Starz

Custom Data Platform and Pipelines to Optimize Digital Marketing

Custom Data Platform and Pipelines to Optimize Digital Marketing

Custom Data Platform and Pipelines to Optimize Digital Marketing

A grid of movie and TV show posters on Starz, including "P-Valley," "Outlander," and "Power Book II," showcasing a variety of genres and titles available on the service.
A grid of movie and TV show posters on Starz, including "P-Valley," "Outlander," and "Power Book II," showcasing a variety of genres and titles available on the service.
A grid of movie and TV show posters on Starz, including "P-Valley," "Outlander," and "Power Book II," showcasing a variety of genres and titles available on the service.

Areas of Focus

  • Custom Software Development

  • Best Practices & Methodologies

Starz is a multi-platform television network that increasingly focuses on digital delivery and OTT streaming to grow its market share.

A tablet and smartphone showing the Starz app with featured content, including "Spider-Man: No Way Home" on the tablet and a selection of Starz series on the phone.
A tablet and smartphone showing the Starz app with featured content, including "Spider-Man: No Way Home" on the tablet and a selection of Starz series on the phone.
A tablet and smartphone showing the Starz app with featured content, including "Spider-Man: No Way Home" on the tablet and a selection of Starz series on the phone.

01

The Challenge

Starz saw an opportunity to build an automated end-to-end data product to gain a better understanding of their customer data so they could assess the effectiveness of their different digital marketing channels. While these insights existed, they were the result of expensive outsourcing, costing Starz upwards of $4 million per year.

02

The Solution

Artium joined this initiative right at inception, and our senior software engineers, senior data engineers, and product director worked in partnership with the Starz tech team to iteratively build a cloud-based data platform on AWS that allowed them to end their relationship with the outsourced SaaS vendor they had been paying to analyze their marketing spend. Through this solution, we were able to drive costs down by roughly $3 million per year.

From there, Starz expanded our work with them to integrate with their development team and enable them through pairing and TDD to de-silo and employ rigorous deployment practices and eliminate 80% of the ongoing critical error maintenance.

Promotional image for "Power" on Starz, featuring a man with a stern expression, half his face shadowed, with the tagline "Ghosts never die"
Promotional image for "Power" on Starz, featuring a man with a stern expression, half his face shadowed, with the tagline "Ghosts never die"
Promotional image for "Power" on Starz, featuring a man with a stern expression, half his face shadowed, with the tagline "Ghosts never die"

03

The Outcome

Starz Engineering leader Jonathan Britz explains: “Artium has helped us improve our engineering culture in so many ways – we’ve introduced pair programming, which provides an “always on” approach to code review, started doing test-driven development and established quality guidelines for pipelines we write going forward.”