Speaker(s)

Colin Powell

Former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

 

Presentation

Leadership: Taking Charge

One of the most admired men in America, General Colin Powell has been a leader for most of his life, having led troops as a military leader, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State. But Powell believes a leader is more than just his or her title. Drawing on examples garnered from experience as both a leader on the world stage and as eyewitness to leadership in action, Powell illustrates for audiences precisely what it takes to be a leader.  He provides strategies for “taking charge” during times of great change and great crises, highlights his perspective on how much data is needed to make a decision, and demonstrates how to remain focused, take responsibility, and work towards improving processes, organizations, and people.

Track: Keynote Presentation

Colin Mahony

SVP & General Manager, Software and Big Data, HP

Smarter Software for Smarter Decisions

In the idea economy, the future belongs to the fast.  But the complexity of the volume, variety, and velocity of big data can drown an organization in data without surfacing the insights that make the difference.  In this session, Colin Mahony, SVP & GM of HP Software Big Data, will share the path to smarter software for smarter decisions, what Big Data myths and hype need to be ignored, and what truths need to be embraced.  He’ll also share stories of some of the most disruptive data-driven organizations across multiple industries, and how they are using analytics to both change and win the game.

Track: Keynote Presentation

Jill Dyche

Vice President, Best Practices, SAS

Innovating with Analytics

Most executives understand that their companies must become digital business. While “digital native” companies can adopt digital technologies seamlessly, mainstream companies need to  run their operations as they innovate—a more difficult proposition.  Noted author, speaker, and SAS Best Practices Vice President Jill Dyché will explore the collision between leadership, information, and new digital strategies. Jill—the author of four books on the business value of technology—discusses case studies from her latest book: "The New IT: How Technology Leaders Enable Business Strategy in the Digital Age" (McGraw Hill, 2015). She outlines the role analytics and data play in the digital enterprise, revealing how digital strategies can encompass existing development pipelines and incumbent technologies while spurring innovation.  Use this dynamic and fun session as a playbook, and a set of lessons-learned on what it takes to become a truly innovation-driven enterprise in the new digital age.

Track: Keynote Presentation

Dave Morgan

CEO and Founder, Simulmedia

Is TV Advertising Ready for its Holy Grail Moment? Closing the Loop Between TV Ads and Sales.

Let’s be honest: as a marketer, you have a love/hate relationship with TV. You love its massive scale and powerful reach, and you know that when your ads are on TV, cash registers ring. But you don’t really know why. TV is one of those necessary evils that historically has lacked the precision and accountability needed for you to truly optimize your media mix. As audiences continue to fragment on TV, this lack of visibility into TV’s performance only gets more frustrating for marketers like you, especially given the metrics available across the aisle in digital. How are sales impacted down to the spot level, and by creative? What insights can you get that can be turned into action? How can schedules be optimized for sales immediately and automatically? Case studies presented at this session will uncover all these qualities that you never knew TV had, and show you and other marketers why TV is here to stay.

Track: Keynote Presentation

David Shing

Digital Prophet at AOL

The Connected Human

As more people are becoming connected to themselves and to the world, marketers need to embrace a more humanized experience where attention is the new currency measured by time and engagement. Get enlightened by a meaningful and insightful look at digital trends, how they are affecting behavior, and what’s next on the digital journey road map.

Track: Keynote Presentation

Mark Bonchek

Founder of SHIFT Thinking

How Little Data Makes Big Data More Powerful

Effective marketing combines both push and pull.  Push is about delivering the right message at the right time to the right audience. But how do we create Pull?  What creates the gravity that pulls people into a brand's orbit?  The secret is combining Big Data - what we know about our customers - with Little Data - what we can help them know about themselves. In this provocative session, Mark will expand on his influential HBR article with compelling examples of how to create customer pull for greater engagement, loyalty, and advocacy. Don't miss this opportunity to rethink the role of data in the digital age.

Track: Marketing & Consumer Insights

Ed See

Cross-Industry Marketing Practice Leader, Deloitte

Mike Hayes

Retail Customer Strategy Leader, Deloitte

Bridging the Engagement Gap: Using Social Technologies to Influence Consumer Behavior

Imagine if you could have a profile of your consumer (guest, viewer, fan) that was constantly being updated with new information about him or her and that provided a deep and comprehensive picture of that customer's likes, dislikes, wants, and needs. Imagine that you could be a part of their social sphere and get in on all the chatter, fun, and discussions that he/she has with friends and family. Imagine that rather than being an intrusion in their lives, you could be a trusted voice - an advisor, someone who helps them out, gives them ideas, and makes their life easier. The new era of cognitive computing is upon us and the use of natural language processing, advanced modeling, and machine learning may be the key to unlock customer insights that will allow you to create the next generation of engagement. This session will share information about what other companies and industries are doing to advance the level of engagement using these social technologies.

