As Chief Financial Officer, Christine McCarthy has helped lead The Walt Disney Company through periods of unprecedented change and growth. A 22-year Disney veteran, Christine shares in this presentation important lessons on how to translate data-driven analysis into insights that inform complex and significant decisions. At a company rooted in exceptional storytelling, even finance leaders must understand how to combine strategy, people, and execution to form a complete narrative.

I’ve spent the last decade working with data, hunting for mathematical patterns in human behavior. In that time, I’ve come across some incredible stories - written solely in the numbers - that get right to the heart of who we are as people.

In this optimistic talk, I’ll share some extraordinary tales about what’s happening at the very cutting edge of data science – a host of surprising and delightful stories that demonstrate how far you can go when we look back at ourselves through the eyes of data. And I’ll show you how a mathematical view of what means to be human can shape the way we design our society, from dating and healthcare to catching serial killers and everything in between.

At Hitachi Vantara, IT-OT convergence is in our DNA. We have more than a century of OT, and 60 years of IT experience, and we're on a mission to help organizations find, analyze and use data to get results. We're proud of our Corporate Alliance with Disney Parks, and we've worked together to help optimize operations and maintenance so guests can have exceptional experiences. This presentation by our Chief Product Officer, Radhika Krishnan, will demonstrate how our next-generation Lumada data and analytics software suite has helped many organizations, deploy a modern data fabric to drive innovation and capture opportunities in ways that were too complex or impossible to capture before.

Hitachi Vantara is a Platinum Plus Sponsor of DDAC

A new world of data opportunities has opened up since the last DDAC. The teams that push boundaries and boldly investigate uncharted territories, will inspire change and drive lasting impact. This session will uncover what it takes to develop a data explorer's mindset, and how it can transform teams into innovation engines. While there are perceived risks in the unknown ("here be dragons!"), there are also unimagined rewards. Power your expedition with technology that helps make every customer's journey productive and illuminating.

Braze is a Platinum Plus Sponsor of DDAC

Customers want great experiences -but it's bigger than that. They want companies to know them, listen to them, wow them, so every moment matters. Every moment helps build a relationship - so it's expected that those moments are connected, relevant, trustworthy, and human. However, most companies lack a strategy for bridging their customer engagements together into meaningful experiences. How can companies drive a culture and platform that supports data and insights everywhere, for everyone? Join Salesforce product leaders as they share how companies take a platform-based approach to deliver innovative 1:1 personalized experiences to their customers, guests, viewers and employees to foster trusted, life-long relationships.

Salesforce is a Platinum Plus Sponsor of DDAC

What helps put the F1-title-holding Oracle Red Bull Racing team in a position to win races and earn new fans? Hear from Oracle EVP, Rob Tarkoff, on how Oracle Red Bull Racing's predictive analytics and vertically integrated technology strategy drives the ultimate competitive advantage. Learn how other sports leaders communicate with their customers through the power of sports as a storytelling device, and how companies can draw inspiration from these data transformation strategies to connect audiences to new and deeper experiences through innovative use of technology.

Oracle is a Platinum Plus Sponsor of DDAC

Hear from President and CEO of Conviva, Keith Zubchevich in this welcome address.

Conviva is a Platinum Sponsor of DDAC

Data consumers need data for Business Intelligence and analytics to make business decisions. But for most organizations, their current data infrastructure isn’t keeping up with demand. Developing analytics and getting them into production takes weeks to months, and data tied to proprietary formats makes it difficult to support different types of analytics, such as BI and data science. Data teams struggle with brittle data pipelines, stale data, slow turnaround, and increasing costs. A data lakehouse built on an open data architecture enables data users to access data in their data lake directly via SQL queries, simplifies complexity, and makes life easier for data teams. Learn why more organizations are moving their analytics and BI to an open data lakehouse and how you can build a successful lakehouse strategy.

Dremio is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

We believe trust is critical to Elevating the Human Experience™ — trust drives both customer & workforce loyalty, and ultimately business results. For example, 88% of customers who highly trust a brand have bought again from that brand, 79% of employees who highly trust their employer feel motivated to work, and trustworthy companies outperform their competitors by up to 4x. But trust today is deeply fractured — business leaders overestimate their customers' trust by 38% and their workforce trust by 45%. We've created the HX TrustID™ to measure, predict and act on trust. Our platform measures the Four Factors of trust: Humanity, Transparency, Capability & Reliability; predicts the customer & workforce behaviors that trust drives; and helps our clients take more targeted actions to (re)build trust.

