Data science hits all the right notes: Vevo's path to a tastemaking music video network

Vevo data science drives innovation

Vevo is the world's leading music video network, with billions of views and hours watched per month. It maintains the largest network of music channels on YouTube, featuring over one million music videos from international artists spanning all genres. For over 15 years, the Vevo logo has been recognized as a mark of premium, official content.

Vevo has embraced data science to transform how the company delivers value to advertisers, viewers, distribution partners, as well as the wider music industry.

Data science is core for us. It's what we need to improve the viewer experience, drive sales, and be a differentiator in the market.

Natalie Gabathuler-Scully

EVP of Revenue, Distribution & Data Operations, Vevo

Advanced data science models built on Domino have enabled a data-backed approach, empowering Vevo to make smarter decisions, more effectively reach specific audiences, and drive business growth. Vevo's data science team plays a crucial role in this transformation by providing a range of data-driven solutions that enhance Vevo’s viewer experience, improve ad offerings, and streamline the sales process. One of the key innovations driving this transformation is ‘Vevo Evolve’.

AI-powered ad product suite

Vevo Evolve is a suite of data-driven tools and capabilities that leverage AI and machine learning to allow advertisers to tailor Vevo’s premium content library to the right target audience in real time and to maximize impact across the funnel.

At the heart of Vevo Evolve is AI-powered video analysis. This granular analysis allows Vevo to use Domino to enable:

• Advanced ad targeting: Advertisers can now activate an AI-built library of hundreds of new contextual targets and audience segments across all Vevo inventory.
• Reach planning and optimization: Vevo Evolve includes new planning and optimization tools - allowing advertisers to target specific audiences at scale
• Real-time measurement: With comprehensive dashboards, advertisers gain access to real-time data to inform optimization campaign strategies and maximize results.

Domino has given our data analytics team easy access to the custom analyses and code our data scientists are developing, promoting a shared and collaborative environment.

Natasha Potashnik

Head of Data, Research, and Measurement, Vevo

Data analysts were onboarded onto the Domino platform, accessed pre-built libraries, effectively collaborated, and contributed to the data projects in new ways.

Vevo’s data science team used Domino's cutting-edge tools to quickly prototype and scale models into production, seamlessly integrating data science into the data workflow.

1. Contextual ad targeting

Vevo has moved beyond traditional demographic segmentation in ad targeting by using machine learning models to analyze music video lyrics, audio, motion, mood, visual elements, and more. By fusing this with AI contextual metadata, this allows Vevo to match music videos to an advertiser's creative asset, better aligning the advertiser with the right music video and ensuring a seamless viewing experience for fans.

In today’s competitive media landscape, advertisers are becoming more innovative in their media buying strategies and selective about appearing within content that is suitable and safe for their brand. Vevo Evolve takes contextual ad targeting to the next level beyond simple content tagging, allowing brands to become a natural part of the consumer viewer experience.

Natalie Gabathuler-Scully

EVP of Revenue, Distribution & Data Operations, Vevo

Domino provides the flexibility to build custom models and the infrastructure to support ongoing experimentation and innovation, enabling Vevo to achieve a level of scalability unmatched by traditional methods. This data-driven approach has resulted in a quantifiable increase in ad click-through rates by up to 10%.

2. Advanced audience targeting

When it comes to advanced audience targeting, Vevo leverages machine learning techniques to combine external data sources with Vevo’s viewership data and video-level metadata to precisely target an advertiser’s audiences.

This approach allows Vevo to quickly integrate new data sources and continuously evolve Vevo’s targeting capabilities based on demand from advertisers. Vevo’s AI framework enables bespoke segmentation based on advertiser’s unique briefs and creatives, marrying that optimally to Vevo’s premium inventory.

Domino provides the flexibility and scale for Vevo to build, maintain, and update hundreds of audiences, creating new targets in a matter of minutes.

3. Attention optimization

Not all impressions are created equal. As advertisers strive to understand the impact of their media spend, Vevo is introducing its most recent product to the Vevo Evolve Suite, integrating attention optimization. Leveraging advanced modeling solutions, Vevo optimizes a campaign’s attention score, ensuring the campaign is not only seen, but also makes an impact.

Vevo is partnering with best-in-class attention data vendors, using Domino to help integrate and process a wide variety of data sources for productization.

4. Streamlining the sales process

Vevo’s data science team has developed an internal app that connects various departments, including ad sales, inventory planning, marketing, and label relations. This app provides a centralized platform for tracking ad inventory, schedules, and new artist releases, enabling teams to quickly identify monetization opportunities. Domino sources data directly into the app, facilitating efficient data sharing and collaboration. This streamlined process has led to hundreds of hours saved.

The business impact: supercharging Vevo's approach into the future

Data science plays a central role in Vevo’s ad sales process, with data-backed products becoming a core part of client conversations. The sales team, equipped with the newly introduced Vevo Evolve suite, is better positioned to close deals and drive revenue growth. Natalie Gabathuler-Scully, EVP of Revenue, Distribution & Data Operations, affirms this, stating that “the continued development of our data-backed advertising products has allowed Vevo to better serve our clients by providing more precision for our targeting capabilities and enhancing campaign effectiveness.”