Narrative 101: How Are Companies Using Narrative?
by Narrative, on July 23, 2019
Learn how companies are leveraging Narrative to power their data strategies.
Welcome back to class, students.
In our second installment of our "Narrative 101" series (here's part one), Narrative founder and CEO Nick Jordan provides some real-life examples of how companies are leveraging Narrative's Acquire and Distribute platforms to power their data strategies.
Watch the video or read the interview below to learn:
How are companies using the Acquire platform?
Joe Apprendi: Could you provide an example of a best practice client that's leveraging the Narrative platform on the Acquire side?
Nick Jordan: I think the most interesting case study we've seen is with a gaming company that we work with. They were effectively launching a new game, and they had a cold start problem. They couldn't just look at their other games and say, "We assume that these same behaviors are going to happen with this new game."
The first thing they wanted to do was get some competitive intelligence. They wanted to understand, in this category of game that I'm developing, who are the users that are playing these types of games? So they used our marketplace to buy app usage data across their competitive set. They said, "It's these seven games that we think are competitors. We want as much data as possible about who plays those games so our consumer insights and competitive intelligence team can go formulate an idea of who our target customer is."
What they realized is that their new game's potential users were very different than their current games' potential users. They were a completely different segment of the population, which meant they really couldn't use their existing data to do acquisition, because they'd be trying to acquire completely different people.
So the second thing they did is they launched the game in two test markets. They took that same data they'd already procured from a consumer insight perspective, and used that data to do acquisition, mostly through social channels in those target markets.
Once they got their acquisition metrics to a number they were comfortable with—revenue per install, cost per install—they wanted to go with a full launch across the US. As part of that, they had a $50 million TV budget that they wanted to use.
So then they came back to the marketplace, because we have TV data that's available there. They purchased TV data about those same users that were playing their competitors' apps to say, "Do these people watch the History Channel, or PBS, or CSPAN, or CNN? Do they watch from 8:00 PM to 12:00 PM? Do they watch it in the morning?" They developed an idea of who their customers were, when they were watching TV, and built their television plan around that using data through our platform.
Then, they continued to buy television data of people that had been exposed to their TV ad to attribute were those people more likely to actually install the game than those that were not exposed to the TV ad.
It was very holistic. From "I need to understand who my target is," to "I need to figure out if I can acquire those users." Then, "I want to go big and have a TV component, and measure if the whole thing worked." All powered by data through out platform.
Learn more about how to use Narrative Acquire to gather competitive intelligence data and convert potential customers.
How are companies using the Distribute platform?
Joe Apprendi: So on the other side of the market, on the sell side, give me an example how that's benefiting data providers. Is it strictly based on workflow efficiency, or really, engaging with new markets that they haven't engaged in the past?
Nick Jordan: It's a little bit of everything. We give the sell side turnkey solutions that make it really easy for them to sell without spinning up massive engineering teams, operations teams, etc.
We are definitely opening up new markets where, maybe historically, they haven't looked. A lot of data sellers, historically, have been wholesale businesses; they want to sell all of their data to anyone that wants to buy it. But the total addressable market of companies that want all of the data in the world—while big deals individually—there's relatively few of those companies. So we've given sellers tools where they can now go sell 5 percent, 1 percent of their dataset at a premium, but to sell it to 5,000 companies instead of selling it to 24 companies.
Joe Apprendi: Is there a unique data provider that you would say is opportunistic through Narrative that isn't generally available through other methods of acquiring it?
Nick Jordan: We have a number of them. We recently talked about a deal that we did with LiveIntent, which has consumer identity data. Historically, they've actually sold their data through other channels, but decided that the middlemen that they were working with as part of those deals were taking the majority of the value chain that they wanted to keep for themselves.
That's another way that people are really leveraging us on the sell side. Historically, if you've worked with a data broker, you pushed the data to the data broker, and then you get one check at the end of every month. But, presumably, that broker is then selling the data to hundreds or thousands of companies. If you're a seller, you'd much rather be getting a thousand checks, having direct relationships with all thousand of those companies. But, it's obviously operationally very hard to do. We really simplify that process so you can have a thousand deals without having a 200-person team to operate it.
Joe Apprendi: You talked about something very specific and I don't want to overlook that: instead of this kind of all-you-can-eat, everything-I've-got, you-figure-out-what's-useful-to-you model, companies can actually leverage your tool from a discovery perspective, from a query perspective, to actually identify exactly what they need so that sellers can start doing transaction with clients that they probably couldn't do before, because they weren't ready to buy all the data.
Nick Jordan: That's exactly right. If you want to sell all of your data for $100,000 a month, and there's 20 companies that are willing to buy all of that, what if you could sell 5% of your data for $10,000 a month, but you could sell that to 2,000 companies? Your total addressable market is now exponentially grown, and by virtue of working with us, your operational footprint doesn't have to grow exponentially. It can grow at a much smaller pace.
If you want to learn how Narrative's solutions can help your company simplify their data acquisition and monetization strategy, send us a message—we'd love to chat.
Want to learn more? Read part one of Narrative 101 to learn what Narrative does and how it's changing the way data is transacted, and part three to learn about Narrative's plans for the future.