Deloitte is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

There is a growing expectation that brands will use people’s data responsibly and deliver value as part of the exchange. Privacy must now be our default setting — whether that’s due to third-party cookie deprecation, restricted access to mobile IDs or a growing number of regulations. To continue reaching the people behind devices with relevant marketing, it’s important to expand your pool of rich, first- and second-party data to power reach and personalization. In this session, Acxiom will share the keys to enabling the connected customer journey and counteracting the demise of the third-party cookie.

Acxiom is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

This session will highlight the work coming from ESPN Edge in partnership with Accenture, Microsoft and Verizon. Join accomplished leaders across sports, business, and technology for an impactful panel leaving you motivated and ready to drive innovation.

ESPN Edge is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

The amount of customer data available to brands has absolutely exploded in the past decade, giving brands an opportunity to create personalized experiences. But with the introduction of privacy regulations, thousands of new marketing tools, new customer touchpoints, and more, this data can simply cause chaos. It’s hard to measure and manage, but most importantly, blocks brands from delivering winning customer experiences. The fun stuff!! Come to this session to learn how industry-leading brands solve data chaos.

mParticle is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

From ad pricing and revenue projection to optimizing streaming content for audience engagement, every aspect of the media and entertainment industry depends on up-to-the-minute, accurate data. The FullStack approach to data platform architecture, construction, and management is the key to meeting media and entertainment companies’ data needs, ensuring integration of the best technology, speed, flexibility, and a single source of truth empowering better decisions, faster. We will show how the FullStack approach, combined with innovative new tools like the Snowflake Media Data Cloud, can transform the way companies in the media and entertainment industry store and use data. Leveraging the Snowflake Media Data Cloud, companies can continuously stream first-party data, PII, subscription revenue, and marketing assets into a privacy-compliant secure raw zone, and seamlessly integrate additional external sources (such as identity, demographic, or psychographic data) to improve marketing effectiveness.

DAS42 is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

Companies across all verticals are adopting the Data Mesh paradigm: decentralized data management to improve data agility and remove organizational bottlenecks associated with monolithic approaches. This session describes how the Snowflake cloud data platform enables key pillars of a data mesh implementation. We will share architecture blueprints and best practices drawn from customers who have successfully realized the benefits of a data mesh.

Snowflake is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

Habu’s Chief Customer Officer, Ted Flanagan, Disney’s Director, Audience Modeling and Data Science, Nick Winfrey, and Disney’s Director, Advanced Analytics and Clean Room Solutions, Christine Chung, will discuss the foundational changes in the advertising ecosystem, the implications of data insights on marketing, analytics, and measurement, and how companies are coming together to collaborate in new and exciting ways to power mutually beneficial data-driven marketing. Ted, Nick, and Christine will share the strategies and tactics companies can utilize to safely maximize the potential of data in a privacy-focused manner, and how Disney Advertising uses data clean rooms to unlock collaboration opportunities with advertising partners that deliver the results and outcomes that drive results for brands and better experiences for consumers.

Watch this session and learn:

• What a data clean room is, how they work, and the value they deliver

• How companies like Disney and advertisers are leveraging data clean rooms today

• Key learnings on how to get started in clean rooms

Habu is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

Action-oriented analytics, augmented by AI and available at sub-second speed, is changing the media and entertainment landscape. From the boardroom to the front lines, leaders are making faster and smarter decisions that drive customer loyalty and build long-lasting value. MicroStrategy’s unique approach to Intelligence Everywhere delivers the agility and trust in data you take results above and beyond!

MicroStrategy is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

In a complex world of data deprecation, economic uncertainty, and a constantly evolving advertising landscape, it takes more than just strategic planning and execution to get ahead. Today’s forward-thinking brands are building successful and sustainable marketing practices by creating and instilling a data-driven mindset throughout their organizations. Join Marc Vermut, VP of The Knowledge Lab from Neustar, a TransUnion company, and Ajay Kapoor, Global Director, Performance Driven Marketing at General Motors, as they discuss the keys to identifying and infusing the right business metrics into your company culture to drive better business outcomes from your marketing investments.

Neustar is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

Did you know that companies with strong Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A) systems have five-year profit growth more than three times that of other companies? Operational performance is typically a leading indicator to financial results and business outcomes. The greater the insights into key operational metrics and understanding how they tie into financial line items, the more proactive and agile an organization can become. This drives improvements to the bottom line. Attend this session to learn how xP&A can help you bring your people and plans together to increase agility and performance by aligning operational and financial data and linking their supporting processes.

