Excellence in Data Analytics, Group A

From a field of contenders, Group A, for those media and advertising companies considered to be international, the winners were:

• First Place, Chartbeat Headline Testing, Chartbeat, United States
• Second Place, Implementation of Data Management Platform, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong

The judges said that Chartbeat’s Headline testing product is:

“A very strong entry, very clear benefit to journalists and very clear results to back it up.” And “Great focus as this really produces results and therefore drives much needed revenue. There really cannot be a solitary reason for any publisher not to experiment with this technology, or something similar.

Anything that enhances and simplifies the reader's experience with a title should and must be welcomed into the market”

Excellence in Data Analytics, Group B

The three winners in Group B of entries in the Data Analytics category are:

• First Place, Wisdomnxt, DB Digital, India
• Second Place, Intelligence Beyond Data: Unlock the Potential of Audience Engagements, United Daily News Group, Taiwan
• Award of Excellence, Metrics for News, American Press Institute, United States

The judges remarked about Wisdomnxt:

“Superb interface. An outstanding piece of software engineering that captures all the key channels that a news organisation would wish to explore. The results of its adoption are truly excellent, also. It would be interesting to see the roadmap for the product, as this would be an insight into where Wisdom sees the direction of news going. Great entry. Congrats” and “Very impressive results. The implied level of culture change sounded impressive too. Does seem quite complex for everyone in the company to use daily?”

Excellence in Data Strategy

The three winners in the Excellence in Data Strategy category are:

• First Place, Dow Jones DNA, Dow Jones, United States
• Second Place, Metrics for News, American Press Institute, United States
• Award of Excellence: Intelligence Beyond Data: Unlock the Potential of Audience Engagements, United Daily News Group, Taiwan

Excellence in data-driven advertising campaign

The winners in the excellence in data-driven advertising campaign category are:

• First Place, Retargeting Campaign Roll-out with Data to Maximize Reach and Conversion, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong
• Second Place, Intelligence Beyond Data: Unlock the Potential of Audience Engagements, United Daily News Group, Taiwan
• Award of Excellence, Campaign through Lotame, DB Digital, India

The judges said of SCMP’s entry:

“Lotame DMP is a powerful tool, as SCMP is establishing. The process makes absolute sense, and the results have been outstanding. A great initiative that delivered powerful results.”

Excellence in Data-driven business Process Efficiency

The winners of the data-driven business process efficiency awards are:

• First Place, InsightsPLUS, Fairfax Media, Australia
• Second Place, Data-driven process revolution, Grupa Onet-RAS, Poland
• Award of Excellence: Strengthening Data Culture at SCMP, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong

The judges said of Fairfax’s winning entry:

“An interface to combine various data sources, and to make it available to all sales people on a self-serve basis is commendable. This interface looks clean and straightforward…(InsightsPLUS) is a positive step.”

Excellence in Data-Driven Product Development, Group A

In Group A, the winners are:

• First Place, Chartbeat Headline Testing, Chartbeat, United States
• Second Place, leveraging Data for A/B Testing, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong

The judges said of Chartbeat’s winning entry:

“A strong benefit to the news department, as well as driving more traffic that translates in to real revenue. Congratulations on a much needed, results-oriented product for the news industry.”

Excellence in Data-Driven Product Development, Group B

The winners are:

• Second Place, Automatic content drives engagement and subscriptions for Swedish local media, United Robots, Sweden
• Award of Excellence, Content recommendation, DB Corp Ltd (Digital Division), India
• First Place, Bytedance Technology, Toutiao Media Lab, China

The judges said of Toutiao’s winning entry:

“Toutiao’s Datadance represents significant scale and a wide variety of use cases in China. It gives us a glimpse into the powerful possibilities that can be done with very large data sets generated by media company audiences.”

Excellence in use of Artificial Intelligence, Group A

In Group A, the two winners are:

• First Place: ModBot: Automatic Comment Moderation, The Washington Post, United States
• Second place: SendtoNews Smart Match: A.I. Designed For Publishers, SendtoNews, Canada

The judges had a lot to say about the winning ModBot entry:

“A good solution to the very tangible problem of comment moderation. This is a vast problem in the media industry and this solution could reduce a lot of cost for large publishers. I like that they focused on a very narrow problem and worked their way out from there, instead of trying to solve a large problem and not getting anywhere.”

Excellence in use of Artificial Intelligence, Group B

In Group B, the winners are:

• First Place: Computer Vision for Classified, Styria Media, Croatia
• Second Place: AI-Powered Video Creation Platform, Wibbitz, United States
• Award of Excellence: Using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate revenue and boost reader engagement, Ringier, Switzerland

The judges said of Styria Media’s winning entry:

Very effective use of neural network historical strengths in classification and very effective operationalisation particularly on mobile. Simple-to-use cropping and matching to tags also adds to productivity gains.

Excellence in the Use of Bots

The winners in the Excellence in the Use of Bots category are:

• First Place: Heliograf: An Intelligent, Automated Storytelling Agent, The Washington Post, United States
• Second Place: Use of NLP in Content Recommendation, DB Corp Ltd (Digital Division), India

The judges said about the Post’s Heliograf:

“While this is not the first company to successfully automate the creation of articles based compiling data in templates, their set of examples and explanations are eloquently written and backed. The results also seem quite promising. Very impressive.”

Excellence in Natural Language Processing

The winners in the Excellence in Natural Language Processing category are:

• First Place: Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to generate revenue, boost engagement, Ringier AG, Switzerland
• Second: La Presse Topic Tagger, La Presse, Canada
• Award of Excellence: Use of Artificial Intelligence in News Recommendation, DB Corp Ltd (Digital Division), India

The judges said about Ringier’s winning entry:

“This is a comprehensive strategy to utilize NLP and ML for various purposes, including streamlining workflows, improving user experience and providing targeted advertising to generate revenue, with clear results.”

Excellence in the Use of Predictive Analytics

The three winners in the predictive analytics category are:

• First Place: EngageReaders - ePaper analytics, Twipe Mobile Publishing, Belgium
• Second Place: Log Optimization, RSG Media, United States
• Award of Excellence: Facebook Monitor System, The News Lens, Taiwan

The judges said about Twipe Mobile’s winning entry:

“That is a creative approach using modern market research methods to baseline engagement. In this sense the work is about recommendations. Excellent work!”

Excellence for Creativity in a Data-Driven Project

The three winners for the Excellence for Creativity in a Data-Driven Project category are:

• First Place: NHS Tracker, BBC News, United Kingdom
• Second Place: ETL without a data engineer, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong
• Award of Excellence: Mather Advertising Rate Calculator Dashboard, Mather Economics, United States

The judges said of the BBC’s winning entry:

“This is a very creative and meaningful use of data extraction and visualization to provide readers with important information on UK hospitals inside of the NHS and is an important tool for journalists in reporting”

Excellence in data-driven technology

The winners in the Excellence in data-driven technology category are:

• First Place: WisdomNxt, DB Corp Ltd (Digital Division), India
• Second Place: Listener Intelligent Paywall, Mather Economics, United States
• Award of Excellence: Implementation of GCS to increase reliance on data across the organization, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong

The judges said of Wisdomnxt:

“This is a good example of a media company harnessing data to increase audience engagement with clear results.”