In my new role as Corporate Vice President of Data Strategy at Viacom, I have joined a small group of data experts affectionately known as “data mercenaries.” Our primary focus is to explore opportunities for scaling data science and data platforms throughout the organization. With many areas ripe for data superpowers, a key question is what to work on and why?

This transition marks an exciting departure from my previous experiences leading and building consumer-focused teams. The potential for growth and impact is immense. In addition to taking on specific data projects and products, we are entrusted with the responsibility of optimizing Viacom’s overall data efforts and assets. In this blog post, I will provide insights into our initial steps toward achieving this goal and share the process we have implemented.

Defining Work with Precision and Consistency: Our first priority is establishing a robust process for defining the work undertaken by each data group. This pre-work phase offers numerous benefits that are both extensive and significant. By adopting a shared methodology, we can document the goals, expectations, and return on investment (ROI) for each project. This levels the playing field for all teams, ensuring a common understanding, garnering buy-in, and securing the necessary support. Now, let’s delve into the details of our process:

1. Problem Statement: We begin by crafting a concise, S.M.A.R.T. sentence that effectively defines the scope of the project, expected outcome metrics, and delivery timeframe. Achieving consensus on this statement can be a time-consuming process, often taking several days.
2. Context: Next, we provide an overview of the project’s landscape and rationale. This context is crucial for understanding why we have undertaken the project.
3. Success Criteria: To validate the project’s value, we establish measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). These criteria serve as benchmarks and ensure that the project moves forward with clear objectives.
4. Scope: We outline the project’s initial starting point and identify components that may be deferred for future consideration. This delineation helps in defining project boundaries and prioritizing tasks.
5. Decision Makers: Identifying the individuals with decision-making authority is essential for effective project management and implementation.
6. Stakeholders: We adopt the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) approach to clearly define roles and responsibilities. This identifies the project owner, support personnel, and those who need to be consulted or kept informed.
7. Constraints: We identify both movable and immovable roadblocks or challenges that may impede project progress.

Condensing the Information for Widespread Understanding: We consolidate the above information into a concise, one-page document. This document is then shared widely across the organization, ensuring that it is accessible to both senior managers and junior data engineers. By doing so, we create a clear vision of our objectives and provide a measurable framework for assessing progress. This practice also enables us to analyze various projects and allocate resources efficiently.

Continuous Improvement: Although we are in the early stages of implementing this process, we are continually learning and refining our estimation methods to enhance the accuracy and quality of our work. The impact of this alignment initiative has already generated excitement within the organization, as the newfound clarity fuels enthusiasm and a shared sense of purpose.

At Viacom, our commitment to data strategy is unwavering. By implementing a comprehensive process to define project work, we are fostering alignment, clarity, and accountability across teams. Through collaborative efforts, we aim to optimize our resources and unlock the full potential of our data-driven initiatives. As we navigate this transformative journey, we remain dedicated to continuous improvement and embracing new opportunities for growth and innovation.

In its inaugural year, Viacom’s Social Data Strategy team has achieved remarkable success by employing data science to discover and collaborate with social media influencers, resulting in substantial revenue growth from their massive social following of approximately one billion fans.

A pivotal achievement during this journey was the development and implementation of the Social Talent Platform (STP), an innovative and data-driven tool that has empowered Viacom’s social casting teams to identify the most suitable influencers for specific campaigns. This blog post delves into the development process of the STP, highlighting the key steps taken to ensure its outstanding results.

Data Acquisition

To build the STP, Viacom strategically partnered with leading social influencer data companies, social listening data firms, and cutting-edge machine learning toolsets. These collaborations facilitated the creation of bespoke deals that incorporated custom features, showcasing Viacom’s expertise in business development and strategic product planning. Additionally, the team harnessed unique data sets not commonly used in social talent searches, setting the STP apart as an exceptional platform.

Data Management

Viacom seamlessly consolidated data from various sources by utilizing licensed data aggregation platforms and tailor-made data environments. Alongside building a custom database for social media talent, Viacom also curated comprehensive social profiles for content and advertisers. This process presented challenges in mapping entities from diverse data sets, a common hurdle in data-driven endeavors.

