-driven reading data is applied to analysis to help content creators and business partners.
4:45 p.m to 5:30 p.m.
Closing panel discussion
Big Data & AI for Media Week Partners:
