Astro Malaysia wins analytics award for broadcasting in Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards

This is for its project on analytical capabilities for personalizing digital advertising and content.

As a publisher across multiple media and platforms, Astro Malaysia Holdings Berhad (Astro) understood the importance of understanding customer interactions through first-party data, particularly for creating a more relevant context for advertisers and personalised content for customers.

In its goal to improve this experience, it has implemented the Text Metadata system which enables automated metadata tag creation based on content to identify customer interests.

The text metadata system aims to understand readers’ preferences. In return, the company can tailor the user’s experiences in terms of content and advertising across all of Astro websites and mobile applications.

For example, readers of an investment article on the Astro Awani website are tagged as having an interest in finance. When these users visit any of Astro’s other websites, for example Stadium Astro or Gempak, Astro will be able to target them with relevant, personalised ads for financial products and services. The same principle will apply to users reading an article on milk powder, who  will be tagged under the parenting segment, or users reading a car article, who will be tagged under the automotive segment.

The full suite of Astro proprietary metadata tags includes automotive, beverages, body care, confectionery, dairy, deodorant, face care, fast food, finance, gadget, hair care, noodles, oral care, spices and seasoning, and telco.

This automated tag creation, together with expansion through Machine Learning lookalike models, are key drivers of personalised ads and content recommendations across all Astro platforms, namely television, radio and digital.

By tying together how a customer is engaging throughout Astro’s ecosystem, they are able to gather insights on what users are watching on TV or Apps, browsing and buying on their home shopping platform, or types of articles or content users are browsing across Astro’s digital assets. 

These insights then allow Astro to create and activate highly personalized, relevant and engaging content and ads which benefit their end users.

For this project, the company was given the Analytics – Broadcasting award in the recently concluded Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards hosted by Singapore Business Review.

The annual awards programme recognises exceptional companies who are riding the disruption wave and are leading the technological revolution and digital journeys of their respective industries to boost Malaysia’s fast-growing economy.

In granting this award, the judging panel considered its multiple achievements.

The project resulted in impressive results of 2.3x CTR on ads and 3.0x CTR on recommended articles. This translates to RM12m revenue uplift within a year, which according to the company is a 7.5x return on investment.

Astro is known for being the leading content and entertainment company in the country, producing over 11,000 hours of content yearly and serving 5.6 million homes or 72% of Malaysian TV households, 8,000 enterprises, 17.5 million weekly radio listeners (FM and digital), 14 million digital monthly unique visitors and 3.2 million shoppers across its TV, radio, digital and commerce platforms.