The India Today Group, one of India's largest media conglomerates has built a Customer Data Platform (CDP) in-house to drive better user experience.
India Today Group's Chief Information Officer, Sanjay Nagpal told the recent AWS India Summit that the company has managed to get 60 million hits a day on their apps and website through its CDP. This is a significant increase in user engagement for the group.
The firm has also achieved several other business outcomes like improved recirculation (of content), reduction in bounce rate and better insights on customer metrics, Nagpal said.
The company is a multi-vertical brand, that owns and operates several popular TV channels, magazines, and newspaper brands like India Today TV, Aaj Tak TV, Reader's Digest, Business Today and others.
With a target to have control over digital channels, grow subscriptions and signed-in users, the group considered building CDP as a "strategic and central piece" of its digital marketing effort, Nagpal said.
The group decided to build the CDP solution in-house to match its dynamic environment and achieve full capability for integration. It also aimed to bring agility into its platforms to scale and accommodate changes quickly, he added.
"We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build this platform as it provides managed services for all building blocks," Nagpal said.
This has helped the team to efficiently create a high-scale solution with depth and breadth of the services AWS has to offer, he added.
The company uses a wide range of AWS-managed services including Kinesis to process and analyse streaming data, Database Migration Service (DMS) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) to ingest data from internal applications.
"Various data processing streams and jobs were captured, configured to clean enrich the data based on content and user attributes," he added.
Redshift Athena QuickSight has been deployed on top of Amazon S3 storage for various analytics processing and metrics analysis.
Dynamo DB is used for profiling and SageMaker and Lambda are for training and deployment of various ML models, he said.
Use cases
Nagpal said the teams picked up specific use cases for CDP to target a "better" customer experience in the long run.
India Today Group's CDP not only caters to providing a unified customer view but also enables user profiling and segmentation, personalisation, segmentation-based targeting and improved analytics and customer insights.
The IT teams had incorporated several features into the platform including high-volume clickstream data, 360-degree profile view, segmentation-based ad targeting and more.
Notably, the CDP is featured with AI models for recommendation engines to suggest relevant articles on a real-time basis, he said.
The group is now more confident in making deep investments in the tech and product space for a better return on investment (RoI), such as cross-channel marketing, delivering campaigns based on user propensity, consumption and geography attributes in the near future, Nagpal said.
