Find the Link From Analytics to Audience

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Dorothy Hui of Sony Music U.K. shares her team's approach to a data-driven, audience-focused marketing strategy. Below, in her own words, she looks beyond the numbers for behavioral insights from her listeners. The challenge Graphs and charts. Ones and zeros. Dashboards. What comes to mind when you visualize data and analytics? The maturity of the digital ecosystem has enabled the music business to access a galaxy of fan and listener data points almost in real time. Now, a strategy driven by data and analytics complements our core Artist & Repertoire (A&R) function in how we discover, develop and market artists today. So, how do we emphasize the link between data and analytics and an audience-driven strategy in our marketing? The two are synonymous when we consider that data sets are an insight into fan and listener preferences, contexts and even routines. The process Sony Music’s philosophy places the artist and fan at the center of everything we do. One of the principal objectives for our insight and analytics team within 4th Floor Creative (Sony's creative and strategic hub) is therefore to go beyond basic analytics and try to unravel the human story behind the data. This helps us better understand our artists’ audiences as real people with passions and nuanced combinations of interests and behaviors, which transcend straightforward and often outmoded classifications like age, location or gender. Over the past several years, the senior executive team at Sony Music has continued to elevate the role of data and analytics within our broader approach to creative development and marketing. We emphasize the people behind the data by illustrating listeners at every opportunity so the data is relatable. Our team also strives to humanize data through a series of ongoing initiatives, including the following: Cluster analysis. The insight and analytics team works with our partners at Affinio to use AI-driven audience segmentation to show top-level clusters of listener affinities and behavioral patterns, which can uncover interesting and, at times, unexpected patterns. This methodology enhances the human dimensions of our data by helping us understand listeners of an artist more deeply, by highlighting people’s passions, interests and behaviors. This expands beyond simple profile attributes like age or gender identification. Clustering audiences or target audiences has provided a springboard for developing broader 4th Floor Creative brand partner collaborations. For example, our insight team identified a group of "culture vulture" city travelers that resulted in a partnership with a major hotel chain. Additionally, we found a developing electronic music fan base within a beer brand’s customers, which influenced the headliner for a series of experiences at iconic locations. Audience closeness. Historically, the music industry has relied on b-to-b relationships for connection with audiences—accessing listeners and fans through key partners in radio, TV, press, retail and live promoters. The rise of digital and business-critical disciplines such as CRM and social media have enabled artists and labels to build direct relationships with audiences, alongside the b-to-b partners critical to breaking an artist. To help our artists succeed, it’s important for us to continue to know our fans and listeners face-to-face, beyond digital connections and dashboards. In 2020, we set up our in-house audience closeness program, PAVE, as a means of meeting the real people behind the data we see driving our success. As lockdown hit, we had to reframe our approach. We pivoted to engage with Gen Z music fans through digital platforms, including livestream discussions. These sessions explored Gen Z’s lockdown experiences and evolving media behaviors, including focusing on the rise of short-form video platforms such as TikTok during this time. For example, we learned that while TikTok may have initially been perceived as primarily for “kids,” the platform quickly endeared itself to a wider audience through a variety of factors: the effectiveness of the “For You” algorithm in surfacing relevant and entertaining videoscomedy serving as a source for lighthearted relief during uncertain timesbite-sized videos suiting shorter attention spansvariety of content to suit mood or purposeease of consumption while scrolling We wanted to change our usual method of insight project recaps, so we set up a private Instagram account for employees to follow the process and designed quick-take summaries and thought-starters shared within carousels. The findings led to a wider analysis of key content types and topics on TikTok to help our labels support our artists in developing authentic ways to build a following on the platform, dispelling a perception that TikTok was all about dance challenges. For example, Relentless Records’ Scottish singer-songwriter and BRIT Award winner Tom Walker grew his TikTok presence with his sense of humor front and center. In our upcoming PAVE, we plan to highlight underserved audiences to help ensure they see themselves represented in the music and content we release as a company. The takeaway It’s essential to look at your data through a human lens—get to know the people behind the data points to truly understand your audience. While our insight and analytics team has several ways to draw out the human characteristics within our data, each of us in different roles across the business should apply empathy and interpret analytics through the lens of fan and listener behaviors generating those data sets.

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To Engage Your Audience, Look at Data Through a Human Lens

Sony Music UK's Dorothy Hui on linking analytics to audience

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