Channel 4 All4 app built on deep data insight
"All4 is the brand new digital home of all Channel 4 content. This embodies the biggest step forward for us, since we launched 4oD back in 2006," Gallagher said in his CIO 100 Q&A.
"The aim is to bring together our online services and our broadcast channels in one place. This will be a complete reframing of our digital estate giving a single destination. We believe that this will be the most advanced broadcaster response to meet changing viewer wants and behaviour," he said of the digital agenda to meet customer needs.
"It brings together all of our digital products, in one place. It will lay the foundation for a service based personalised viewer experience consistent across all devices," Gallagher said.
The CIO and his team worked the audience insight team at Channel 4 to develop All4. "We have developed an industry-leading Viewer Relationship Strategy. We laid the foundation by setting data policies and establishing what would constitute value to the viewer.
"A major initiative we have embraced is Big Data technologies and helped to bring this transformation through to reality. The result of this initiative is that Channel 4 now has over 11 million registered viewers including over half of all 16 to 24-year-olds. Through the campaign management tools we implemented this year we are able to interact directly with those viewers based on our understanding of their interests and behaviours. Furthermore the viewer data is a key part of informing our consumer facing product technology development.
"Channel 4 has established a successful mix of skilled data scientists and technology innovators. We have made great progress in analysing viewer behaviour data and segmenting this to support personalisation for viewers and unique commercial products to offer our advertisers.
"We need to ensure that we can automate and 'productionise' the models developed by the data scientists to ensure efficiency and quality of our analysis as it is embedded in the business process.
"The vision is to roll out this analytics capability to other areas of the business to bring us a competitive advantage in places where traditionally decision making has not been based on deep analytics. My team are the key driver behind making this happen. "
Gallagher says the cloud has been instrumental in his strategy. "The increasing maturity of cloud and SaaS options provide great opportunities to deliver value more quickly.
"Similarly the ubiquity of mobile and more general access to high speed broadband are transforming what we can achieve with our viewer facing products," he said.
Read the full CIO 100 Q&A with Channel 4 CIO Kevin Gallagher.