News UK: Data is not only the fingerprint of our customers' lives, it's the blueprint of our relationship with them

News UK's BI director, Andy Day, explains how the publisher of The Sun and The Times uses data to guide every aspect of its business

When I joined News UK in 2013, my remit was clear: build a business intelligence team with the responsibility of looking at all things data. News UK was committed to building a broad-brush technical data capability and was making the investment to prove it.

The reason for this development was simple: it saw an opportunity to put customers and their data at the heart of the business, trading on consistent facts across the board, and using data-based insights to improve, yet not replace, our instinct-driven journalism.

Imagine for a minute what Sherlock Holmes might have achieved if, alongside his amazing powers of deduction, he had the benefit of forensic science?

At News UK, our titles - The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun - have collectively been producing award-winning journalism for more than 100 years. But now, with the data and information we have across the company, there is even greater potential to use it to help inform all areas of the business and drive better outcomes.

We use data to help develop the content we put in the papers, identify new business opportunities, personalise our marketing efforts, better manage our distribution and improve a whole host of areas across the company. But just as importantly, it enables us to provide an improved service for our customers and readers, too.

Like most businesses across the world, News UK has access to huge swathes of data. For us it includes newspaper sales, digital news readership, subscription data, web-traffic information and data from our various brand extension businesses, such as Sun Bingo, Handpicked, The Sunday Times Wine Club and so on.

Although we may not have the "biggest" data estate when compared with a company such as Google or a Vodafone, with more than 200 different sources of customer information and 50 million pieces of transactional data captured every day, we have significant complexity to deal with.

Over the past 12 months, we have invested in a technical architecture that mixes traditional data-warehousing technologies with state-of-the-art big-data tools. Amazon Redshift and SAS analytics capabilities sit alongside Google's Big Query, Hadoop, R and Python.

But success with analytics is built on two key pillars: great data and equally great people. We have been fortunate to have attracted a team of amazing data analysts and engineers who bring a blend of technical skill and business acumen, which in turn ensures that we are solving actual business problems.

At the heart of building our data and information capability is the customer. The key guiding principle for News UK is to make sure there is a clear value exchange between the customer and the business. We use our customers' data for their benefit.

Instinct and data

But what does this mean in practice? At its simplest, it ensures we have a lens through which we decide what we can and cannot do with our data as well as providing a "conscience" as to what data we will hold about our customers. It also means that we treat the collection and collation of our customers' "data DNA" with the care and attention it deserves - not only is it a fingerprint of their lives, it is the blueprint of our relationship with them.

For example, the aim of the editorial team is to provide a compelling newspaper across all formats (print, digital tablet and smartphone) for its readers. Historically, it was purely down to the editorial team to work out what that content should be, based on their experience and journalist intuition. But it was difficult for those teams to understand the sometimes very differing traits of their spectrum of readers.

Today, linking our digital analytics (we know which articles each reader consumes) with the demographic data we hold and the social media data we are able to analyse, we can clearly define the likes and dislikes from a content perspective for each and every reader. This means we can produce more of the content they like and will consume leading to happier readers who are more engaged with our product and will hopefully continue to buy.

But there is balance. Whether it's news, comment, opinion or investigative journalism, they all need the human touch - the ability to sniff out a story or provide an opinion that challenges the reader. No algorithm in the world could create satirical cartoons as good as The Times' Peter Brookes does every day.

So while the exciting potential for analysing data is clear, it would be a crying shame if we simply let that do the work and ended up in a world where differentiated and distinctive content no longer existed.

Andy Day is business intelligence director at News UK