Track: Advanced Analytics

Chad Greenleaf

Senior Consulting Manager, Media, DOMO

Stop the Insanity: Why You Need More Than Big Data, BI, and Analytics

For all the money spent on BI, big data, and analytics, insights still arrive too slowly, data lives everywhere, and collaboration is wildly inefficient. You don’t need an advanced degree in data science to see something’s broken. Your business needs to be able to answer the critical questions they have every day. You need a way to put the right information, at the right time, into the hands of people that actually use it to collaborate and make decisions. Join Brett Haymond, Consulting Manager at Domo, as he discusses how to answer critical business questions from anywhere with real-time information.

Track: Beyond the Numbers

William Vambenepe

Senior Product Manager, Cloud Platform, Google

Why Wait: The Case for Low-Latency Analytics at Scale

The world doesn't stop to let you think and process data. And yet, most large-scale data processing systems are still limited to batch-style processing. Or, if they support streaming, it comes with a large cost in complexity, fragility, and accuracy. It doesn't have to be so, and low-latency processing can become the default choice for most applications. In this talk, we will describe how customers implement complex analytics in real time over large data sets. We will review the operational benefits and challenges of stream processing, and examine how to integrate it in a complete data processing environment.

Track: Data & Technology

Jamie Engesser

Vice President, Worldwide Engineering Solutions, Hortonworks

Inna Giguere

Senior Manager, Analytics Development, The Walt Disney Company

Matt Olsen

Development Operations Lead, The Walt Disney Company

Accelerated Time to Value via Hadoop Cloud Analytics

Across Disney ABC Television Group’s (DATG) portfolio, leadership teams are increasingly driving value creation efforts through leveraging data assets as organizational capital. At an industry level, analysts tell us that by 2020 Mobile, IoT, and Consumer-Web will drive over 40-zetabytes of data which is projected to fuel trillions in profits world-wide. In order to accelerate DATG efforts to capture the opportunity, we have recently teamed with Hortonworks to launch the SKYE Cloud Analytics Platform.

Hortonworks’ founders authored and pioneered the Apache Hadoop technology conceived at Yahoo!, which DATG now leverages as a central element of our Data Ingestion Pipeline utilizing a broad base of diversified internal and external sources.

With Disney being at the cross section of data-driven innovation, this presentation will demonstrate the build of automated infrastructure and the use of zero lock-in Hadoop components to provide an adaptable, low cost, high-value Data Platform now maximizing time to value for DATG.

Track: Data & Technology

Neil Isford

General Manager, Client Success, Analytics Solutions & Services, IBM

Wayne Peacock

VP, Analytic Insights and Business Intelligence, The Walt Disney Company

Analytics Without Limits

Data is coming from EVERYWHERE - and we continue to find new sources of structured and unstructured data that can provide business value including text, social media, weather, and connected devices. Finding value in the data requires analytics—descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, and cognitive (machine learning). Neil Isford, General Manager of Analytics Solutions and Services at IBM, and Wayne Peacock, Vice President, Analytic Insights and Business Intelligence at The Walt Disney Company, will share insights on how data has become the basis for competitive advantage, and how media and entertainment companies are harnessing more diverse data sources than ever before to achieve success. In the new Insight Economy, winners infuse analytics everywhere, driving insight to outcome. Discover actionable and fast insights, and power your sales, marketing, ad operations, finance, and HR initiatives like never before! 

Track: Advanced Analytics

Kevin Fleet

Vice President, Professional Services, Informatica

Better Data is Everyone's Job!

In today’s world business agility is king. In order to move quickly, senior leaders are making data a strategic imperative, one that business leaders own. It is now imperative that data be understood so it can be leveraged as an asset and an enabler of providing 360 degree, personalized interactions with customers, of improving cross and up selling, and of streamlining operations and processes. What do we need to get there? Data Governance, which is the name given to the policies, processes, standards, and people accountable for the disciplined, cross-enterprise management of data throughout its life cycle and architecture. This session will present an innovative method for implementing Data Governance, one that addresses it holistically, meaning a way to manage data completely across the organizational, architectural, and political silos in the company. The speakers have deep experience in implementing Data Governance and will share several examples of successful implementations of Data Governance and its results.

