Data-driven design is more than simply alliteration. As Jason Nash, leading Product Management Consultant and Christopher Conroy, Chief Data Officer, Future Anthem discussed on our latest Tune into Data event, the last 20 years has seen big tech and large e-commerce businesses such as Netflix and Ocado embrace data-driven design and, as a result, catapulted them to unicorn status due to their laser focus on the intelligent use of customer data.
According to Nash, who has worked on large-scale strategic projects for some of the world’s biggest brands including Microsoft, these businesses have re-shaped our purchasing and viewing behaviours employing machine learning, recommendation engines and data-driven design to turn a mass-market approach into one where everyone of us is presented with our own individual personalised experience. This has set a new benchmark of how to use data and data-driven design to offer, market and sell online and offline products and services.
“It was previously always about the mass market but that’s gone”, said Nash. “Television advertisers, for example, are increasingly trying to work out how to target individuals. This was inefficient in the past because we didn’t have the tools, but today these are the very tools that game data science is unlocking for the gaming industry through the capabilities that Future Anthem is making available.
“It’s the technology that Future Anthem is working on that will enable people to succeed and differentiate, in the same way, Netflix and others have done in the past and still do today.”
“The [gaming] industry has to realise that the opportunity is here now and that they must act on it sooner rather than later. Too often people say, ‘great idea but it’s too risky’, but the reality is that those businesses who seize that opportunity early on are the ones that are now delivering transformational revenue numbers and great customer experiences.”
Conroy oversees Future Anthem’s data design-driven products with a mission to create a new strategy to empower operators and studios to deliver never-before-seen outcomes for their players. Future Anthem’s proprietary AI software has so far ingested 35 billion data points providing customers with in-depth analysis of all bets and spins players make on casino games, providing customers with the essential ingredients to target specific player behaviours to build better, more personalised games.
“Netflix has used data-driven design and recommendation algorithms for many years so it’s only right we reference it alongside one of its mantra’s that we should all consider when looking at our own businesses: ‘We don’t have one product we have 100 million products for all our members’.
“It recognised very early on that its product wasn’t entertainment content, but the recommendation algorithms that personalise your homepage. They created commercial data science, and we’re now bringing that into the gaming world creating a category of our own – game data science – making a huge difference to the way gaming studios and operators create and deliver content, driving efficiencies, creating safer environments for players and significantly enhancing the gaming experience.
If you missed this episode of Tune into Data listen back now and find out more about how you can embrace data-driven design to better understand your players’ needs.