Data Modeling:

Two Ph.D. data scientists on the team crafted proprietary algorithms for the STP, enabling precise comparisons between influencers, content, and advertisers. These advanced algorithms analyzed multiple dimensions, including audience demographics, topic relevance, post-emotionality, and more. Significantly, Viacom’s models integrated non-social data and harnessed time series data to predict future engagement growth.

Data Storytelling

Viacom took data visualization to the next level by developing a bespoke front-end JavaScript application. This interactive tool allows talent, content creators, and advertisers to gain meaningful insights from the results of the custom search tool. Understanding the importance of creativity at Viacom, this application has been instrumental in effectively conveying outcomes that surpass traditional spreadsheets.

The culmination of Viacom’s efforts is the Social Talent Platform (STP), a patent-pending data platform revolutionizing the process of identifying social media influencers and generating engaging social content. The exceptional success of the STP is a testament to the unwavering dedication and expertise of the entire team at Viacom, who have harnessed data science to drive the company’s influencer marketing to new heights.

Reposted from: https://digiday.com/sponsored/viacombcs1-008-first-data-then-vibe-how-viacom-casts-influencers-in-90-percent-of-its-campaigns/

At first glance, there’s little that sets Shaun McBride—a charismatic former skateboarder who goes by the handle “Shonduras”—apart from the millions of other social media influencers enjoying the spoils of Internet fame. But in March, Viacom’s brand studio, Velocity, anointed McBride as a creative consultant, a move based largely on his Snapchat success.

McBride is among the many influencers the unit works with, mainly on campaigns, in a given year. His prominence shows how seriously Viacom takes its digital talent strategy: Velocity uses social media influencers in 90 percent of its campaigns, an approach that has evolved over years.

“A few years ago—the good old days—we could’ve put up a social post on certain platforms on behalf of an advertiser in the hopes of getting perhaps over 50 percent of those people to actually see it organically,” said Lydia Daly, SVP of Social Media and Branded Content Strategy for Viacom Velocity. “Now it could be as little as less than five percent meaning our distribution tactics have had to evolve.”

Influencers have become a cornerstone of the unit’s distribution strategy. And while McBride puts up big numbers on Snapchat and YouTube, Daly said much more goes into the casting of influencer partners than a sizeable following. To select the perfect influencer partner, Daly deploys a five-person team that combines old-school Hollywood casting techniques with new-fangled data science.

Part one: The reach

Of course, the numbers come first. “You’re looking at the numbers,” said Daly “and that helps you to whittle down from hundreds of thousands of potential influencers in the world to the 20 or so that might make sense for the campaign and make it onto our final talent proposal list.”

Those numbers go beyond cumulative subscriber counts to include average video views, breakdown of sponsored video views versus non-sponsored video views, growth trajectory over time, audience demographics, even the engagement metrics that indicate an influencer’s active subscriber base. Viacom guarantee campaign performance, so the Velocity brand studio is just as invested in accurately calculating a social influencer’s real reach as the brands that question the tactic’s value.

“You want active fans who are likely to remain active for a particular campaign,” said David Berzin, VP of data strategy, who leads a team of data scientists, including one doctor of mathematics and neuroscience, that collects and interprets influencers’ value. “The follower count is a lifetime number which is not necessarily relevant for a campaign you’re planning for next month.”

Then there’s the audience itself. “We have ways of looking deeply at the talent’s audience to find if it’s a good fit,” said Berzin. In some cases, Viacom looks for a perfect reflection of an audience they already have, say MTV’s core viewership. For other campaigns, they’re looking for a way to extend their reach into a new niche audience.

But in all cases, the numbers are just the beginning. “We don’t try to be prescriptive with the data.”

Part two: The vibe

Once the numbers are tallied, it’s up to Daly’s social talent casting and management team to work the talent. Here, casting relies—as it always has—on keeping up with trends in the marketplace and close relationships with talent agencies and managers. The team keeps a few different wish lists of talent: “interesting influencers in certain categories, those that fit well with Viacom’s brands and ones that are on our radar… that [are] kind of at a weird tipping point.”

And, of course, there’s chemistry. Daly’s team takes the lead, looking for charisma and personal spark while disqualifying influencers based on a client’s red flags: “There are certain clients that are extremely conservative—they would not want an influencer who has ever sworn in a video,” Daly said. Although that hasn’t stopped her talent team from passionately making the case to clients for creators they have faith in.

