This month’s we sat down with Principal Data Scientist, Ray You, for our Day in the Life chat. Ray tells us the questions he asks to understand the business context when building measurement solutions and gives budding data scientists advice on how to get started in data science.

What led you to a career in data science?

The story goes back to my time at university in Canada where I studied marketing. After I graduated, I tried to get a creative marketing job in Canada, but it proved quite difficult. Roles there require excellent English and a strong understanding of local culture. Having only recently moved to Canada from China, these weren’t skills I possessed yet. Instead, as I have always been a scientific and logical person, I took a curveball and went into marketing analytics.

Eventually, I moved to London in digital analytics where I got more in depth with digital advertising. Then I became heavily involved in A/B testing as a product analyst. Everything shifted when I moved to a role at Unicef. It was here that I moved into data science as I looked to face marketing challenges with modelling work. I’ve brought all the knowledge into my role as principal data scientist at MI Media!

What does a typical day look like for you?

There are three core elements to my role. Firstly, I spend a lot of my time talking to people. Taking the time to get the basic questions right and understand the business context and expectations. The more time I’ve been in analyst roles, the more I’ve found that understanding people and their context is vital to success. Once I have all the information I need, I will come up with a custom-built measurement strategy.

Next, there’s the model-building part of my role. This is the most technical area, considering statistics, coding and pipelines. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, is sharing the results. The people I deal with have a varied understanding of statistics, so I need to explain the rationale in plain English. I need to make sure they understand why I did what I did, why it makes sense and what in means for the business.

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

Early in my career I was too geeky and focused on technical solutions rather than business actions. I was part of a segmentation project that failed because the outcome constraint was not defined well enough when I started the project. The results were unusable. This experience taught me that, in any project I’m building, I need to understand what the business is trying to achieve. It goes back to my earlier comment about being a consultant. I need to know what the business can and can’t do on the back of any results I give them. Without this, I could easily make a fancy technical solution that, from a business point of view, adds very little value.

Who’s your role model and why?

I take strengths from a variety of different people. From the power of honesty and transparency from previous managers to people speaking in the industry about using unconventional ways to extract new insights. I have also learnt from my senior colleagues at Unicef the importance of not assuming that you know everything, even if you’re in a senior role. They understood that the colleagues in local markets had the best local expertise and trusted them to deliver. Finally, my peers in the analytics field such as the data director at Huel, Bhav, have given me examples of the right blend of an analytical mindset with great storytelling.

Where does growth come from in an increasingly competitive landscape?

As our clients navigate an increasingly competitive landscape, evolving and expanding beyond historic strategies has never been more critical. We need to ensure budgets are allocated with maximum strategic impact. For example, shifts in search behaviour driven in part by greater adoption of AI have affected site traffic, CTRs and CPCs. This makes ongoing testing and learning essential to optimise spend and consistently achieve KPIs. It’s our role to curate and manage AdTech innovations in a way that drives learning and incremental value, while protecting top line performance.

I’m particularly excited about continuing to broaden our digital media mix beyond the traditional ‘holy grail’ digital channels of Meta and Google. We can no longer rely solely on these walled gardens. By exploring and refining approaches across additional digital channels, we can adapt to evolving media consumption patterns and continue Accelerating Growth.

AdTech is incredibly powerful and continues to evolve rapidly, but it cannot replace strategic human oversight. AdTech provides data and targeting, but the real value comes from how we interpret that data and apply it strategically to our clients. Human expertise is essential to guide AdTech platforms toward meaningful outcomes. Not just short-term statistical efficiency, but long-term brand building and future-proofed growth. In other words: AdTech is an enabler, not a replacement, for strategic thinking. Ultimately, that strategic layer is what drives sustainable business impact on the bottom line.

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Marketing Insight

Bethesda Games Studios is a worldwide renowned video game development studio. However, the level of popularity for the studio is split amongst the gaming community. On the one hand, it’s had huge successes in the past with titles like ES IV: Oblivion (2006), Fallout 3 (2008), ES V: Skyrim (2011) and Fallout 4 (2015). In recent years however, the studio had fallen out of favour amongst critics and fans. A heavily criticised launch of Fallout 76 (2018) suffered from technical failures, server crashes and poor-quality physical merchandise. Following that Bethesda saw a 97% drop in player count in the six months after the release of Starfield (2023) due to lack of a live service model (regular content updates).

