News UK: ‘digital butler’ helps increase engagement

Joanne Kuai

22, February 2019 | London

The Times of London and Sunday Times is developing its own self-learning algorithm to provide its subscribers with more personalised services, sending emails at the time and frequency most suited to their habits.

The News UK-owned publishers developed this ‘digital butler’ to accelerate subscriptions growth and reduce churn. Internally, staffers refer to the butler as James.

Elon Woodman-Worrell, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Manager at the Times and the Sunday Times, describing herself as the “a nanny to James”, says James means an unprecedented level of operational efficiency: “It’s a quicker route to personalisation and significantly reduced creative spend”.

Ms Woodman-Worrell introduces the team developing James is multi-disciplinary, including journalists, marketers, data scientists, etc., and there are tons of insights, hypothesises and ideas to experiment. The goal is to increase engagement by personalising distribution.

“The plan is not just to serve relevant content to subscribers and readers who have registered to the Times, but for James to ingest all customer data, including information on customers’ propensity to convert to subscribers, as well as churn propensity,” says Mukund Venkataraman, Principal Data Scientist at News UK.

Mr Venkataraman details four dimensions of email personalisation, including time, content, format and frequency. He adds some valuable lessons they’ve learnt so far are fast experimentation allows for fast results and insights, and not every subscriber react similarly, and they have to learn their preferences and one should never underestimate technical complexity of e-mail sending infrastructure.

They were speaking at a study tour to News UK’s headquarters in London on 22 February 2019. As part of the 9th Data & AI for Media Week, the tour aims to inspire participants to imagine how to earn revenue with AI-driven products for their own media companies.

The Data & AI for Media Week was created by World Newsmedia Network in 2013. Since then, the conference has been held in London five times, Hong Kong once and twice in New York. The 10th Data & AI for Media Week is planned for San Francisco and Silicon Valley for 29 April to 3 May 2019.  https://sanfrancisco.dataaimedia.org