Taming the “business intelligence beast” at Rede Bandeirantes

Rede Bandeirantes — known to viewers as Band — is a television network based in São Paulo, Brazil. Part of Grupo Bandeirantes de Comunicação, Band was founded in 1967.

In these videos, Gabriel Queiroz, Business Intelligence Director, and Alexandre Porto, Marketing Analyst, for Band talk about the benefits of choosing a self-service business intelligence tool and how they are using Tableau to improve revenue and save time.

Rede Banderientes delivers the power of information (video in Portuguese)

Tableau: What is the benefit of enabling a self-service business intelligence tool?
Gabriel Queiroz, BI Director: Those that have to look after the business are those that are in the front, who are the managers. I am not a technology professional, you know? I'm a business and advertising professional.

So, the self-service BI is like that, even though I don't have technical knowledge of computing, I can set up powerful visualizations to show the executives and also to use within my own department, while the IT team remains responsible for the maintenance of that database.

Tableau: So as someone who is not an “IT person” – you are able to use self-service business intelligence tools like Tableau at Band?
Gabriel: With my knowledge of computing, I can set up powerful visualizations to show the executives and also to use within my own department, while the IT team remains responsible for the maintenance of that database.

Tableau: How are people reacting when you show them Tableau visualizations?
Alexandre Porto, Marketing Analyst: You look at a graphic, it tells you— very simply—what you have to do, where to act, in that case there, where to sell your advertising space, what agencies you should prioritize.

So, that was very well received, because people that never worked with numbers went on to understand those visualizations in very simple ways.

Tableau:Can you give me an example of how Tableau is helping Band succeed?
Gabriel: So, Tableau now can give us insights, for example, of the average price of commercials per agency, per client.

It can report clients that are advertising more on other stations than on Band, clients that have a greater or lesser revenue potential, from where we are extracting, really, the maximum from our business team. So, with the visualization of Tableau, we can have that type of insight in a very quick way.

That is one of the great advantages of the tools, without a doubt.

Tableau: If you had to point to the biggest benefit of Tableau at Band, what would you say?
Alexandre: The main impact that Tableau had, in my opinion, on the Bandeirantes group, was to show how it was possible to understand complex data from different sources of information in a very simple way.

Gabriel: Tableau can transform BI from a seven-headed beast within an organization.

Tableau: Was Tableau Band’s first business intelligence solution?
Gabriel: Well, when I arrived at Band five months ago, there was already a BI solution from another company. That solution was purchased five years before.

And during those five years that solution managed to deliver very little to the level of, let's say, of the managers of the company.

And with Tableau, during those five months, we managed to do much more work than those five years with the other tool.

Tableau: Is Tableau helping you gain insight into your data faster?
Alexandre: I think that I—if I didn't have Tableau— I certainly would spend much more time and would need many more people helping to deliver that work.

I would say that analyses, which probably I would take a week to do ... these days, I can do in one or two hours and it soon has a visualization ready, well formatted. You now can send it either to the client or to whomever asked you for it.

Personally, I think that the greatest impact of Tableau came in the question of when I was going to a presentation to answer, one, two, three questions, with Tableau I began to go to those meetings, I would respond to the first, the second, the third question.

It became much easier for you to dialog in a meeting.

Tableau: Can you tell us a little bit about the data you’re visualizing in Tableau?
Gabriel: The practicality of Tableau for us—besides the fact that you can set up analyses very quickly— is the connectivity with various databases. That is very important.

Tableau helps us a lot with problems related to transforming a large amount of information into visualizations, and Tableau can work with small, medium and large databases, you know? Which is our case.

In Bandeirantes, we have two big information centers. One is private information, which is the information that we generate ourselves, internal management information. That is the space on television, radio, of all the vehicles, the billing by agency, by client, right? Very connected to the business area. So, that amount of information is very, very large.

Besides that, we have another type of database, which is information that we buy, which is information that measures our audience performance ... so, much of it is connected to research institutions.

And the great challenge is to merge those two information sources into one analysis. Tableau can do that very well for us.

Tableau: What do you think other business people in Brazil should know about business intelligence and Tableau?
Gabriel: Because BI in Brazil is still something that is not totally widespread, companies are now beginning to look at BI in more detail.

I have worked with Tableau for some years now, despite my having started in Bandeirantes now. It gives power, it delivers the power of information to everyone in the organization.