10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
(New York time)
About this module
Media companies produce more great content that even their most dedicated users could read. And the user experience could be vastly improved if we could highlight these features that are most useful for a given user. Getting our users to be happier, read longer, and deepen their relationship also correlates with their value to us as a business. In our first module, we look at how publishers are thinking of ways to optimise on the basis of the individual user without losing their souls (or their minds).
Today's classes
10:00 a.m.-10:10 a.m. (New York time)
Welcome and introductions
Entering Year 2 of INMA’s Smart Data Initiative, join new lead Ariane Bernard in an
introduction that provides a brief overview of the master class and Module 1.
10:10 a.m.-10:40 a.m. (New York time)
A screen designed for each user at the South China Morning Post
Taking a hard look at the main prompts a user encounters on our screens —
liking, sharing, downloading — South China Morning Post used personalisation to
optimise the balance between content experience and promotion goals while improving the reader experience.
10:40 a.m.-11:10 a.m. (New York time)
How to approach personalisation
What do we mean when we say we optimise for a personalised experience? Erica Greene will share some of
the learnings from her experience as a machine learning engineering manager at Etsy and The New York
Times to identify some of the problems with Big Tech’s approach to personalisation and some proposals
for how media companies can do better.
11:10 a.m.-11:20 a.m. (New York time)
Personalising the user journey to reduce churn
A personalised customer journey relies on the ability to recognize the user in the first place. Using their
customer data platform, MediaNews Group is powering a personalized experience and engagement strategy. Jason Kristufek,
who works on subscription best practices across MediaNews Group's digital properties, will present their work on how they
leverage BlueConic's capabilities.
11:20 a.m.-11:50 a.m. (New York time)
Iterating through personalisation at Dow Jones
How Dow Jones approaches personalisation across their brands and functions and makes personalisation intentional in product development through a crawl-walk-run approach is the focus of this case study presentation.
11:50 a.m.-12:20 p.m. (New York time)
Building a toolbox for content recommendations at The New York Times
Anna Coenen will share some insights from leading a team that builds real-time content recommendation
algorithms at The Times. She will lay out the main components of their recommendation system and
talk about how the team partners with product teams and the newsroom to bring recommendations to
New York Times readers.
Do you feel like your data is working against rather than supporting you? Does dataset
sprawl become a liability rather than an asset? BuzzFeed went through the painful process
of completely replacing its foundational data instrumentation. In this session,
learn about the journey through this refactor — but also, the value they unlocked
for teams across the company.
Paywall optimisation is a great application of data, but what happens after conversion? Groupe Les Echos created an early model to predict whether a user would churn. 
Sometimes, you can serve constituents across the organisation with one new data point.
La Nación designed a new article score that supports the newsroom and the subscription team.
In this session, learn how this score got built.
With a very diversified user base and catalogue of products, Hindustan Times knew their first-party data strategy needed to cover a lot of ground. Saurabh Goel, the head of product at HT, will take us through their first-party data strategy and some of the ways they have put it to use. And this question which emerged from this work: Should publishers work together in consortiums to pool some of their first party data in the first place?
Nucleus Measure leverages News UK’s new first-party data to bring insights to commercial
partners that extend beyond click metrics. Meera Panchal pilots the development of a suite
of tools leveraging News UK's first party data and sees the project as having many applications across the whole organisation. 
In order to address the question of privacy more comprehensively, The Washington Post has created a new engineering team focused on data privacy. Aram Zucker-Schraff will share the story of the team he’s been building.