Globe and Mail: How data and AI are leveraged for better ad revenue

By Scott M. Scher, Columbia University

The Globe and Mail, Canada was established in 1884 and is Canada’s leading newspaper. They have taken a 170-year-old company and built a new foundation on data by creating an advance technology staff.

The purpose of this new foundation is to identify business goals, leverage data, outline audience segments, refine insights, activation across networks, and optimize. They have created a product known as Sophi that can analyze stories to remove bias, effectively utilize scores to help journalists understand the value of a story, and what content retains users. This is done through monitoring real-time web streams, content, and image data to determine length of time a user has spent reading, how best to attract users, and how to convert and retain readers.

By mining customers’ interests they have been able to create “taste graphs”, insights into clients interests, taxonomy trees, and click stream data. All of this distributed data mitigates risk, creates brand safety, and enhances user interest. The key to all of this is to target not just data but the right data. The market is moving fast and organizations must build the right data streams in order to enhance audience and client engagement.