Then in 2020, Amazon announced that it had licensed the rights to produce a live-action TV adaptation of the Fallout Series. Strong casting announcements followed, with Walton Goggins and Emma Purnell taking lead roles and filming began in 2022.

HBO, Paramount and Universal had all launched successful live-action video game adaptions with The Last of Us (2023-present), Sonic the Hedgehog (2020-2024) and The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023) respectively. So how did Fallout fair when it aired in 2024?

Accelerating Growth

The show itself has been a huge hit with audiences. But what impact did it have on the video game series and Bethesda’s fortunes?

Firstly, player counts increased significantly for Fallout 76 and Fallout 4, as well as other previous Fallout games. Fallout 7 reached an all-time high of 1 million Steam players across all platforms on the day after the show’s release. Fallout 4 saw a 7,500% week-on-week increase in sales, which saw it return as the top-selling title in the European sales charts, nine years after its initial release. Overall, it’s estimated that the first series generated an additional $80 million in revenue for Bethesda.

The additional revenue and demand for the games that the series has created, allowed Bethesda to innovate further by:

• Releasing next-generation console editions of titles such as Fallout 4 to meet increased player demand
• Integrating between the live-action series and games by adding in additional content to both Fallout 7 and Fallout Shelter

Licensing its IP to Amazon to create a TV show was a risk for Bethesda. How would it be received? Would the show be loyal to the game’s lore and style that had brought previous games so much success?

The answer? Amazon’s Fallout drove significant additional revenue for Bethesda, whilst also widening its audience of fans which is going to positively impact future titles.

If you could change one thing in the industry, what would it be?

There’s a resource drought happening in the industry today. Technology has been treated as a solve-all and we’ve lost a lot of highly talented people.

I’ve always known that AI would take jobs. But I’d hoped that AI and agentic AI buying would be targeted at aspects of people’s roles that are repeatable and can be turned into automated tasks. Strategic human thinking cannot be done by AI and agents. Instead, they should provide people with the tools to free up their time to dedicate to the parts of their roles that are about developing strategies, creative concepts and meeting people.  What appears to be happening is that businesses believe AI can allow them to reduce their workforce. It’s creating a talent squeeze where fewer people are expected to manage increasingly complex roles. This impacts everything in our industry. Publishers struggle to deliver high quality journalism as they reduce their staff and rely on AI content. Agencies can’t make the most out of their strategic talent because they’re too bogged down in trying to run campaigns. And agency buyers lack the headspace to truly interrogate the ecosystem.

Yes, society needs to move on and embrace the new technology, but it can’t be to the detriment of the human touch.

If I could change one thing in this industry it would be steering companies away from getting rid of talented people, in the mistaken belief that machines will do it for them. We need to move away from ‘shoestring’ operations and give people the time to focus on the strategic work that moves the needle. We need to invest in people. I hope that as we lean more into AI and agentic buying, we use those efficiencies to reinvest in human brilliance.

How do you think advertising will change over the next three years?

Advertising workflows will be simplified and integrated, with humans in the loop supervising AI-driven processes. The hype around AI replacing humans will die out, creating a two-tier system: AI-managed, single-channel campaigns for small businesses and AI-aided, cross-channel campaigns managed by human experts for more professional advertisers.

What are you most passionate about achieving this year in media?

We have spent years perfecting the underlying technology required to operate in a restricted ecosystem controlled by privacy and the reduction of traditional signals. That work is now our baseline. Anonymised supports user privacy, reduces leakage and keeps data safe. The way that data and privacy should work.

I’m genuinely excited about being able to take our technology and give agencies and advertisers a competitive advantage. It’s something we’ve done recently with MI Media’s own client, Prostate Cancer UK. The charity faced the challenge of Meta’s healthcare category restrictions, which prevented conversion optimisation. By deploying Anonymised’s Audience Lift to create enriched lookalike audiences, MI Media’s campaign achieved a 35% reduction in cost per acquisition in just two weeks.

What I am most passionate about achieving this year is the rollout of our unique omnichannel solutions. Because our foundations are so robust, we can offer advertisers a level of audience intelligence and cross channel reach that is difficult to find elsewhere. I want to spend this year demonstrating how our bespoke approach to first party data activation provides a genuine competitive advantage. We enable our clients to achieve results that simply weren’t possible under the old models.

