英国新闻：帮助业务团队以360°的读者数据视角解读字里行间

News UK(part of global media corporation News Corp) is one ofthe leading multichannel media businesses in the UK and Ireland.It creates content that entertains, informs, and inspires. Its brandsinclude The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, talkSPORT, VirginRadio, Times Radio, and talkRADIO. This case study was originally published by Google Cloud. News UK enables its business teams to better understandand cater to readers’ wants and needs by unifyingcustomer data and transactions on BigQuery to makethem more easily accessible. Google Cloud results GETS NEWDATASETSTO BUSINESSTEAMS4X FASTER •Unifies first-party customer datawith product service interactiondata, giving teams an integratedview of reader behavior •Enables sales teams to improveaccurate insights for advertisingpartners, creating a more targetedbrowsing experience for readers •Drives innovation and customerpersonalization by empoweringthe data platforms team tosupport more self-serviceablebusiness intelligence queries At News UK, a media group best knownfor its big print titles such as The Sunand The Times, its experienced editorscarefully curate relevant, interestingcontent on its digital news platforms andapplications for its readers. Digital readershave overtaken print ones across NewsUK’s brands: The Times and The SundayTimes have more than 380,000 digital-onlysubscribers. Finding ways to engage thesereaders is central to the company’s success. The newspaper industry has facedbig challenges over the last 20 years.The way people consume news mediahas changed irrevocably. Readers arenow more likely to swipe through theirdaily dose of news on their phones thanbuy a printed newspaper. And theywant news that is tailored to them. That’s not without challenges though,explains Karthik Ramani, Head ofData Platforms at News UK.“In the digitalspace, there’s even more competitionfor the attention of our audience andadvertisers than in print. To stay on top,we have to foster a loyal relationshipwith our readers, providing them withgreat content, while maximizing adrevenue from targeted advertising.” "We want to create asustainable, cost-effectivecloud strategy that will provideflexibility to support businessdecisions over the next fiveyears, so we're looking atsolutions that can grow withus. That’s what we’ve foundin Google Cloud and itsBigQuery data warehouse." To balance both these goals, News UK’sbusiness teams must make increasinglydata-driven decisions."We’re committed toproviding our digital readers with the bestpossible content and services, especially forour subscription-based services,"explainsKarthik."Accessible data insights are crucialto enable the newsroom to curate morerelevant content for our audiences, whileincreasing our ad revenue and supportingour sales and marketing teams." —Karthik Ramani,Head of Data Platforms, News UK Reducing maintenance, improving access across teams What Karthik and his team needed wasa single source for both batch andreal-time data, to provide deeper insightsinto News UK’s customer behavior withlower maintenance efforts. When therollout of GDPR required an audit of NewsUK’s data compliance strategies, the teamused it as an opportunity to also rethinkthe company’s overall approach to data. Karthik's team is responsible for datawarehousing and data engineeringand managing data processing and thecloud infrastructure behind it. But whenKarthik joined News UK in June 2018,connecting the dots between News UK'sfirst-party customer datasets and the datagenerated from customer interactionson its websites and apps was a challenge.With two data warehouses on twoseparate cloud platforms, the marketing,analytics, data science, subscription, andcustomer services teams couldn't easilygain insights due to information silos. "We wanted a scalable solutionfor data storage and access,and based on our previousexperience, BigQuery was theideal choice. The serverlessaspect is a huge win, enablingus to focus on adding valueto the business, not worryingabout our data warehouse’sbackend scalability." Because behavioral data was storedseparately from data relating todemographics and subscriptions, endusers had to manually combine thesedatasets in marketing and analytics toolsto deliver insights to the business teams.With duplicate workflows required forevery single use case, drawing insightsfrom data was a time-consuming process. "Having two parallel data warehouses madethings harder for business teams that needed aholistic view of our data assets,”says Karthik. “It wasn't cost-effective, as the only way tofully integrate them was to transfer databetween the warehouses or within externaltools such as tableau. That required extraengineering work and transfer costs.” —Karthik Ramani,Head of Data Platforms, News UK Selecting BigQuery for a solution that’s growth-ready News UK had already been usingBigQuery for its data science usecases for five years, so the digital datasetsfor customer interactions were already onGoog