Driven by the life motto, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world,” Somya Malviya is building up an ambitious career as a Data Analyst. She has incorporated Information Systems qualification with strong business acumen. She aspires to provide exceptional data analytics insights and technological transformations to make the world a better place.

The company she is assigned to, GroupM, is shaping the next era of media where advertising works better for people. It is the world’s leading media investment company, responsible for more than $50B in annual media investment through agencies. The company aims to leverage all the benefits of scaling, innovating, differentiating, and generating sustained value for its business clients.

Continuously Pushing Boundaries

Somya has big ambitions for the broader industry. According to research, only 27% of female graduates opt for a career in technology. Looking beyond the statistics, she has first-hand experienced the struggles of getting into an industry typically dominated by men and workplaces that rarely provide opportunities to inexperienced individuals. Having encountered such circumstances in her journey from working in Supply Chain and Healthcare industries and eventually progressing towards the Data Analyst role at GroupM, she thrives on eliminating the notion of technology being competitive and non-inclusive. Somya’s ambition is to progress into leadership positions where she can influence a wider network of people and help other women succeed, encouraging female graduates and interns to pursue Data and Technology.

GroupM’s mission is to make advertising better for people, continually achieved by supporting its clients, partners, and internal teams in delivering ad effectiveness, optimizing media investments, and providing the platform to develop and deploy cutting-edge technological solutions. The amalgamation of all the different aspects of the business: Search, Social, Programmatic, and AI, acts as a powerhouse for three of the top five global media agencies: Mindshare, Mediacom, and Wavemaker. This is further driven by strong connections with its premium partners: Google, Amazon, Meta, and more. It constantly focuses on connecting technology with talent that allows it to grow and pivot into different opportunities and capabilities, enhancing scalability and interoperability within cross-functional diverse teams.

Somya tries her best to push the boundaries continuously and deliver ground-breaking projects working closely with several team members across Programmatic, Finance, and Operations. She has worked on several innovative solutions and navigated through uncharted waters to explore the media effectiveness capability of Data Clean Rooms like Amazon Marketing Cloud and Ads Data Hub to discover high-value audiences and measure holistic brand lift. Secondly, she has transformed the Pacing process into an automated dashboard, improving the efficiency with a performance uplift of 30% and saving GroupM $85,000 on manual and tedious processes. Additionally, Somya has created a Commercial Tracker that drove 35% savings in head hours, accounting for an overall savings of $2,000 each month.

Leaving a Mark in Media World

GroupM has always focused on bringing value to its clients and aims to touch many lives through global media campaigns that give back to society by increasing ad effectiveness through data analytics and insight generation, media strategy, and investment optimization.

“The Go Give One campaign” in 2021 was one such instance to support World Health Organization’s mission to vaccinate the world and utilize strategy building, big data, and technological advancements as the support system for campaigns that change the world. GroupM’s mission to make advertising better for people, in turn, aims to play a key role in bringing this vision to life through leading and inspiring a team of media and data-centric individuals who build the backbone of effective work that has an impact on the world. GroupM has also implemented several initiatives like DE&I Talent Pipelines, Automation, TeamFlex, and Reconnect plans that allow its employees to work from home whilst visiting family across borders. It builds strategic partnerships that give new and different talent pipelines and eliminate mundane, monotonous tasks to decrease the staff attrition rate.

The ever-changing world of media and subsequent depreciation of cookies has left marketers grappling with privacy-first solutions that could measure return on marketing investment with higher accuracy. Somya shares, “My inquisitive nature and go-getter attitude enabled me to explore a new and innovative solution for a Pet Food client: Data Clean Rooms. My initial hypothesis for the first-ever use case for GroupM Australia was to create connections between platform and customer data, ensuring data compliance. However, I have dived deeper into several possible use cases to explore the ad effectiveness for cross-channel exposure and optimal frequency for different device types. Results generated were extraordinary, highlighting a promising use case where Amazon Sponsored Products along with Display ads led to an exponentially higher purchase rate. Almost 60% of total purchases can be attributed to customers targeted using both the channels, boosting purchase likelihood by ten times. Additionally, when multiple devices are used to target a customer, they are eight times more likely to drive conversions.”

Data Visualization tools largely focus on creating a variety of charts and graphs; however, one of the most crucial parts of it is also the ability to generate complex insights and present those in support of the visuals. The storytelling feature of a dashboard is equally important, especially when it accounts for driving business decisions for stakeholders and clients. She has the vision to advance the Data Visualization dashboards to automate the generation of visuals from complex natural language processing questions. Somya explains, “I would also enable ways to display the Prescriptive analytical solutions that assist our clients in figuring out the solutions to the seemingly simple but biggest problems in media: Whom should I target? Where should I spend the biggest chunk of my budget? How many times should I serve an ad to a potential customer? Should this ad be served on Mobile, Desktop, Tablet, or TV?”

Cost-Effective Optimal Solutions

Somya believes that as Media Industry is stepping towards a cookie-less future, it is extremely pivotal to consider the revolutionized changes it is bound to bring within the analytics industry. This would shed light on the immense capabilities and importance of data owned by Walled Gardens like Google and Facebook and how it can be used to generate insights within a privacy-safe environment that guarantee no Personally identifiable information (PII) is shared across companies. Data Clean Rooms is just one such solution. Several others focus on utilizing data pipelines, contextual targeting, and device fingerprinting to target the right set of users for an ad. According to this information, these use devices or website content to monitor user behaviour and target customers. GroupM is continuously collaborating with its partners like The Trade Desk, Xandr, Adobe, Google, and Amazon to explore solutions that maintain the highest level of privacy and improvise campaign delivery metrics and provide costeffective optimal solutions to its clients.

Somya concludes with a bit of advice to budding entrepreneurs, “If the world of media has taught me anything, it is the paramount importance that must be placed on the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for a specific business. This answers the simplest of questions but provides immense insights into your target market. In layman terms, any business that unlocks the door to know whom to target and how to build a product that solves their biggest roadblocks and appeals to their target audience wins it all.”

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