Just over a decade ago, television programming and advertising meant little more than scheduling a spot for airtime and hoping your audience was tuning in. Today, however, viewers are “tuning in“ through their desktops, mobile devices, and connected TVs, shifting the television broadcast landscape. New, data-driven streaming services are popping up regularly. Content programmers and advertisers can now reach specific audiences where they are and offer content that’s tailored to them.

PMGSC is a not-for-profit broadcasting organization that operates two content channels—PBS SoCal and KCET—as well as Link TV, a noncommercial satellite channel. As legacy providers of publicly funded content that aims to inspire, inform, and entertain, the company is in a position to improve its complex marketing and data ecosystem. Through a holistic roadmap, PMGSC plans to unify disparate data sources, fully understand viewer behavior, and craft one-on-one user journeys to become a leader in defining the future of public television.

The best path forward? Informed data.

Since 2020, PMGSC leaders have been examining their business holistically across all platforms, redefining their goals under the direction of Dan Ferguson, the company’s senior vice president of marketing and communications. With a proven record of successfully leading marketing programs for well-known companies such as DirecTV, STARZ, and AT&T, Ferguson is helping PMGSC find its way in the data-informed streaming landscape.  

The company’s previous methods for gathering insights were both cumbersome and time-consuming. Broadcast and digital data were pulled from at least eight different sources, and staff were inundated by the manual effort of exporting, organizing, and visualizing data. Answers to basic questions like, “How many people did we reach this month?” took weeks to decipher due to the multiday process of exporting, converting, cleaning, and beautifying data. Workload issues ensued, and PMGSC was too bogged down to make clear, informed programming decisions. 

As a not-for-profit that relies on member subscriptions, grants, and foundations for funding, the company needs these insights to show how they affect the communities they serve. Without easy access to unified and clean data, PMGSC was struggling to connect its marketing efforts to its broader mission. PMGSC needed a new data strategy to forge a clear path forward for its business.

Having enjoyed working with Slalom in the past, Ferguson reached out to our team to help support the following goals:

• Accelerate automation 

• Improve efficiency  

• Increase user engagement 

• Improve strategic decision-making 

The initial discovery phase consisted of interviews and workshops to assess the current state of marketing efforts, gather requirements for an ideal future state, and identify key KPIs and underutilized data across various sources. We then entered a build phase in which we mapped source data tables to the key KPIs needed for reporting. Through an iterative process, Slalom and PMGSC worked together to design a set of wireframes across broadcast and digital data, providing viewership and rating insights for PMGSC’s various channels.

We also partnered with PMGSC to help develop a semantic layer in its existing data warehouse and create a set of interactive Tableau dashboards, enabling the entire organization to make data-driven decisions. These dashboards consider data such as viewership across linear and digital, website engagement, and marketing performance.

In a convoluted landscape of abundant data with no easily accessible way to view it, Slalom helped PMGSC identify a single source of truth. 

On-air, online, and in the community, PMGSC plays a vital role in the educational and cultural enrichment of Southern and Central California. The organization has won hundreds of major awards for news and public affairs programming, national documentary productions, and educational family programs.  

By streamlining data intake and analysis with automation, the PMGSC team now has more time and resources to create and curate programming based on informed and interest-targeted viewer behavior.  

Through understanding what the data is telling them, the team can elevate the way it’s used. And a more efficient workflow means that any leftover time can now be used for innovation. 

“PMGSC’s work with Slalom serves as a model for the 300+ other PBS member stations as we navigate the future of public television and sustain our cultural importance,“ says Stacy Shaffer, senior director of marketing operations and business intelligence at PMGSC.

With detailed, audience-specific insights and a path forward in place, PMGSC and Slalom continue to partner together to implement a next-generation marketing and data ecosystem. The next phase of the journey is a company-wide, Slalom-supported roll out. Moving forward will open the door to new possibilities across the company and—most importantly—the local communities it serves.