How the FT executes its audience-centric, data-driven operation

Data is an enabler for the Financial Times’ customer-centric approach to business, said Tom Betts, chief data officer and board member of the FT in London.

Betts was one of the speakers at the sixth annual Big Data & AI for Media  conference in Hong Kong from 7-8 December.

The FT uses its audience engagement score with its 900,000 paid readers to evaluate the success of their audience-centric approach.  The  audience uses FT content across print and digital channels, but increasingly, on mobile, which represents the majority of FT’s content consumption, he said.

The engagement score is considered the FT’s “Northstar” consists of three components, namely recency, frequency and volume. Each user’s score is different, depending on how much time and how frequently they consume content on all of their platforms and channels.

These data are used to predict the relationship between engagement and acquisition and retention of users. Betts said the data-driven approach has successfully predicts the link between engagement to subscription revenue.

Betts explained that as they aim at increasing the volume of engaged readers, it is important to understand where the engagement tipping point lies when the time comes to renew subscriptions.

Part of the FT’s 10-year-old data operation is to include editorial and marketing teams to be involved with data practices. Among them, the institutionalised experimentation  with product development using audience data, as well as the metadata tagging system called  Lantern.

In order to help the editorial and marketing teams understand how to use and respond to data, they have built tools that help embed feedback and data into their workflows, Betts said.

For example, they developed the Lantern metadata bot that delivers pre-publication intelligence to the newsroom. The bot scans the articles and suggests tags and categories to editors for them complete the metadata. After getting the notification from Slack, editors then fix the metadata with reference to the suggestions. The objective of the metadata exercise is to surface articles for audience, which enables a significiant boost in user engagement.

FT has also developed tools for readers, for instance, data- supported discovery and a personalisation product called “MyFT”.

Provided that data can connect users to content they are interested in, readers can add their interests in specific content to their “My FT” account, where they can follow different areas or broaden their interest, in turn, help them discover new content from FT.

When relevant content is linked to readers, it brings a higher engagement, Betts said.