SAP is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

Data is not the strategic resource of the 21st century, data scientists are, but they come from all walks of life with an exceptionally wide ranges of skills, experience and training. This diversity drives better decisions and enables a wider range of more innovative and successful solutions. However, to scale data science teams and unlock these benefits, organizations need to overhaul the way they support them. In this session we will discuss how to empower diverse teams with platforms that support an increasingly wide set of tools, provide scalable infrastructure and drive collaboration while still providing the governance and security organizations need.

Domino Data Lab is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

(Additional registration required)

Deriving insights from data is more efficient when using a well-crafted data visualization than when using tables or reports. However, the journey to creating a well-crafted visualization can encounter many common pitfalls, especially when enabled by spreadsheet tools. This course will cover the principles and science behind creating a great visualization and change how you look at pie and bar charts. This course will dive into topics including:

• Building Blocks of Data Visualization - basic elements of a visualization and how they work together to create various chart types

• Data Visualization Designs - design principles used in data visualizations, how to convey messages through graphic representation, and making visualizations accessible and inclusive

• Exploration & Storytelling - storytelling with data and the use of tools to build visualizations

• Data Manipulation for Data Visualization - preparing data in a way that enables iteration through many visualizations and working with data manipulation techniques that aid effective data visualization

2:00 to 3:15 - Mind Blown: Learn the Basics of Alteryx Designer

New to Alteryx? Let us show you how you can do anything with Data! During this session, Alteryx' Principal Evangelist and Alteryx Ace, Joshua Burkhow and the Alteryx Team will take you on an amazing ride to teach you how you can do anything with data using Alteryx Designer. There will be no seatbelts or harness restraints, only excitement and thrills allowed! At the end you will not only have a ton of fun, but you will also have learned how to use Alteryx Designer to get started today!

Who Should Attend: First Time Riders.
Pre-Requisites: Download & Install Alteryx Designer Desktop

3:30 to 5:00 - How Big of a Movie Fan are You Really?

For this fun filled and competitive session we are going to show you how you can answer important questions about your data to see really, how big of a true movie insider you really are! We will show you how to easily connect to data, not be constrained by Excel and learn how to use Alteryx Designer to Summarize, Filter, Sort, and Analyze your data and more! Prizes may or may not be involved.

Who Should Attend: Data Lovers, Excel Junkies, and Movie Fanatics masquerading as Analysts.

Alteryx is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

2:00 to 3:15 - Zero to Snowflake

New to Snowflake? Here's your opportunity to get to know us!

During this session, technical experts from Snowflake will demonstrate how to transform your legacy data architecture into a modern data platform, all designed to help you understand the true power of Snowflake's Cloud Data Platform. This will be followed by an advanced use-case demonstration.

Who Should Attend: Anyone new to Snowflake with a technical background

3:30 to 5:00 - Snowflake Showcase

• Data Sharing Demo using media specific datasets

  • Subscriber overlap analysis to package bundled offering

• Data Clean Room Demo. Common use cases: Campaign attribution and measurement, third party enrichment, ad log analysis etc.

  • Snowflake DCR Architecture
  • DCR using Snowflake
  • DCR using Habu

Who Should Attend: Data Analyst, Ad Sales, Marketing, Customer Acquisition & Retention

Snowflake is a Gold Sponsor of DDAC

From Data to Insights

Join Dataiku for a workshop where you'll gain intimate, firsthand experience with Dataiku's end-to-end data science platform. Dive deep into the Dataiku Design Node to prepare data interactively, analyze it, create insights, and augment your analysis using machine learning with or without coding.

For an optimal experience, it is recommended attendees bring their own laptops to this training session.

Dataiku is a Showcase Sponsor of DDAC

Understanding customer behavior is essential to hone the capability of marketing teams in nurturing and engaging customers in a more meaningful way.

As part of the marketing toolbox, the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a holistic tool that measures the Force (the future monetary value) of each individual customer. CLV allows marketing teams to identify the customers with the strongest tie to the Force and help them harness their spending power. Easy to understand and implement, its flexible application allows segmentation and targeting of customers based on their CLV. Monitoring CLV of both existing and newly acquired customers will help organizations to devise actionable drivers that improve key performance indices.

There are several methodologies for calculating CLV. In this presentation we will explain and compare the three most popular approaches. We will also show how CLV could be used to increase the revenue of a company.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into many industries around the world and disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming to the fields of banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, retail, and entertainment.
But the truth is, it has just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions to drive strategic business decisions—powering and accelerating business. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform. The disruption that comes with such transformation is yet to be felt—but it is coming.
New developments in artificial intelligence and the history of how technologies have disrupted industries highlight the striking phase we are now in – "the Between Times” -- after witnessing the power of this new technology and before its widespread adoption. While there continues to be important opportunities for businesses, there are also threats of disruption. As AI prediction improves, old ways of doing things will be upended, and that process will have winners and losers. How can businesses leverage, or protect, their positions?

