If there is anyone who has built his career around data, it
would have to be Michael Collette, CEO of Dativa, a fast-growing data science
services start-up providing custom TV measurement strategy and solutions to
brands, agencies and media companies.
Collette is a serial entrepreneur with four
start-ups, including Dativa, dedicated to maximizing the value of data for use
in media. “Most of my career was in technology – set top box software, the
early days of digital satellite and multi-room DVR,” he explained. His
professional crossroad came as a result of a shift in thinking about
interactive television.
Charlene Weisler: How did you make the pivot from interactive TV into
data?
Michael Collette: About 7 or 8 years ago, I was consulting with
Canoe trying to figure out how to get interactive television working once again
on set top boxes when I met with people at Turner who basically said, ‘eh, it’s
never going to happen, but let us show you this thing.’ I was introduced to
Zeev Neumeier (currently SVP of Product, Inscape) who was the technical founder
of what was then TV Interactive Systems which became Cognitive Networks. That experience
really started a significant pivot for me. We thought we were building an interactive
television company, but our biggest investor said, ‘You’re not. You’re building
a data company and that is why I am investing.’ I walked out of that meeting and
turned to Zeev and said, ‘Do you know anything about data?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’
I said, ‘Me neither! Let’s go!’ (laughs) It was very much like that.
Weisler: Which led to Cognitive. (Disclosure: I consulted with
Cognitive from 2013-2015)
Collette: Yes, we started to scale the company about 7 years
ago. We did a bunch of really fun interactive TV stuff with LG as a customer but
we quickly found that our investor was right: the most interesting and valuable
output of the ACR system was the data. As the dataset began to scale, and as we
started to get Vizio launched alongside LG, we saw some profound things
happening. So I spent several years focused on making great data.
Weisler: I know you have a specific philosophy regarding data.
Collette: Yes. We took a different approach compared to
other companies in the space. They were taking the data and creating services
with it. We thought the more important thing to do was to make great data and
to build trust in the data by being really transparent as to how was it made
and what it was like. Data is complex. It
has to be transparent so people can use it properly. There are always pros and
cons. Raw data is rough. We also wanted to empower an ecosystem so we
partnered with lots of folks to let them chase different aspects of the use of
that data. That is where the iSpot relationship came in, along with VideoAmp
and Alphonso. They came out of that
early effort. The strategy has proven out well in that Vizio acquired Cognitive
and created Inscape. Inscape has flourished with its focus on making the data
and being transparent about how it’s made.
Weisler: So what is the next big thing in data?
Collette: From my work with Inscape and my partnership with
Tom Weiss, Dativa co-founder and CTO, it looked like all the emerging companies
in the data-driven TV space were pivoting into each other - all around
measurement. It looked a lot like the
ad tech train wreck with an oversupply of similar offerings. We believed that a lot of companies were
going to raise a lot of money. A few of them would get good access and a lot of
them would struggle. Our fundamental
observation was that eventually what will happen is, as the market gets smarter
about granular data, the endpoints in the markets - the brands, agencies and
networks - are going to start to bring the data in-house. Some will bring that
talent in but, at the end of the day, there is a real need for a professional
services company to help those companies implement their data strategies. This is
where Dativa comes in. It has been a professional services company from the
start. We are not here to sell a platform. We operate as a service to help our
customers build a platform that they want to use. We will help them extend it
as they wish but they own it. We just build what our customers want, implementing
the data they are licensing and not licensing to them what we have.
Weisler: Any company working in the data space has to be concerned
about privacy.
Collette: This underscores why insourcing is so important. When
our customer brings Inscape data into their own domain, for example, in that
setting they can bring whatever other first or third data they have. So, if
you’re a brand and you have customer data, you can match the consumption data
you have to the viewing data privately without giving up possession of your
data. In today’s privacy world, that is really important. You haven’t shared
your customer’s data with anyone. You’re just using it for your own insights. From
a privacy standpoint, that use of data is much, much more permissible.
Weisler: How do you think this will play out in the media ecosystem?
Collette: Information is power. When an organization that
never had access to fundamental data starts to have access to it, that
organization starts to change. Five
years ago, we knew that this data was going to be transformational. But five
years ago almost no organization had the skills to use it. That was a real
limiter to growth which was why the third-party ecosystem players were necessary
because you needed a skilled team between the data and the user to put it to
work. That has changed. Now what we are seeing is that the media organizations
are starting to build up their own data mining muscles. They are building
inventory optimization and forecasting, which is a tricky data science
undertaking. That kind of activity is growing and becoming more important. And
each organization does it differently – they have different inputs, concerns
and specific questions. For that reason, implementing data in-house is going to
be increasingly important as it begins to make granular data close to currency
class.
This article first appeared in Mediapost.com
