Becoming a Global Data Storytelling Company
"We have been on a transformational journey.”
Ever wondered what sort of impact Data Storytelling can have on a Global business? The Pharmaceutical company behind much-loved customer brands including Johnson's Baby, Neutrogena, Listerine (and many others) operates in complex markets all around the world. Heads of their APAC Digital Analytics team, Jyoti Jain and Sherman Goh, give us the lowdown on how transformative Data Storytelling has been for them.
The Problem: Data, everywhere!
With a software stack bigger than most, the analytics teams have admittedly got ‘everything’ in their toolbox. Jyoti Jain, Director of Advanced Analytics for APAC, had this to say: “The reality is we are up to our gills with data. Things were being done on a one-off basis. Individual Excels, they were not standardised. They were not organised. We’re in a region which is very diverse and complex… Something might be on Twitter in Japan and something could be on a very native site in Australia. How do you actually organise that and make it consumable?”
On a local and regional level, the pharmaceutical company needed to find a way to more easily collate and clean up their data and standardise the way the teams look at data across multiple markets.
Local teams used to wait for a week or two for digital media reports from the media agency, who would take hours or days to prepare each report. Regional teams used to wait weeks or a month to get regional digital performance, which is a compiled format of all the local reports, that again, take local markets up to a week to prepare.
Only after all these preparations can the actual data analysis start, with meetings or calls set up to discuss opportunities. By then the data is already outdated, reducing the potential impact compared to if these insights were identified at a much earlier time.
This is where Nugit comes in.
What difference has Nugit made?
The organisation has been using Nugit for a while now to improve the communication of data between 17 of their different brand teams across 10 territories.
Nugit not only consolidates all the organisation's digital and sales data in one easy to use platform, but also enables data storytelling at scale, breaking data into bite-sized stories for marketers and brand teams to easily analyse. The automation that Nugit provides also relieves both brand and media teams from the manual effort of data collation and clean-up, so time can be more efficiently allocated to data-driven discussions that are more beneficial to the business.
Using Nugit has so far helped the team identify over $15 million in digital media opportunities for the company's APAC brands.
Standardising & Communicating Data
Our Nugit team worked with the APAC Regional Analytics team to come up with a solution to standardise the way the teams look at data across multiple markets using Nugit.
For Market rollouts, we developed a few story templates to help enable better data discussions: a Media Scorecard to track monthly media performance by brand, a Campaign Performance report for markets to closely track and optimise media activity, a Weekly Activity Snapshot to track weekly website activity. These stories are aimed at Local Brand Managers who make marketing decisions based on media activity, as well as the Local Media Agencies who plan and implement these activities.
"This is really good. I have not had this kind of data at my fingertips before! If we are going to make budget shifts, I always had to ask people to get me this kind of data…it would take weeks before I get it. Now I can just go in and see what’s happening…today! This is phenomenal. So excited to get my hands on this data on a regular basis."
A Single Source of Truth
Aside from working closely with the Regional Analytics team to develop story templates and implementation processes that go hand in hand with digital education, we also developed stories that allowed Regional teams to easily gain insight on personal best performance, creative and video performance and search insights within the region. These stories are targeted to Regional Brand Experience Leads, Regional Analytics and Digital Strategists, who use the insights for a deeper discussion to influence business decisions such as market presence and sufficiencies, as well as overall media efficiencies.
As stories can be easily refreshed and interacted with, this has completely changed the way that both the regional and brand teams are conducting their data analysis and discussions.
Sherman Goh, Digital Analytics for APAC adds "Nugit enables us to be active and real-time in looking at our performance and from there react to it. That's really important because we want that reaction, we want that response and conversation to happen."
Speaking The Same Language
The automation, intuitive interface and shareability of stories created on Nugit eliminates this manual preparation work. Teams can now have more real-time discussions, all looking at the same set of information and insights to identify optimization opportunities.
“Nobody had the time to look into 5 or 10 different platforms a day. Nugit really helped us to enable that capability. I think the ‘Weekly Snapshot’ that comes in as a report gives us a lot of insight into what's been happening over the last 7 days.”
Teams can now evaluate creative performance across markets, platforms, and data sets, allowing them to scale better-performing creatives in the region. Jyoti continues, “When our head of Beauty Category talks to somebody in Korea or somebody in Australia, she’s not translating her medium of conversation suddenly. It’s very seamless to her and that’s really been transformational.”
So, what’s the best feature?
For Sherman it’s easy, “For me, I think the download feature into a Powerpoint is the most powerful. Nobody really has to create Powerpoints from scratch anymore. I really like it because you can download the whole report and just select which slides you want to use for your next presentation.”
Jyoti concludes, “I absolutely love the natural language insight that comes in. I don’t even have to write the insight anymore. Maybe it’s making me lazy. But it’s making me powerful as well.”
Going Global?
After such success with Nugit in APAC earlier last year, the company are keen to get underway with a Global Pilot, rolling out Data Storytelling to EMEA & USA. Over recent months the team at Nugit have conducted a series of workshops in the UK and USA to support brand teams with onboarding. Focussed around sharing insights into data storytelling, the workshops are designed to guide groups of regional leads on how to create the best data stories to answer their business needs.
At Nugit, we’re excited to continue working together in 2019, bringing the power of Data Storytelling to even more of their teams and territories across the globe.
What exactly is Nugit?
Nugit is a Data Storytelling Platform designed to make data more consumable for people. It automatically pulls in all your business data from different platforms and transforms the complex numbers into something the whole team can understand. AI insights, visualisations and clear narrative combine to tell the story of your data in a way that empowers users and drives action.
