In a recent episode of the O’Reilly Media Podcast, David Hsieh, senior vice president of marketing at Qubole, sat down with John Slocum, vice president of MediaMath’s data management platform (DMP), to discuss DataOps in the media industry. “DataOps” refers to the promotion of communication between formerly siloed data, teams, and systems. As discussed in "Creating a Data-Driven Enterprise with DataOps," a report published by Qubole and O’Reilly in 2016, DataOps leverages process change, organizational realignment, and technology to facilitate relationships between everyone who handles data: developers, data engineers, data scientists, analysts, and business users. As a programmatic advertising platform, MediaMath has a unique lens into the shifting business models across the media industry, and how DataOps is playing a role in those shifts.

During the podcast, Hsieh and Slocum discussed how data has transformed the culture and overall goals of organizations in the media industry in the past 10 years, and shared some best practices for companies that are just embarking on their journey toward becoming data driven.

What It Means to Be Data-Driven in the Media Industry

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

What It Means to Be Data-Driven in the Media Industry

O'Reilly Radar