2024 UK edition
Manchester · 23-24 May 2024
The UK conference returned after a five-year gap. Two days of 50-minute talks followed by 50-minute discussions, with attendees from major broadcasters, publishers, music companies, data consultancies, and regulators. A suggestion was made to create a penalty jar for every mention of “Gen AI” during the two days.
Talks
- “Building a Data-Driven Culture at a 180-Year-Old Publisher” – A media analytics leader joined a major global publication and found it roughly five years behind a comparable title in data maturity, despite nearly identical tech stacks. The gap was cultural, not technical: the fix was getting data people into leadership meetings, not buying new tools.
- “Principles for Responsible AI Deployment” – A major financial newspaper warned that organisations experimenting with generative AI were creating a “Pandora’s POC box”: small experiments proliferating with no central visibility, each carrying infrastructure costs, and in one case duplicating work the internal team had already completed.
- “AI Applications in News Publishing” – A data science leader returning from parental leave found a third-party consultancy had been contracted to rebuild a recommendation model that duplicated her team’s own work, using the organisation’s own content taxonomy. The contract was signed before the data science team knew about it.
- “Cross-Platform Audience Analytics and Attribution” – All tests optimised for a single metric: total customer lifetime value of incoming subscribers. This removed endless debates about conversion rate vs. product mix vs. average order value, making testing fast and decisive.
- “Data Governance and Regulatory Perspectives” – Discussion of how media data regulation is evolving, with perspectives from regulators and practitioners on the challenges of balancing innovation against privacy obligations.
- “Advertising Effectiveness and Outcome-Based Measurement” – Calculating the return on investment for a data science initiative frequently took longer than building and deploying the model itself. One speaker described spending extensive effort just to justify £50,000 of infrastructure spend.
- “Music Industry Data: Streaming Economics” – An examination of how streaming royalties are calculated, distributed, and disputed, with fresh data on the economic impact of playlist curation on independent artists.
- “Regional Broadcaster Perspectives on Data Maturity” – Even a deliberately simplified approach to AI required about an hour a day of experimentation to avoid falling behind. Attendees from major broadcasters described mandatory eight-hour AI training courses as a prerequisite just to access basic tools.
- “Measuring UX Impact Without A/B Testing” – A TV platform provider that doesn’t own the customer relationship developed causal inference alternatives to randomised testing. The key learning: getting product owners to write down hypotheses and decision trees upfront mattered far more than the measurement methodology itself.
- “The Data and AI Playbook from Private Equity” – Research across 35+ PE-backed data leaders found compensation has risen from £250,000 to £400,000 (now including carried interest) even as data teams elsewhere face cuts. Generative AI had produced zero change in enterprise valuations so far because it has only delivered productivity gains, not new revenue.
- “Glocalization: Local Artists Dominating Global Platforms” – On-demand streaming is driving local artists to the top of local charts. In Germany, zero of the top 100 radio songs were German-language, but a third of the top 100 streaming songs were. In Denmark, nine of the top ten streaming tracks were Danish. The UK has not produced a true global pop star since 2017.
- “Simplifying the NLP Stack with Generative AI” – A major publisher found that prompt-engineered named entity extraction outperformed established NLP tools (spaCy, NLTK) in blind editorial evaluations, and reduced training data requirements from 100 articles per topic to 10 using a human-in-the-loop feedback system.
- “Neuroscience-Based Creative Optimisation” – Predictive models trained on 120,000+ neuroscience test subjects (eye tracking, EEG, pupil dilation) evaluate marketing creative effectiveness at millisecond-level subconscious responses, avoiding the self-reporting bias of traditional survey methods.
What we learned
Ten Million Pounds From Testing: One publication estimated that optimisation tests run against customer lifetime value had generated roughly £10 million per year in incremental value. The breakthrough was a single decision: all tests optimise for total CLTV of incoming subscribers, removing endless internal debates.
The CEO Stopped the Meeting: During a quarterly budget review, three changes were launched simultaneously. When the analytics team could not isolate the impact of each, the CEO halted the meeting and refused to continue until data could explain what had actually happened. Data culture is a behaviour, not a slogan.
Eight Hours Before You Can Touch AI: One broadcaster required an eight-hour mandatory AI training course before staff could access even basic tools. The practical result: most employees never completed it, creating a de facto opt-out for AI adoption across the organisation.
Five Years Behind on Identical Technology: Two publications with nearly identical tech stacks (Snowflake, Salesforce, Tableau, GA) were five years apart in data maturity. The gap was entirely cultural. The finance team had become the de facto data team, controlling the narrative. The fix was relationship building, not technology investment.
The ROI Trap: Calculating ROI on data science projects often becomes a project in itself. One speaker needed to demonstrate £500,000 of projected value to justify £50,000 of spend. The comparison: nobody asks a UX designer to cost up twenty prototypes before deciding which one to build.
Pandora’s POC Box: Small generative AI experiments were proliferating across business units with no central visibility. In one case, a third-party consultancy was contracted to build a model that duplicated the internal team’s own work. The contract was signed before the data science team even knew about it.
Local Artists Are Winning on Global Platforms: On-demand streaming is reversing decades of Anglo-American chart dominance. In Germany, zero of the top 100 radio songs were German-language, but a third of the top 100 streaming songs were. In Brazil, 86 positions above the first English-language track were all Brazilian Portuguese acts. The UK has not produced a true global pop star since 2017.
Gen AI: Zero Impact on Valuations: Research across 35+ PE-backed companies found generative AI had produced zero change in enterprise valuations because it has only delivered internal productivity gains, not new revenue streams. Data leader compensation has risen from £250,000 to £400,000 even as data teams elsewhere face budget cuts.