The leads of Search and Experimentation at Disney Streaming discuss how they collaborate to build highly engaging streaming experiences by surfacing the right content to the right users at the right time. This entails creating a uniquely personalized in-app experience for every user while still retaining distinct brand identities across the different streaming platforms, including Disney+, Hulu and Star+, that reach over 200 million subscribers globally. Come learn about the strategic approach used to build Disney Streaming’s content discovery program for the globe, the role of data in guiding the product decisions, and the business trade-offs in experimentation. You’ll walk away from this conversation with how Disney Streaming uses data to drive best-in-class customer experiences and achieve desired business outcomes.

The need for analytic solutions continues to grow as more and more data becomes available, and companies strive to find a competitive edge to drive business value. As systems and tools transition to the cloud, what factors should you consider when planning for your data and analytic needs? The goal of this discussion is to walk through that journey with a strong focus on the types of tools and services available in the cloud to enable cost-effective, stable, secure, and robust solutions that take your analytics to the next level!

At Disney Streaming, we constantly challenge ourselves to experiment and seek the best way to delight and engage with our users. While continuing to benefit from randomized controlled experiments as our user engagement grows, Disney Streaming has also developed a scalable solution to make valid and prompt causal inferences without relying on randomized A/B tests. In this presentation, we will discuss different, cutting-edge machine learning methodologies implemented in our causal inference tool to help all our stakeholders swiftly make optimal data-driven decisions.

Our social and work environment has been through cataclysmic changes in the last few years. How do we anticipate the inflection points and manage teams through both professional and personal challenges? How do you maintain tactical agility in this environment? There are some lessons from the tradecraft of security and espionage that may offer both perspective and concrete solutions.

Why do fans tune in to watch LeBron James? What do Mike Trout and Aaron Judge have in common? What makes Tom Brady the greatest of all time? The answers to these questions may seem obvious to some, might be too in then weeds for others, but there are tangible measures for why fans tune in to watch these superstars.

Across all sports, Superstars are the main reason fans tune in to watch a game, match, or fight. An athlete can have the talent to be the best in their respective sport, but that doesn't always translate to viewership. The Sports Research and Insights team at Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution have studied the key attributes that make a superstar, how to nurture the next generation of stars, and predict future superstars.

We'll share which attributes are key to grow superstardom, how they differ from sport to sport, and which are predictive indicators.

Decision making to satisfy the basic human needs of health, food, and education is complex. In 2020, more than 38 million people, including 12 million children, in the U.S. were food insecure. By 2021, 53 million people sought help from food banks and community programs to feed their families. Food banks are nonprofit organizations that collect and distribute food donations to food-insecure populations in their service regions. Food banks are challenged with juggling multiple criteria such as equity, effectiveness, and efficiency when making distribution decisions. Models that assume predetermined weights on multiple criteria may produce inaccurate results as the preference of food banks over these criteria may vary over time, and as a function of supply and demand. In collaboration with our food bank partner in North Carolina, we develop a single-period, weighted multi-criteria optimization model that provides the decision-maker the flexibility to capture their preferences over the three criteria of equity, effectiveness, and efficiency, and explore the resulting trade-offs. We introduce a novel algorithm to elicit the inherent preference of a food bank by analyzing its actions within a single-period. The algorithm does not require direct interaction with the decision-maker. The non-interactive nature of this algorithm is especially significant for humanitarian organizations such as food banks which lack the resources to interact with modelers on a regular basis. We explore the implications of different decision-maker preferences for the criteria on distribution policies.

Learning isn’t just for machines! Advancing in one’s career often feels more like navigating a learning curve than simply climbing the “corporate ladder,” with many ups and downs along the way. Join this session for stories of personal reflection – including fears, obstacles and lessons learned – collected from the uniquely human experience of learning and growing across an analytics career. Walk away with ideas for approaching challenges in analytics and beyond.

Have you ever calculated the sample size for an A/B test and come up with a sample size that is larger than you can ever get? Does this mean you shouldn't run the test? No! In this presentation, we discuss why the standard hypothesis test used to analyze A/B tests doesn’t always fit with the tactical problems that businesses are trying to solve. The standard hypothesis test is used by academics who want to find small effects, but in marketing, we care about the big effects. Big effects are where the profit comes from! In a tactical A/B test -- which we call a “Test & Roll” -- the marketer conducts a small test and then uses the data to choose one of the treatments to deploy. We derive a new sample size formula which maximizes the expected profit from a Test & Roll. Using this lens, we show that "undersized" tests always increase profit and the optimal test size is far smaller than recommended by the standard sample size formula. We will also discuss how Test & Roll relates to more complicated bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms, providing most of the benefit of these algorithms with far simpler implementation requirements.

