Sustainable ecosystem is the way to regain control over media integration

Direct competitors are not the most threatening to media owners, but GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) players are, said Xiaoqun Clever, Chief Technology & Data Officer of Ringier, Switzerland.

Clever, and her colleague, Zhao Wang, were two of the speakers at the sixth annual Big Data & AI for Media  conference in Hong Kong from 7-8 December.

Clever said the media industry is suffering and losing control of content distribution and content creation to the GAFA players and the media owners are voluntarily giving content to them.

“But ignore, compete and giving up are not the options,” she said, she suggested to construct a sustainable ecosystem in the long term game of All-in-One Destination, hybriding content business and marketplace

business with data and technology.

Being a platform for 90 businesses in Switzerland, the ecosystem should derive from their original portfolio and sustain the value and foundation of the future development of the company, she said.

Clever listed out five tactics to build the system:

• Take back the control of our data
• Ride on the economy of attention
• I can‘t, but we can – form alliances
• Explore new business models
• Embrace tech & data as an organization

Apart from building an ecosystem, Ringier also invests in an artificial intelligence content recommendation system, said Wang, Principal Solutions Architect of Ringier.

He said with an increasing number of vendors and players in the market entering the digital marketing technology landscape, No solo player can dominate the market and there are plenty of vendors to choose if you want something.

Through the system, they were able to enhance the user experience by improving personalization and solving glitches such as a slow homepage by creating a simple workflow in the system, Zhao said.

Undoubtedly, more enterprises are putting their focus on big data, yet the difference between success and failure of a big data project lies in the way of execution, and a forecast of 60 percent of the data projects will fail in 2017, Clever said.

She said native digital companies should fight for their lives and expand its full potential with fewer regulations compared with traditional business to gain back control in the big data industry.