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Karine Serfaty, Chief Data Officer, The Economist Group

Karine Serfaty, Chief Data Officer, The Economist Group

Describe your career to date

The first chapter of my career was in business strategy in a global consultancy (OC&C Strategy Consultants), and at The New York Times, where I was really lucky to join at a crucial inflection point in the digital transformation journey. I took my first data leadership role there in 2016 and my team and I got to develop the path to double our digital business.

We drew on predictive data science models, big data analytics and customer research to understand what audience groups and growth really underpinned our economics, research their needs and pain points, and then test our hypotheses. That work shaped me as a data leader as it showed me the power of joining up different approaches to design innovative solutions with huge business impact.

The transition from there to leading data was organic as I already worked at the intersection of strategy and data. I then developed my leadership skills, and upped my technology knowledge, over the next few years, in order to lead and deliver the data agenda in three different data leadership roles at The New York Times, ITV in the UK and the Economist Group. Those roles had different focuses – respectively redirect, accelerate and build – and have rounded me out as a data leader.

What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?

The Economist Group has come a long way in the last couple of years. We have established well-understood KPIs that represent the drivers of our business and are developing a test and learn culture. And we are now deep into developing the personalisation and targeting agenda, underpinned by a clear first-party data strategy.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

I have about 40 direct reports who represent all disciplines that make use of the data (analytics, data science and customer research) as well as those who collect the data, look after its quality and own the roadmap for our data platform (analytics implementation, data governance, data product managers). My teams distil the business priorities into data priorities, and also inject initiatives that build our capabilities. I also work very closely with my project management and technology peers to make the right design decisions and deliver on the roadmap. We now have about 60 data specialists across departments to deliver the data agenda.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organisation and on the industry as a whole?

We will continue to evolve our approaches to privacy as the eco-system continues to change, focusing on a clear value exchange for users.

The other big topic is sustainability. Decarbonation is the biggest challenge for our generation and organisations that want to future-proof themselves have to marry up their sustainability strategy and their data strategy. At the Economist Group we are committed to ambitious emission reduction goals. It is increasingly clear that data will be central to this, not just to measure, but also to drive change across the organisation and integrate carbon metrics in everything we do.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organisation or just the data function?

We have a mission and vision for data that aims to put users at the centre and ensure our data always informs our decisions to the right extent. We want to make sure we leverage our data to understand behaviours, but also predict and affect behaviours. In addition, our ambition over time is to become much proactive in how we generate and collect data, going from data as a by-product of our operations to what I like to call ’data by design’.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organisation, particularly with regard to data quality?

This is always a work in progress, but we have established key roles and processes that did not exist before. We are now monitoring quality for some of our key data assets and are making big strides. We still some distance to travel, but are now travelling at a good pace.

Karine Serfaty
has been included in:

100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)

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Karine Serfaty, Chief Data Officer, The Economist Group

Join our membership network of over 250 global senior data and AI leaders.

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Join our membership network of over 250
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