Commentary

Why Sirius XM Radio Lives In Big Data Darkness

There are very few companies that know less about their customers than Sirius XM Radio. Chris Marriott, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, at CertainSource, made the point at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, on Monday.

“They don’t know what you listen to,” Marriott told attendees. “They don’t know how often you listen to it,” i.e., “anything that the rest of us as email marketers would use to leverage [and] to sell you more.” 

It’s true, Jon Weiss, Director of Email Marketing Operations at Sirius XM, admitted on Monday. Sirius simply doesn’t dedicate the bandwidth to retrieve such data from its listeners, he said. And, it’s a problem.  

“By fare the biggest challenge that we faced from a marketing perspective -- and the biggest surprise that I was in for when I took the job when I interviewed for it -- was finding out that we don’t have that available to us,” Weiss said on Monday.

Not having big data at our disposal for the most important thing in our business, which is what you like (what you listen to; what your preferences are) [is] very, very challenging.”

How do Weiss and his team cope? “We have other ways of getting to that [data],” he said. Part of the solution certainly involves machine learning. Still, “We have to start with very macro-level decisions,” Weiss groused.  

1 comment about "Why Sirius XM Radio Lives In Big Data Darkness".
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  1. Garrett Donaldson from JKR Advertising & Marketing, June 8, 2016 at 1:49 p.m.

    This sounds terribly simplistic; but for a subscription service, wouldn't new subscribers, renewals and cancellations be the only true measures for performance? I'm not asserting that the other data has no value, but there are times when I suspect we tend to parse the information too finely. 

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