Data is an unexciting commodity that can yield very exciting results if exploited across an organization. But how can companies get all hands on deck with few people interested?

“Data is not the most sexy topic for a lot of executives in our organization,” said Kristen O’Hara (pictured, right), chief marketing officer of global media at Time Warner Inc.

This is a familiar problem in lots of industries, according to Laura Ipsen (pictured, left), general manager and senior vice president of Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Oracle Corp.’s solutions helped pique interest in data at Time Warner, O’Hara explained. She and Ipsen spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Oracle Modern Marketing Experience in Las Vegas, Nevada.
(* Disclosure below.)

Time Warner is a conglomerate that also contains HBO and Turner Broadcasting. Internal collaboration has not typically been the company’s strong suit, according to O’Hara. To have the company adopt data as more than a backroom experiment, it was necessary to show executives and others tangible results (read: the money).

“We started with marketing as use case one to prove the value proposition, because we market at significant scale across our three businesses,” O’Hara said. The marketing team used Oracle’s data-driven marketing tools to quickly and efficiently drive value from insights.

Data couch potatoes

The first step in this process was getting marketing people to understand that data can be static or dynamic, depending on what the organization does with it. In fact, Ipsen has seen many companies shelve valuable data.

“Often times people had data and knowledge and information, and they felt like they were sitting on it,” she said. Unfortunately, data is not like chicken eggs. “It’s not going to hatch and create something wonderful in terms of growth and ROI,” she said.

Time Warner’s marketing team used the Oracle Marketing Cloud to put its data in motion, harvesting it at every touchpoint, operating on it quickly, driving insights and reiterating models. “As soon as we started to prove that it was driving demonstrable business results, then people in the organization started to wake up and take notice,” O’Hara said.

Higher-ups then began taking steps to spread data use across the entire conglomerate and all departments; this holistic approach is key to getting the heftiest returns from data, O’Hara explained.

“Data’s not the job of a department; it’s everyone’s job, so we need to educate the organization,” she said. Oracle’s team was especially helpful in providing accessible data education to staffers across Time Warner’s departments. Oracle’s marketing tech and the strategy it promotes prioritize consistent, end-to-end rendering of data so that everyone gets the same information to reach consonant conclusions.

This can result in better-tuned pilots that do not have to be retried “by ear” over and over. In the early days of Time Warner’s data experiment, it conducted a lot of pilot experiments that sounded less scary to people than a complete paradigm shift. “We did hundreds of pilots, and I used to joke and say, ‘If there’s a hundred-and-first pilot, something’s wrong with our organization,'” O’Hara stated.

Laying a blanket data strategy over the whole organization gave staffers a common language so they could collaborate and tweak models and programs quicker.

Artificial intelligence and human creativity

This has also been a boon for creatives in Time Warner’s marketing team, since the artificial intelligence in some of the data tools automates rote tasks.

That plays well to Oracle’s AI manifesto, which suggests that AI should augment human efforts, not replace them, according to Ipsen.

“What humans are great at is that creative process and intuition, and I think the more we can automate parts of the system to free up that, it makes it a more exciting proposition,” O’Hara concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. The conference sponsor, Oracle, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE