Q&A with PropertyGuru CMO Bjorn Sprengers

In this Q&A with Mumbrella Asia’s editor Robin Hicks, Sprengers talks about the value of data for journalism, Big Data Vs Small Data and why most of the content produced by brands at the moment is falling short of consumer expectations.

Data journalism is, according to your definition, about building content around data. How does that work?
Our brand promise is to help people make more confident property decisions.

We look at consumer insights across the region, especially for people who are in the market to buy a house. They want to know, for instance, where should I buy, should I rent, should I work with this or that agent? Our first aim is to create transparency in the market.

The second thing is that there are lots of opinions in the property market. There are lots of stakeholders, and these opinions tend to be biased. We introduced the 'Guru View', which is part of our syndication plan. We wanted to create a stamp of objectivity on the market.

To be honest, we’ve been criticised for our points of view in the past. A few years ago, we published a property outlook for the Singapore market. We projected that in 2014 the market would fall by eight-11 per cent. We based that outlook on demand and supply patterns. Most developers were saying that the market would increase. We take our role of helping customers make more confident decisions very seriously, even if our projections are contrarian.

'While it may be tempting to be drawn by the promises of Big Data for content marketing, the immediate opportunity is with Small Data,' you have said in a recent white paper on data journalism. What does this actually mean?
The point that I make in the white paper is that while there’s a lot of buzz around Big Data – which is why you see so many traditional IT companies rebranding to Big Data firms – the cost per acquisition is high, and there isn’t always a clear value proposition. I would argue that’s there’s a bigger opportunity already at your fingertips with the data you can use on a daily basis.

What sort of data do you use?
We have 80 per cent market share in Singapore, 60 per cent in Thailand, and 40 per cent in both Malaysia and Indonesia, so we think we know how property seekers search more than anyone in this region. We have a lot of data.

There’s a lot of opportunity to create ownable data. We group our data into four buckets: brand related, acquiring new traffic, converting traffic and retention.

How do you use data to inform the sort of content you put out?
This is a big subject. We focus on ownable data; data that is relevant to our audiences, difficult to replicate by other publishers and generates high brand linkage. We have around 14 million people on our sites every month, and we use search results and supply listings to create actionable insights for visitors.

Who produces your content for you? Do you have a team of inhouse journalists? How big is that team, and how frequently do you post?
Property ReportWe create 600 pieces of content a month, ranging from news to market sentiment surveys. We have eight-10 staff across our four markets. We use third parties too. We have a newspaper in Singapore, we run online news, eDMs and a magazine, Property Report, which is published in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong.

What’s been the most popular piece of content you’ve produced, and why?
An article we published in 2011 about the 5 Most Haunted Locations in Singapore resurfaces every now and again, which goes to show that the content we make is not only dry stuff about the property market.

But the most consistently prominent piece of content is PropertyGuru Market Outlook. We have been publishing market outlooks in Singapore for the last two years, and in Malaysia since last December. Both markets lack an objective expert point of view on the property market, which is why I think the content is popular. The typical Singapore property market outlook receives between 10-15,000 downloads.

How do you work with third parties, such as PR or media agencies, to ensure the content is well distributed? Or do you do this inhouse?
PropertyGuru news and viewsThis depends on whether it’s ‘always-on’ or ‘hero’ content. The always-on content is news, social media content and opinion pieces, and we do all of that in-house. Hero content, such as the PropertyGuru Market Outlook and property surveys, we will work with a market research agency to gather the data, and a PR agency (Ruder Finn) to help amplify it.

We also find a balance between owned and partner content. We have extensive reach ourselves, but we also partner with the likes of Astro Radio in Malaysia, Malay Mail in Malaysia, 938Live in Singapore, and Liputan6 in Indonesia to broaden that reach.

Do they pay you?
No. They give us exposure, we give them content.

What do you make of the quality of content that brands are producing currently?
The cost of content is rising, particularly for distribution and reach. CPCs on Facebook, for instance, are going up. If the cost of reach is going up, then companies need to become more critical about the sort of content they are putting out.

Most content being distributed is not good. Brands have to figure out how to improve their content, otherwise it just won’t cut through. There are lots of opportunities that companies already have that they’re not fully exploiting. Look around you. Look at what you can start using, and the kind of tools and techniques you can bring into play.

How do you see the future of data journalism unfolding?
The cost for distributing content will go up, as the clutter is already there. But I think higher costs will lead to higher quality.

Brands need to clearly define principles for what they are producing and ask themselves, are we really delivering shareable content? For us, it’s an ongoing journey of improvement. Not all of our content is world class.

Rising costs also mean that you need to make sure your content is better targeted. For companies like ours, that’s where the opportunity for innovation lies. We are about creating more personalised experiences. The direction we want to go in is in delivering even better quality of content, listings and insights. And that comes from understanding search patterns to uncover what is most valuable to our readers.

This article first appeared on the Mumbrella website here. Read more spotlight interviews in our Library.