How breaking data silos is like making pomegranate juice

Let’s say you are walking down the aisle at Costco and are craving pomegranate juice.

On your right are cases of pomegranates, costing $10 per case.

On your left are bottles of pomegranate juice, costing $7 per bottle.

If you really want to, you could buy the pomegranates and make the juice yourself. Indeed, a five-second Google search will even give you exact instructions on how to do it at home.

The problem is, making your own juice will be time consuming and probably messy. Imagine all those peels and seeds exploding on your clothing!

Sure, it can be done.

But if you are like me, you just want juice. So you buy the bottle.

Working with data silos is like that. We call this “The Pomegranate Problem.”

See, executives in media and publishing have data from a wide variety of sources that are siloed from each other.

What do we mean by data being “siloed?”

Data from ad impressions, analytics from your website, demographics, media, viewability, e-commerce, video, direct sales and much more are in disparate formats. And unless you put the data into one format, you can’t glean critical insights you need to be more profitable.

By breaking down these data silos and putting your various data sources into one format, you can answer critical questions such as:

• Which advertisers are the best and most profitable?
• What should be our price optimization strategy?
• How much revenue came from mobile over the weekend?
• How much revenue comes from internal ads?

Typically this is done in-house with dozens of engineers and various other team members. But this process can be messy, expensive, and time-consuming.

Not unlike making your own pomegranate juice.

(Shameless self-promotion: Switchboard can break down your data silos and unify your data sources quickly, easily and affordably. In other words, we sell pomegranate juice and do not sell the ingredients.)

One important point to consider is timing. When should you begin the process of breaking these silos and unifying your data? It may seem like starting such a project is a daunting challenge. That’s because it is. And, your team probably has other mission-critical priorities that need to be addressed before you undertake such a project.

But, if you don’t start unifying your data now, you are missing business insights that only data unification can uncover. Not getting started right away could literally cost your firm millions of dollars, as it has for other clients.

Over the next few months, instead of telling you about how amazing Switchboard is, I am going to leverage my experience as one of the project leaders at Google BigQuery to show you how to unify your data sets in-house, and why we believe you should start undertaking such a project as soon as possible.

In other words, I am going to show you how to make pomegranate juice. It might be a little messy, but it can be done.

Just try not to destroy your proverbial kitchen in the process.