James Bartelme

VP Technology, Media Analytics @Nielsen

The media business is changing at an incredible rate. There’s more content than ever and the number of ways for consumers to get it keeps growing. As audiences become more fragmented, media companies and advertisers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they reach their audience. This means more data from more sources, and brings more complexity to an already complex business. Media Analytics is Nielsen’s innovation engine; we’ve delivered double-digit growth by addressing the nascent, unmet needs of our clients through consultative sales. My team combines Nielsen’s myriad data assets, with data from third-party partners and from our clients to enable our consultants and analysts to answer client-specific questions and needs. Bigger data and an increasingly complex industry meant finding a new way to support that growth. It meant reimagining how we source, analyze and deliver answers to our clients, and using technology and automation to deliver more and deliver faster, without adding staff. Results Led transition of our work from an on-prem, Netezza-based environment, to a Apache Spark-based analytics platform running on AWS Sold the need for a Data Lake strategy to Nielsen’s global technology organization, and served as its first key stakeholder. Expanded team’s skills from being primarily SQL-based, to include Python, Spark and R. Built Data Science and Machine Learning capabilities within the team Drove employee engagement across the entire organization by creating and leading a \"Connections\" team that sponsors inter-office and inter-team events; both in-person and digital Evangelized adoption of new technology and new skills across the organization by starting and acting as chief editor of an internal blog -\"Reinventing Research\"