Using the example of the Seating Optimization application deployed to the Star Tours – The Adventures Continue attraction, this instructional discussion will focus on how engineering and user- centered design principles can enable the ability to deploy effective products in smaller cycles.

In a diverse workforce, understanding how to be an effective ally is an important task and each individual has a unique perspective on the type of support they want and need. Please join Hannah Fry (Author, TV & Podcast Host, Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London (UCL)), Emily Kubicek McAfee (Data Strategy Manager, Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution), and Tara Wilson (Senior Manager Decision Science, The Walt Disney Company) as they talk with moderator Mina McBride (Decision Science Product Manager, The Walt Disney Company) about the impact allies have had on their career journeys and share ideas on how we can elevate our own teams through allyship.

We develop a game theoretical model of dynamic predatory pricing. An incumbent who is privately informed about whether the demand is strong or weak faces a potential entrant who decides when, if ever, to pay an entry cost to become an incumbent's competitor or take an outside option. The incumbent chooses its output so as to affect the market price, which is a noisy signal of the market demand. Leveraging continuous-time methods, we provide a tractable characterization of Markov equilibria and show that they always feature overproduction. Intuitively, the incumbent has incentives to ``flood the market'' when demand is strong so that the resulting price is low and the potential entrant is induced to believe that the demand is weak, and not to enter. Even if in equilibrium the potential entrant anticipates the behavior of the incumbent when drawing inference about the demand from prices, the incumbent adopts a predatory behavior to deter entry. We show that because of its numerical tractability, our equilibrium characterization is amenable to further empirical investigation to quantify, for example, the welfare cost of predation.

In this presentation we will set forth how the Disney Streaming D.A.T.A. organization creates value for Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution by providing a framework for managing and leveraging D.A.T.A. Products. We will discuss how the D.A.T.A. organization defines D.A.T.A. Products and the unique framework allowing it to launch products in Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution at scale with guardrails to ensure value and trustworthiness. To provide a better understanding of D.A.T.A.’s product framework, we will explore not just the definition of the framework, but also how we define D.A.T.A. assets, what is and is not a D.A.T.A. Product, benefits of productization, the D.A.T.A. Product lifecycle, roles and responsibilities for product managers, as well as explore a set of general product examples.

We are all storytellers. And everyday business analysts worldwide are greeted with millions of data points that are translated into insights to drive data informed decisions. The best data analysts humanize statistics for their audience and transform “the what” of data into “the why” behind the numbers, with context, conclusions, and consequences. The skill to effectively craft a data driven story is not limited to simply communicating data analysis with statistics and data visualizations, but lies in finding the “soul” of your data to create excitement, clarity, and inspiration for others. Data needs stories and this session explores how you can identify the story of your data, tailor a narrative for your specific audience, and select the best way to communicate your “spark” of insight to make a difference.

As the digital media landscape evolves with the deprecation of third-party identifiers, successful application of first-party data has become more important than ever as companies shift to develop customized but scalable targeting solutions. Disney Advertising Sales has met this challenge head-on with our development of Disney Select, an extensive library of first-party segments that span the Disney portfolio and are designed for maximum scale, built with integrity and activated across the portfolio of available Disney inventory. These segments are built in-house using a holistic methodology that leverages our wealth of first-party data and pairs business-driven insights with end to end advanced machine learning and analytical techniques to form a future- proofed solution. In this presentation, we take a closer look at this innovative process, highlighting successful segmentations, key insights, and unique capabilities that position our audience offerings at the forefront of the industry.

The step from data analyst to managing a team of analytic talent is top of mind for many individual contributors. There are so many books, courses, and seminars on how to be an effective manager once you have the job; but these rarely address the self-awareness and advocacy needed to get a seat at the table. This talk will touch on how to know when you’re ready for the next step, ways to demonstrate convincing readiness to your leadership, and anticipating common challenges unique to managing analytic teams. We invite individual contributors considering a move into a management track to our talk. Experienced leaders may also find helpful tips for encouraging their staff to consider management roles.

Disney Institute presents Disney leadership insights that demonstrate why leadership is more than just a job title—it’s about creating positive transformations throughout the organization. Our approach is based on time-tested data that is demonstrated throughout our daily operations. We’ve learned that leaders who intentionally nurture an environment of mutual trust and respect tend to drive stronger employee performance, which can lead to exceptional customer service—and ultimately—improved business results.