Connections

NEW YORK — Data infrastructure in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry today simply isn’t prepared for the future of programmatic everything, anticipatory media placement and an ad-supported Internet of Things, according to Scott Taylor, market development and strategy leader at Dun & Bradstreet Master Data

Therefore, aggressive adoption of standardized metadata across media companies, agencies and brand owners is drastically needed, he told the HITS N.Y.C. event at the Microsoft Technology Center Nov. 8, during the keynote “Integrate or Dis-Integrate! – Why Interoperability is the Foundation of Your Data-Inspired Media Supply Chain.”

“No matter what business you’re in, no matter what industry you’re in, no matter what part of those industries you’re in, everything we touch today turns to data, as consumer activity and business processes go from analog to digital,” he said.

Taylor said all marketers are “trying to use data technology at scale to gain a competitive advantage” and “drive operational efficiency.” But, he said, the “volume and velocity of data is overwhelming, the variety is unmanageable,” and knowing how to sort all that data is a major challenge.

“Master data” is the answer to those challenges and “how you find the truth” among all the “silos” of data that are out there, he said, adding it provides organizations with a much-needed “common language.” There is “no endeavor that’s beyond your reach when you can have a common language and interoperability through systems,” he said.

Business people “want to make good decisions, but good decisions made on bad data are just bad decisions you don’t know about yet,” he said. Therefore, “you’ve got to make sure that data that’s coming in there is good and solid,” he said.

Calling master data the “most important data” there is, he said that if data is the glue of the digital age, then “master data is the epoxy – that’s what pulls all that stuff together.”

And there are “four C’s” involved in creating a master data record, he said, listing them as code (a unique identifier), a company (who owns that code), a category (what kind of information the data is), and the country (some form of geography – the region, sales market, etc.). “You need these four C’s no matter what data you’re looking at,” he said.

One of the “core values” of Dun& Bradstreet is “being data-inspired,” he said, adding: “People talk a lot about being data-driven. We think machines are data-driven. Processes are data-driven. But people should be inspired, and so people are data-inspired. And we hope our data and a lot of other data you use can help you inspire you to make those kinds of decisions you need to make in your business.”

Dun & Bradstreet is “probably the oldest data business on earth,” he said, pointing out his company has “been around since the 40s – the 1840s.” Taylor noted that Lewis Tappan , the company founder who started the Mercantile Agency in New York, got a bunch of merchants together so they could “share insight they had about new people to sell to in the west because they didn’t know who to trust.” In the 1840s, there were “no phones – no nothing,” and the merchants had to build relationships and “build a data repository” to accomplish that, he said.

To date, Dun & Bradstreet has “been involved in thousands” of data integrations, master data initiatives and legacy transformations “across thousands of companies across hundreds of countries,” he said, adding that its clients today include many Fortune 500 companies and Apple developers.

The Nov. 8 edition of HITS N.Y.C. saw media executives and the companies working with broadcasters and advertisers gather to discuss the innovations they’re making to advance the supply chain in the media and entertainment sector.

Produced by MESA in cooperation with the Hollywood IT Society, HITS N.Y.C. was presented by Cast & Crew Entertainment Services, and sponsored by Virtusa Polaris, TiVo, GrayMeta, Teradata and Ad-ID.