Track: Data & Technology

Rob Gatto

SVP of Sales, Neustar

The Magic of "Me"

Personalized experiences mean the difference between customers thinking “nice ad” and “wow, that’s so ME." Rob Gatto, SVP of Sales at Neustar, will address how we’ve entered a “Golden Era” of marketing, one where identifying customers and personalizing their experiences through the smart use of big data is crucial and what a critical role precision marketing plays in successful campaigns. You will learn how to:
  • Turn big data into smart data – personalizing and contextualizing data for the next level of customer engagement
  • Create a successful omni-channel approach – telling a consistent and compelling story across multiple platforms, online and off
  • Ensure your brand is safe across all channels – working together with traditional technology stakeholders

Track: Marketing & Consumer Insights

David Algranati

Senior VP, TV Product Innovation and Customer Research

Carol Davidsen

VP, Political Technology

Seeing Television Viewership Through a Political Lens

Since its inception, television has had an impact on political campaign results, fundamentally altering political campaigns, television media, and America's political history. After all, without the nation's first televised debate, Kennedy would never have been president. Fifty-two years later, television - specifically, television return path data - has altered political campaign strategy dramatically once again. By matching political intelligence to television viewing, the 2012 Obama campaign has been touted as the primary example of the disruptive impact of data analytics for a modern day campaign. Learn about the data insights that campaigns are using today to create micro-targeting groups, and understand the process of matching set-top box data to voter information, so that television viewership data can be looked at through a political lens.

Track: Marketing & Consumer Insights

Jeff Cann

Senior Director, Client Experience, Sysomos

Data Science is the New Black: Transforming Social Data to Data Science-Driven Results

While social media has opened up dozens of new opportunities for brands, social analytics has largely remained a listening, monitoring, and reporting activity.  Unlocking the true advantages of results driven, predictive and even preemptive social intelligence lies in the power that data sciences can deliver. Whether you are involved in influencer identification, crisis monitoring, advertising or general reporting, data science is changing everything. 

This presentation will walk through the future of data science-driven social intelligence that will allow companies to realize a new level of insight, open new opportunities, and provide an unprecedented level of prediction to their business. Are you on the leading edge, evolving from social data collection and reporting to the true data science practices of tomorrow?

Track: Data & Technology

Mike Akeroyd

Managing Consultant, Revenue Management and Analytics, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Applying Analytics Across Industries

When faced with a business problem that doesn’t conform to anything you’ve experienced in the past, it can be difficult to not only know where to start but also to determine how analytics can add value. It is natural to rely on methods that may have been successful in the past, but applying a cookie cutter approach sometimes doesn’t work. Unfortunately, when traditional processes can’t be applied, more highly subjective solutions are often used in place of quantitative rigor. Although different industries have certain business challenges that are unique to them, analytical solutions that are common in one industry can often be ported to another where that technique may be atypical. By looking to different fields and leveraging a more unique approach, you can increase the percentage of your solutions or decisions that are more quantitatively informed. This presentation will highlight several examples of how companies in various industries are leveraging analytical techniques to generate value.

Track: Beyond the Numbers

Chris Barton

Associate Director, Advertiser Analytics, ESPN

Emily Bockino

Director, Advertiser Insights, ESPN

ESPN XPE: Connecting Fieldwork and Passive Measurement Through Modeling

ESPN’s Cross Platform Effectiveness initiative (XPE) provides a deep, longitudinal, multi-advertiser, multi-database resource for cross-platform effectiveness discovery.  The hub of XPE is a continuous brand health survey, designed from the marketer's point of view, which has been measuring cross-platform ad effectiveness for over two and a half years.  Numerous other sources of longitudinal data are housed together with the survey metrics, and together they are modeled to create a set of “living” variables that impact communications success and inform a host of today’s complex marketing decisions.

Track: Data & Technology

Nathalie Bordes

Senior Director, Emerging Channels Research, ESPN

Amy Rask

Executive Vice President, MediaScience

Innovating Media Research through Experimental and Neuroscience Studies at the ESPNLab

The ESPN Lab has set the standard for state-of-the-art, lab-based research and is at the forefront of a new movement to bring science to the study of media and advertising. By constantly testing and validating new methods, the Lab ensures that it is always at the forefront, without being distracted by approaches which, in the long run, will be exposed for their shortcomings. 