Click here to sign up to be alerted when the next in our Media Innovation series is published. Head to our news page to read previous posts in this series about Retail Media.

Anonymised is an AI data platform for incremental audience targeting and campaign measurement – helping advertisers target and measure relevant audiences for increased reach and performance – without using or exposing personal data. Its privacy-enhancing technology couples cross-site data with on-device machine learning to allow accurate targeting and measurement of 100% consented audiences, across all browsers and devices. Its AI technology is crucial for the future of digital advertising since 60% of the web is effectively anonymous, and therefore addressable.

Your product feed should give the most accurate representation of your products

Once you know you have the right tracking in place, the next important element to crack is your product feed. Taking Google’s Merchant Centre or PMax as an example, if you have uncategorised products and inaccurate accompanying product information then these engines will be reasoning from the misclassification of your feed. Ill-performing retail media placements aren’t random; they are based on the information (or lack of information) you have provided.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to consider if one of your products is a red, zip-up jacket and you’ve categorised it simply as a ‘coat’ then your product isn’t going to appear when those high-intent shoppers are searching for a red jacket. Cleaning up your feed allows retail media algorithms to work in unison with your sales, rather than against them.

Retail media should optimise towards profit, not sales

Like any other channel, measurement is incredibly important in retail media. It’s not enough to make revenue gains from product sales. We need to consider every element that can affect sales: retail ad fees, manufacturing costs, shipping fees, sale prices, returns & warranties and product competition. Without a view on this, you are only seeing half the measurement picture and are at an increased risk of profit loss.

The strongest retail media strategy will focus on profit as a growth driver, not sales.

There’s no doubt that there are many exciting opportunities in retail media. To make the most of them, you must ensure that your first party tracking, product feed and measurement frameworks are setting you up for success. The impact of taking these steps can be phenomenal. It’s an approach we took with the retailer JML and within three months we delivered an 825% increase in profits compared to the same period in the previous year.

If you want to find out if you are set up for retail media success, get in touch.

We couldn’t be more proud to share that our inimitable and downright fantastic Jo Blake has been shortlisted for Mentor of the Year at Campaign’s Inspiring Women Awards!

The awards celebrate women in the marketing, advertising, media and technology industries, honouring those who have demonstrated exceptional achievements and led the way for others.

Jo embodies what it means to be a mentor, empowering others to grow with purpose, confidence and resilience. With over 30 years of experience in media, Jo now sits on our senior leadership team as Head of Investment and Head of People. Her dual focus on commercial excellence and people development underpins our strategic vision to Accelerate Growth across the business, its clients and its people. 

As a qualified business coach and mental health first aider, Jo combines professional expertise with empathy, ensuring every individual at MI feels heard, supported and inspired. She has introduced formal mentoring programmes, overhauled the appraisal process and delivered workshops designed to unlock personal and professional growth. Her initiatives have contributed directly to MI achieving both the IPA’s People First and CPD Gold accreditations. 

Beyond agency life, Jo’s impact resonates across the industry. She is a founding member of Bloom and Women in Trading, two networks dedicated to championing women through mentorship, education and community. Jo currently mentors six women formally, providing tailored guidance on confidence, career progression and leadership. 

Jo’s mentorship has transformed the lives and careers of many women, guiding early-career professionals through to senior leadership. Her approach is authentic, personal and lasting. As one mentee said, “I genuinely believe I owe my career to Jo Blake, and I don’t know what I would have done without her mentorship.”

What is the one thing you wish everyone knew about retail media? 

Retail media isn’t just another media channel. It’s the closest thing we’ve ever had to real consumer intent. The teams that run retail media and commerce operations are all starting to become one, blurring the line between commerce and media. Retail media links supply chain, shopper behaviour, media investment and sales in a single loop. This means that advertisers need to look beyond how they’re optimising bids & budgets and consider other signals such as digital shelf metrics. For example, if you can see that a product is low in stock, you will want to make sure that bidding is pulled back so you’re not paying high rates for a product that doesn’t have much more opportunity to sell.  

The brands that win won’t treat retail media as a budget line; they use it to uncover business insights for growth. The moment people see it that way, the entire conversation becomes more strategic. 