But even in evaluating personal chemistry, the data team plays a role. “We have a patent pending social data analysis tool that examines the fit between an advertiser, a content property and social talent,” Brezin said. “Consider it a set of customized set of ranked Venn diagrams that we create for each of our campaigns.” The data team will examine what kind of content the advertiser’s preferred audience watches along with traditional data like demographics.

Then there’s emotionality. Using natural language processing, the team can extract words and phrases and “bucket them into certain emotions. That basic fingerprint of emotionality gives you a good sense of how that audience typically reacts, and might react,” to a particular content strategy.

Part three: The relevance

The perfect influencer, according to Berzin and Daly, isn’t necessarily someone big, but someone who’s about to be big. “You really want to look for ebbs and flows, and talent that’s about to peak as opposed to an inflated follower count,” Berzin said. But Viacom is also looking for someone who’s relevant.

For Trojan’s campaign at last year’s MTV awards—designed to get millennials to wear condoms—the team wanted to propose Shannon Boodram, a YouTube sexologist at the top of their wish list. Though she didn’t have the tremendous follower count that advertisers crave, her sex-positive social presence was a perfect match for the campaign. And she seemed to be at a tipping point.

To help bolster her reach, they paired her with a comedic heartthrob,Josh Levya, said Daly. His 2 million strong subscriber base ensured Boodram’s on-brand message for Trojan cut through the social noise. The campaign for Trojan culminated in an appearance by Boodram and Leyva on the red carpet at Viacom’s MTV Video Music Awards–with Boodram wearing a dress of her own design made from Trojan condoms, naturally. The pairing resulted in an avalanche of positive press for Trojan and Boodram.

“It just speaks to how Viacom can elevate the brand of the talent.” said Berzin, “It’s a two-way street.”

The Ultimate Influencer?

Velocity has garnered some ink for its deal with influencer-turned-consultant McBride, aka Shonduras. While it might seem like Viacom’s just hedging its bets by going with the Snapchat flavor of the month, it instead found in him a kind of ideal influencer: one with the right reach, vibe, authenticity, adaptability  and business savvy to be more than another distribution channel.

“There are some influencers who post content to social media that goes viral, then accidentally become famous and start doing branded content deals,” said Daly. “Shaun is not one of those.”

He’s a motivated businessman, interested not just in how to build his own platform success, but in the interplay of content between platforms. His experiments with content formats, actively tracks trending content and is tireless when it comes to engaging directly with his fans, all of which pays off handsomely in brainstorms.

“In Shaun, and other creators, we are always looking for people who can craft stories across platforms,” said Dr. Thomas De Napoli, Velocity’s senior director of content and platform strategy. “That’s what our studio aims to do, and Shaun makes sure we’re doing it in a way that means something to fans.”

Shaun has already made major contributions to creative strategy sessions both on the brand and channel side of Viacom and is increasingly becoming an in-demand contributor for such meetings.

And, according to Berzin, McBride is, in addition to a content creator, a born metrics geek. “We have data teams that crunch numbers all day, but he just observes the numbers and his insights are often directly in line with our prioritized metrics.  And, he has a unique point of view as a social talent that…is just invaluable to us.”

But, as Viacom has found time and time again, the ultimate influencers may not be the folks with the biggest Snapchat following, the most liked Facebook posts, or the most fire Tweets. The ultimate influencer is situational, empowered as much by timing and authenticity as by the brute force of numeric popularity.

We’re lucky.  Viacom has built new, bespoke office space for our Data Strategy teams.  Open floors, lots of informal gathering spaces, a record player (we nearly burnt our “purple rain” when Prince passed) and more.

AdWeek featured us recently.  Take a look: http://www.adweek.com/news-gallery/advertising-branding/viacom-gets-face-lift-millennial-generation-173659

At Viacom we’re hard at work at new tools to create, predict and measure our social media campaigns.

“Viacom’s data-driven ad sales unit Vantage is upping the volume on its Echo social media product.

Now, with version 3.0 of Echo, the company is offering marketing clients what it is calling an entire “Echosystem” of tools. Those tools will help create social media campaigns, predict how many people they will reach, optimize them while they are in the market, and provide a thorough analysis when they’re over…”

Read more here: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/currency/echo-gets-stronger-viacom-vantage/156254