While it’s very important to measure what people can articulate verbally, it is equally important to study what they can’t articulate by capturing the body’s reaction to media content – all within a controlled lab environment.  With this approach, we are adding a layer of precision that allows us to uncover new insights about the emotional response to media and advertising executions – and truly understand why certain executions work better than others. The Lab’s research approach is method-agnostic but is based on classic experimental design and ESPN is applying this philosophy and methodology to the Lab’s current areas of focus ranging from brand integrations to cross-platform advertising to break architecture as well as new ad models and new media technologies. In this presentation we will not only provide a deep dive into the original methodologies but will also share analysis and conclusions drawn from this study and how the results were applied.

Track: Marketing & Consumer Insights

Einav Brent

Senior Manager, Software Engineering, The Walt Disney Company

Mu Jing

Lead Software Engineer, The Walt Disney Company

Busting Silos: How We Facilitate Data Sharing Across Disney

Our Guests see Disney as one cohesive entity, not as a group of distinct business units. Unfortunately, Disney data tends to be siloed within each respective business unit, preventing different groups and products from taking full advantage of Guest data and putting forth a unified experience. Activity Stream allows products from around the Company to share their Guest data by publishing information about what Guests are doing into a real-time live stream of Disney data that can be consumed by anyone. By consolidating and standardizing these activities, we enable easy cross-product collaboration and foster partnerships.
Join us to learn about our approach towards standardizing disparate data and how we provide a simplified way for clients to publish their data into our system, all without the need for them to understand our schemas or vocabulary without sacrificing consistency and quality. We will show how this data can be used to build exciting features that can be used by anyone, such as generating trending and popularity rankings, supporting a rewards engine, or serving newsfeeds and timelines similar to Facebook or Twitter.

Track: Data & Technology

Christine Chung

Senior Manager, Analytics, The Walt Disney Company

Laurel Long

Customer Insight Analyst, The Walt Disney Company

Extending Guest Experiences and Engagements Across Disney Apps

Disney has a network of 300+ apps in the marketplace today and millions of users across those apps.  As installs become increasingly expensive to acquire in the open market, cross-promotion between our apps has become more valuable than ever and allows us the opportunity to extend our guests’ lifetimes within the network of Disney apps.  But cross-promotion often comes with the risk of cannibalizing the revenue and engagement of users in their existing apps, creating the questions of when we should do it, how frequently, and where in the user’s lifecycle.  In this session we’ll walk through and discuss how Disney Interactive evaluates cannibalization and optimizes for incrementality, with the goal of extending guest engagement across our portfolio.

Track: Advanced Analytics

Kris Ferreira

Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization

I will present work done with Rue La La, an online retailer who offers limited-time discounts on designer apparel. One of their main challenges is revenue management for new products. We use machine learning techniques to build a demand prediction model, the structure of which poses challenges for creating a pricing policy. We develop new theory around multi-product price optimization and use this to create and implement a pricing decision support tool. Results show an average increase in revenue of nearly 10%. Finally, we develop a dynamic pricing algorithm for online retailers which has strong empirical and theoretical results.

Track: Advanced Analytics

Guillermo Gallego

Liu Family Professor, Department of IE & OR, Columbia University

Do Customers Benefit From Dynamic Pricing?

Under dynamic pricing, a seller changes her prices over time in response to changes in demand or changes in the marginal value of capacity. A common intuition is that, when a seller earns more revenue by employing dynamic pricing, the additional revenue earned is coming out of the total customer surplus. This perception may even prevent the use of dynamic pricing if companies feel that it may hurt their image in the eyes of potential customers. But is this intuition correct? To investigate, we asked ourselves under what conditions customer surplus would actually increase when dynamic pricing is employed. We deduced that this can occur when customer surplus has a particular mathematical structure. Remarkably, we found that this mathematical property holds in many cases, strongly suggesting that the common intuition about dynamic pricing—that it is not “win-win”—is usually wrong.

Track: Advanced Analytics

Juan Gorricho

VP, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Partners Federal Credit Union

The Strategic Importance of Chief Analytics Officers

Recently, Chief Data and/or Chief Analytics Officers are becoming more popular, with many companies creating one or both. CDO/CAO roles are not created equal, and a big part of the success depends on the maturity of the organization, the competitive landscape, and the strategic priorities. Partners Federal Credit Union is one of the top credit unions in the country in terms of size and performance, exclusively serving more than 100,000 cast members of The Walt Disney Company – we are cast serving cast.  I will share what drove the creation of the CDAO role at Partners, and our journey to proactively transform Partners into an analytics driven organization, maximizing today’s ever growing data volumes to create business value to our Members. 