What’s the biggest misconception advertisers have about retail media? 

People assume that it’s easy. That you plug in spend and magic happens. In reality, every retailer behaves differently. The data is fragmented, as are the teams within media agencies that plan and buy retail media. 

If you consider retail media in Europe as an example, you have over forty countries, each with their own collection of retailers. In the UK, we have the big six grocers plus Amazon, all operating separately. It becomes even further fragmented when you look at the structure within media agencies where retail media is planned and bought by disparate teams. Many agencies have teams that focus purely on Amazon, with other retailers dealt with completely separately. This leads to teams fighting internally for budget, with no real view on how to spend budget most effectively across all retailers. 

This challenge is underscored by the misconception that retail media is a lower funnel, tactical decision. Historically, it’s been treated like search, for brands trying to make a sale. Today it’s becoming full funnel. Take Amazon as an example. It encompasses CTV and subscriptions with Amazon Prime, then has Amazon DSP plus sponsored brand and product opportunities. Advertisers and agencies must consider retail media holistically and better organise their agencies to get the most from it. It can’t be a TV team, a search team and DSP team each buying Amazon separately, it must be joined up. Once advertisers and their agencies realise this, their performance will be transformed. 

What are you most passionate about achieving this year in media? 

This year, beyond commercial goals, I’m passionate about pushing the conversation around neurodiversity in our industry.  

I have two autistic sons and watching how they navigate the world has reshaped how I think about workplaces. So many people in media are ‘masking’; holding it together, managing sensory overload or social pressure, just to get through the day. 

If we can build environments where people don’t have to hide who they are to succeed, the work improves and the culture improves. Creativity comes from cognitive diversity. For me, making the industry more inclusive and more human is just as important as any media trend. 

How can media agencies get the most out of retail media for their clients? 

There’s a real opportunity to be had in stopping firefighting and wasting time on how agencies and brands are set up operationally to instead start strategizing again.  

For me there are three things that agencies must focus on in retail media: 

1. Lean into AI – Focus less time on tasks that can be automated, and more time on delivering client value. Agencies (and brands) that use agentic AI for insight, planning and optimisation will move faster and deliver more strategic value.
2. Own the operating model – The retail media landscape is developing and changing so quickly that most CPGs and agencies are still figuring out their operating structures. It’s crucial for agencies to work with their external partners to connect the dots, align their technologies and bring everything together across retail media and commerce operations.
3. Use data as the connective thread – This is linked to connectivity. Agencies shouldn’t treat each retailer as a silo. Instead, they must find smart ways of using data to unify retailers so brands can plan properly. Brands are going to demand to see incrementality and business impact, not vanity metrics like ROAS. Yes, brands will pay their agencies for what they do, but increasingly, they’re going to pay for the performance they deliver and the guidance they can give them on how to spend their next pound to sell more. 

The agencies that do these three things will become indispensable partners. 

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Skai is the world’s leading omnichannel platform unifying retail, search and social advertising with its AI-powered commerce media platform. 

This month’s day in the life is with digital account director, Rianne Clarey. In our chat, Rianne tells us how a fascination with left and right-brain thinking led her to a career in the media industry and why you should never assume that anyone you encounter at work knows anything or everything!

What led you to a career in media?

Left and right-brain thinking has always interested me, but I never thought that I was either super creative or super analytical. Media & advertising is an industry that allows you to combine the two. Initially, I wanted to be a graphic designer within the advertising industry. Then at school my friend got me a two-week work placement at her uncle’s creative agency and I fell in love with the work. After that, whenever I had any spare time in my college years, I would head back to Regent Street and continue my work experience there. 

After completing a degree in advertising, I had the panic realisation that I needed a job, quickly! I applied for everything I could within the industry which is how I came to working in digital teams in agencies. During my first interview they were throwing acronyms at me from every angle. Even though I didn’t know what CPM or CPAs were at the time, I got the job! Having joined the agency’s affiliate team, I started to hear about interesting work going on in the paid social teams. I offered my time to help them out wherever I could until, eventually, I was able to make the move across to paid social.  

From there I joined a multi-channel agency where I discovered that I love data. I enjoy being able to analyse the effects that our media decisions have had on a business. Since then, I’ve specialised in search and social across different media agencies.   

What does a typical day look like for you?

