The Data Scientist, Theatrical Marketing joins a growth area at Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), positioned at the fast-moving intersection of film marketing strategy, shifting consumer behaviors, and big data / predictive modeling. The role is built for a self-starter, and creative, quantitative thinker; someone comfortable pushing for structured insights amidst disparate data sets, and excited about applying data and analytics to evolving Theatrical Film Marketing.

The role reports to the SVP of Marketing Analytics & Insights and will join a practice charged with developing a roadmap for the Studio’s integration of data into their decision-making lifecycle. Success will require balancing assessing business needs, with the ability to be hands-on in the data, building machine learning models (R, Python, etc), tools and other granular statistical analyses. Team goals include adapting predictive models for the quickly changing marketplace, enhancing film recommender engines, and identifying new ways of guiding film greenlighting and early decision making.

The candidate must have a proven track record of extracting meaningful business insights from data, from data wrangling, to developing analytical frameworks and applying advanced statistical techniques. Working across consumer, marketing and media-related data sets, the Data Scientist will require a self-starter attitude, plus curiosity and initiative—someone who wants to change the fundamental approach to movie marketing.

The role requires a balance of heads down data science work, alongside strategic thinking, team planning, and communication required to be successful. Worthy applicants possess a broad and deep data science skillset, tangible hands-on business/marketing application, and an ability to work with and influence the Sony data science community.

Core Responsibilities:

Machine Learning Initiatives: Predictive Box Office Modeling, Audience & Content Insights

• Long Lead Signal Enhancement: support the improvement of SPE’s predictive box office tools, calibrating a wide variety of data sets to support robust predictive outputs. Creative thinking will be critical to generating meaningful insights from many disparate digital signals & datasets.
• Audience / Content Insights & Ad-hoc Studies: using available data sets and machine learning tools to enable both modular and comprehensive research into drivers of moviegoing behavior, content effectiveness and an understanding of related proxy measures and data sets. Scope of data and analysis dependent on business questions and iterative feedback to uncover new, more meaningful questions.

Data & Tools Strategy

• Tool Development: assess business needs to translate complex model outputs into tangible, actionable and interactive reports and tools.
• Business Data Strategy: participation in acquisition, assessment and deployment of new consumer, content and marketing data sets, alongside Engineering & IT teams. Assess business needs to guide strategic integration and analysis of new data.

Cross-LOB Collaboration

• Act as a connection point to the centralized audience activation and data management groups, providing guidance for how to blend and leverage media and other 1st party data to impact non-media marketing strategies and insights.

Job Requirements:

Education, Experience, Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

Skill In:

• Advanced Statistics – Supervised and unsupervised machine learning models, including regularization, feature engineering, training, as well as interpretation and integrity. Experience with clustering, affinity analysis, segmentation, simulation, customer profiling.
• Specific familiarity with xgboost, randomforest, caret, ggplot2 packages.
• Programming – Expertise with SQL data models (logical, physical, conceptual), R (required), Python (a plus, NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn), R Shiny dashboards & other R Studio Connect apps, including familiarity with databases, data wrangling, maintenance, cleaning. Comfort with ETL, API strategies.
• Visualization & Presentation – Represent complex information in easily understood visualization (including Tableau, PowerPoint, etc). Communicating clearly to executives, technology partners, agencies, and contributing to projects and meetings.
• Project Management – Strong attention to detail, willingness to wear multiple hats, building and tracking a work plan in a fast-based environment.

Ability To:

• Analyze and organize large data sets to create a cohesive story that can inform marketing strategies
• Experiment with various tools and technologies, with the end goal of creating innovative data-driven insights at a quick pace.
• Handle data wrangling, cleansing, QC, as new data is considered. Success will require assisting Sony’s IT team to acquire/transfer, store, organize and operationalize data.
• Work collaboratively and horizontally across multiple teams with fragmented, vertical (title-by-title) priorities
• Translate business objectives into analytical functions, including ability to quantitatively assess risk.

Knowledge of:

• Business Processes: Experience with Agile methodology (Jira), Git
• Digital media/marketing landscape – Familiarity with addressable media strategies, CRM, ad-tech (i.e. Krux, DCM, Ads Data Hub), audience buying platforms and methodologies, digital KPIs
• Film marketing & data science: basic strategies, campaign tactics and common social/digital KPIs. Experience with survey-based and digital data sets preferred. Passion for movies, and knowledge of existing industry tools, studies, methodologies and data sets is a major plus!

Other:

• BA/BS degree required with technical focus (e.g. mathematics, computer science, physics)
• MS or PhD degree preferred
• Minimum of 4-7 years of progressively complex related experience
• Business experience in media industry preferred, but not required

*Sony Pictures Entertainment is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other protected characteristics.

*As part of our commitment to health and safety, SPE requires all U.S. non-union applicants and employees to submit proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or to request and obtain approval of a reasonable accommodation based on disability or a sincerely held religious belief, practice or observance. To request an accommodation for purposes of participating in the hiring process, you may contact us at SPE_Accommodation_Assistance@spe.sony.com.