Track: Beyond the Numbers

Patricia Rodriguez

Manager, Guest Data, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Colleen Monaco

Digital Experience Director, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Andrew Brown

Business Technology Manager, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Creating the Personalized Experience: Disney Parks & Resorts

Learn how WDP&R is personalizing the Guest experience through the use of advanced decisioning software to enable delivery of relevant content, imagery, and product recommendations in real-time, consistently across channels. This multi-year initiative is kicking off with the personalization of the WDW website. See how online and offline data, in conjunction with machine learning, are enabling a 1:1 experience on Disneyworld.com and driving significant results.

Track: Marketing & Consumer Insights

Michael Lisin

Senior Information Architect, ABC

How Seattle's Sports Venues Manage Crowds Using  Bluetooth Beacons and Customer Analytics

During busy sporting events a balance between a fan’s wait in lines and quick navigation through a stadium is essential. Long lines may turn a fan away from purchasing products. Short lines can flood the stadium with fans, impairing a fan’s ability to navigate to desired destinations. Beacons present an opportunity to improve a fan’s experience at a stadium and to maximize a stadium’s throughput and profitability. Beacons leverage Bluetooth technology available on many phones and other mobile devices today. Beacons allow to pinpoint a customer’s location, and unlike GPS, beacons do not require clear view of the sky to receive a satellite signal. Beacons have more precise control of detection range than RFIDs and don’t require specialized readers or expenses of RFID cards or bracelets. Analytics can present a coupon to drive a discount-driven fan to a store, while simultaneously reducing a crowd wandering through the stadium. For a “true fan,” analytics can present an opportunity to meet with a sports celebrity, while simultaneously redirecting the fan through a less crowded section of a stadium.

Track: Beyond the Numbers

Jocelyn McDowell

Director, Multi-Platform Research and Strategy, Disney Channels Worldwide

Marc Normand

Vice President of Research, Disney Channels Worldwide

Keeping Up With Kids: Challenges of Measuring Consumption in the Kid's Space

Tablets, smart phones, OTT devices (Roku/Apple TV), Smart TVs, SVOD services, apps, and sites are evolving the way consumers watch TV and video. While behaviors are changing rapidly, measurement capabilities are not keeping up, making it difficult to understand how new technologies & services are truly impacting the TV business. 

Track: Beyond the Numbers

Mary Metcalf

Digital Marketing Director, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Wayne Peacock

VP, Analytic Insights and Business Intelligence, The Walt Disney Studios

Social Media Insights: Outsourcing Versus In-House

The social media space offers a rich trove of publicly available data that can be used to quickly and inexpensively understand levels of audience interest, sentiment, themes, topics, and demographics on any number of topics, ranging from our own and competitor’s brands to trends in the social climate.  Many companies outsource the analysis of this data to specialist agencies, but at Walt Disney Studios and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, this practice was brought fully in-house early last year.  In this session, you’ll learn why they did it, how they did it, and what it has taken to make social analytics truly valuable and actionable for marketing, operations, distribution, and franchise decision-making. 

Track: Marketing & Consumer Insights

Nate Vadeboncoeur

Manager, Advanced Analytics and Optimization, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

BJ Price

Analytics and Optimization Manager, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Interactive Optimization Visualization and Automated Scenario Evaluation Using Tableau

Once the difficult task of building a working marketing mix model is complete, our teams spend countless hours preparing presentations and presenting the model findings to our clients. This novel use of Tableau allows our clients to explore optimization results and input their own what-if scenarios themselves.  In this presentation we will review how these visualizations were created, and discuss the business impact of letting our clients explore their model results.

Track: Beyond the Numbers

Haining Yu

Manager, Decision Science, Walt Disney Parks & Resorts

Jonathan Yedidia

Senior Research Scientist, Disney Research Boston

Novel Algorithms and Applications for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Today’s business world demands intelligent solutions to complex analytic problems. Can we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to meet this challenge? Machine learning algorithms use experience to find insights and make predictions, while recent artificial intelligence algorithms optimize complex system decisions by passing messages between components. In this talk we will present algorithms in these areas and explore novel applications in trajectory planning, constraint satisfaction, and business analytics.

Track: Advanced Analytics