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Maya Bull, Head of Customer Data, The Telegraph

Maya Bull, Head of Customer Data, The Telegraph

Describe your career to date

I cut my CRM teeth in the gaming industry, working at Sportingbet 13 years ago. They had an impressively sophisticated business information function and their approach to segmentation and personalisation was way ahead of many of the companies I’ve worked for since.

From there I’ve worked in a number of different industries, including The Guardian, Ancestry.com and PayPal, all of which had impressive swathes of customer data to work with. I’ve been at the Telegraph for five years, initially as the head of CRM and then last year I moved into the newly created role of head of customer data. It is indicative of the value the business is putting on its data that this role now exists.

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

Our data journey has progressed significantly in terms of the availability and use of our data, building on the foundations of some major tech projects over the past couple of years. We’ve brought our SCV inhouse, implemented the Adobe Experience Platform and we’re successfully deploying AI across our site to optimise what offers are presented to prospects and also to manage their content access.

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?

The challenges we encounter with our data haven’t changed: how do we compliantly extract the maximum value from our data to support the goal of attracting and engaging prospects and retaining our paying subscribers. The challenge exists in understanding to what extent the tools at our disposal, for example AI to determine content and offers, can mitigate against external factors, such as the cost of living crisis.

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

The strength of our acquisition strategy is based on the quality of the prospect data we hold so this is of paramount importance to us and extensive tech projects over the last couple of years have helped support this.

We’re now in a position to really push forward and capitalise on the solid foundations that we’ve built, however, my view is that as our data asset continues to evolve, its management is very much an ongoing project and, as such, data quality isn’t a finite piece of work.

Maya Bull
has been included in:

100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)