Ben Petremont (Head of Analytics, Spark Foundry), and Alison White (Group Analytics Director, Spark Foundry), presented to the lecturers at the 2023 MFA Lecture the Lecturers event. Their insightful presentation argued that in order to respond to upcoming market challenges, businesses must have a strong modern analytics foundation in place.
We asked them a few important questions about their media journey, their presentation insights and the key skills needed to succeed in their role.
What’s your role & how would you explain it to your mother?
The responsibility of the Analytics teams at Spark is to constantly provide our clients but also the Spark peeps with the most innovative, relevant, and cutting-edge solutions to grow their business while maximising both, media effectiveness and media efficiency.
In a competitive environment like the media industry my role is to work closely with the Leadership team as well as with all disciplines leads to unsure that our offering remains market leading and secure a sustainable growth for Spark Foundry, its people and most importantly, our clients.
When my kids ask what I do, I say – I use numbers to show my clients how to grown their business. We connect Media Investment to business outcomes to improve profitability, create efficiencies and identify opportunities.
What was your presentation about & why did you think it was relevant to share with lecturers?
Our presentation was focusing on what it takes to be a modern analytics team to successfully face today’s challenges. We choose this angle as there is still a myriad of cliches and stereotypes when it comes to building a successful analytics team, and we wanted to showcase a different way of doing things that might be more suited to modern challengers.
Our presentation was about making sure analysts walk before they run – getting the fundamentals right and building a solid foundation of trust and understanding in order to progressively help clients.
What are the top 3 takeaways of your presentation?
- Data is now commoditised, modern analytics is better defined by a way of working rather than advanced analytics. The isn’t about (Only) R Square anymore, this is about 24 months return on investment.
- If you want a seat at the executive table, speak business, not media
- A successful analytics team, in its majority, is not made of analysts / data scientist.
- Businesses face many challenges both internally and externally – modern Analytics which is a way of working, can be essential to solving many of these problems.
- Innovation is everywhere, but focus is vital. It is important not to get distracted from the core business outcomes
- By building a solid base of analytics, a team can progress through the analytics maturity curve. It is not possible to jump to advanced analytics without a solid foundation in place
What skills do you think are most critical to your role?
- Actually the soft skills are the ones we are after when hiring a new team member. The hard skills can be learned.
- Curiosity, agility, business acumen,
- Problem solving, Ability to learn,
- Adaptable, agile
- Genuine, passionate, egoless
In our role, obviously an affinity for numbers is very important. The most important skill, however is a way of thinking and questioning what is in front of you.
What are the best resources to keep up to date on the industry?
Controversially, I am tempted to say every else which is not directly related to the industry. The media is a small world with a small numbers of sources managed by a small number of people, and sometimes, we might have the tendency to live in our own bubble. A marketing spends 5% of his time dealing with Media. For us to be able to be better at what we are doing, we need to learn on all the other things that are actually influencing a business performance, not just media. And that includes geo politics, macro economy, politics, legislation…. The media knowledge should already be covered by the job itself.
Industry news, seminars/training, Macro news and business trends.