What our judges are looking for

Sue MacLure, Co-Chair Customer Data Council, Director of Data, CACI

This year I’ll be judging the Data Storytelling category within the DMA Awards, and I’m really looking forward to it.

An ongoing challenge for ensuring the good application of data insight is marrying those predominantly left-brain thinkers (logical, analytical) with their right-brained counterparts (creative, intuitive). It’s one thing to find out some mathematical truth, a perfect correlation, or indeed a complete lack of relationship between two facts, but quite another to translate that so that a business counterpart can make a decision, or act. This is particularly true when it comes to marketing applications where we want to decide what the best way to communicate with human beings is, and we are the most fickle of creatures.

This is data storytelling, and all good stories need a plot (look at us selling products to our customers), a setting (UK market, CoL crisis, past business performance), characters (the marketers, the purse-string holders, the business owners, the customers), points of view (how we might interpret what the data is saying), and conflict (cost vs benefit, risk vs reward). We are telling these stories at work every day – good data analytics helps us, but storytelling skills take us that step further.

So, for our three core pillars, I’ll be looking for…

• Strategy: Are you crystal clear about what it is that you are trying to influence with your story, what does the receiver do, or believe, differently as a result of hearing it

• Creativity: Are you giving the information in a way that is easy to understand, or just throwing a lot of facts out there and hoping they’ll work it out, it’s their fault if they don’t understand the numbers

• Results: Did it drive demonstrably different behaviours or commercial value?

Sanjeevan Bala, Value of Data Committee Member, Group Chief Data & AI Officer, ITV

I judge as I simply love reading and hearing about developments across the industry and am always in awe at the scale of aspiration and achievement. Put simply the winners are the ones that inspire a generation of Marketers and Data professionals to Go Further and challenge mediocrity.

I'm delighted to be judging the AI category as it feels like Generative has shot AI to the front of most agendas. On the one hand a hugely transformative opportunity on the other questions relating to risks, it's an incredibly exciting time to be at the intersection of machine intelligence with human creativity.

• Strategy: What was the initial intention, what did you set out to achieve and critically, how did you navigate a path to execution? We're keen on entries that demonstrate diverse minds and skills coming together to form the strategy.

• Creativity: No matter the medium, we're looking for those explosive kernels of ideas that simply lodge themselves into the minds of consumers and in doing so create a lasting and vivid memory and, in doing so, evoke a deep emotional response.

• Results: How did this really shift the dial? Be warned, marginal gains are taken as a given and very much part of Business As Usual, we're looking for standout results that have had a material and lasting impact.