There’s a real balance in my days throughout the week. Working from home on Mondays and Fridays are really when I get deskwork done, catching up on emails and working through reports. When we get into the office on Tuesday to Thursday, things are much more collaborative where I can catch up with the team and speak to clients. 

On the days at home, I get my head down and focus on new strategies and proposals, considering how we can optimise campaigns. Alongside my day-to-day work, I think it’s so important to keep up with market trends and learn something new. It makes it more existing for us as a team, but just as importantly it’s how brands grow and how we grow as an agency.  

What mistake have you learnt the most from?

One lesson that has always stuck with me is to never assume other people’s knowledge. In my earlier years as an executive and a manager, I had a habit of overcomplicating things to get my point across. I believed that everyone needed to know every inch of detail, when in fact this would confuse the client. 

Clarity is key, don’t feel idiotic about really spelling things out. Even if you think your team or your client already knows something, they might not. This applies equally to presentations: the simpler the better. Never assume that anyone knows anything or everything! 

Who’s your role model and why?

Even though he’s not media related, I would say my brother. After an error with a vaccination before a family holiday to Egypt, he developed a condition called CIDP which is a form of MS. Throughout his life he’s always been really sporty. My dad was a rugby coach at the time and my brother always played; with CIDP he thought he would have to stop playing. However, even when things were looking quite bad for him, he never gave up. He always strived for better and never let anything get in his way. He’s very inspirational and I really look up to him for that. 

Marketing Insight

Like many of the best ideas, Quad Lock was born as a solution to a problem. Chris Peters, an industrial designer and avid cyclist, needed a secure way to mount an early iPhone to his bike. Finding no solution in-market, Peters and co-founder Rob Ward developed a case-based mount system featuring a unique twist-lock mechanism (with a distinctive blue locking tab). This became the first Quad Lock bike mount, launched via Kickstarter in 2011.

The product gained traction, establishing Quad Lock’s name among cyclists globally. Feedback showed that motorcyclists were repurposing the bike mount, so Quad Lock adapted its design and started marketing to motorbike riders just two years after launching. From two wheels, the company introduced mounts for cars, running and everyday use; turning Quad Lock into a multi-activity brand rather than a single-use gadget. Each new product was tailored to the user’s needs but centred on the same original locking mechanism and investment in robust design and materials.

Accelerating Growth

Quad Lock solved a problem and sold the solution to the right audience in the right way. It removed barriers to purchase from day one, but understood that reputation and trust were key to driving growth. Global growth doesn’t have to be driven by multi-million-pound TV campaigns, but it’s not driven by ecommerce alone either. Solving a consumer problem and being true and authentic to your proposition will always yield the best results.

Quad Lock has built a base of millions of loyal customers, of which 75% come directly to the brand. From a $35,000 Kickstarter in 2011, Quad Lock grew to $196m in sales in 2024.

It may not be the sexiest product, but any brand that has grown as consistently while staying true to its vision (and achieving a $500m acquisition in the meantime) gets my vote for an Accelerate Growth journey.

Marketing Insight

Stanley has been providing top quality Tupperware and drinkware since 1913. Trusted by hikers and workers, the brand had a reputation for being practical and long lasting. As a $70m a year business that had survived for over a hundred years, it would be considered very successful by most people.

Whilst the cup is undeniably well designed (as a proud owner myself, I can vouch for that personally), design alone wouldn’t have given it the global status it now has. The rise of the Stanley Cup was timed perfectly with the growth of the multi-million-pound wellness industry. Exercise, fashion and, importantly, hydration were all becoming intertwined. Just like the 10,000 steps a day trope seeded in the public imagination by a pedometer company, Stanley was primed to jump on the global trend of people obsessed with getting their two litres a day.

Accelerating Growth

With over 100 colour ways and the constant launch of new collaborations the Stanley Cup craze shows no signs of abating. Cut to today and Stanley continues to be plastered across TikTok and, thanks to the cross-bottle ‘handsfree hydration’ range launch, worn with pride IRL.

The Quencher, now more well-known as the Stanley Cup, remains the brand’s best-seller. But, by becoming synonymous with this one product, Stanley has become a household brand with sales across the whole range benefitting as a result. From a business that was bringing in $70m a year, Stanley reached a remarkable $750m valuation in 2023.