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Find your customers on Roku this Black Friday

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.

Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.

Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

₍🙏 _{checking out ads helps me keep this newsletter alive and free)}

👨🏼‍💻 Is data democratisation a good thing?

Yes, of course it is.

Enabling the organisation access to its data should be the goal of every data team. Without the ability to check and interrogate data on their own, business stakeholders invariable come directly to data teams to have them provide it.

This positions the data team as a huge bottleneck and key dependency in helping the business get their hands on data.

When done right, democratisation builds trust, transparency, and speed of decision-making.

BUT (you knew there was a a big ‘but’ coming didn’t you?)

When done badly, data democratisation can fuel chaos, confusion, and political tension faster than you can say “single source of truth”.

Data leaders the world over see data democratisation as a key goal for their teams, whether they believe it is right or they’re being pushed aggressively by the business to achieve it.

In today’s edition we’re gonna dissect the concept of data democratisation, look at it’s potential shortfalls, and go from there to see what a success data democratisation approach might look like.

Buckle up!

😱 “My analysis is better than yours!”

Here’s what happens when the push for self-service goes wrong:

🤥 1. Conflicting truths start circulating
Without shared definitions, governance, and alignment on key metrics, you may end up with multiple versions of reality. Two people can look at the same dataset and walk into a meeting with entirely different numbers. Suddenly, your execs are arguing about which analysis is right rather than what the data means!!

🥊 2. The data team loses credibility
When stakeholders build their own reports and misinterpret the data, it quite often reflects poorly on the data team. You become the scapegoat for “bad data” even though the issue was misuse, not quality. This erodes trust and turns the data function into a convenient punching bag.

🫥 3. Strategic focus disappears
Instead of reducing workload, poorly executed democratisation can actually increase it. The data team spends more time fixing mistakes, clarifying definitions, and cleaning up after stakeholders who “went rogue”. Strategic projects stall because you’re too busy firefighting.

😖 4. Politics, not insight, drives decisions
Inconsistent data access creates power struggles. Certain teams or leaders start promoting “their” numbers that best support their narrative. Once politics take over, the data team’s ability to influence with objectivity plummets.

💔 5. You expose the cracks in business maturity
If the business isn’t ready either culturally or operationally for self-service, democratisation will simply expose weak data literacy, inconsistent decision-making, and a lack of accountability. It’s like giving everyone a Ferrari before they’ve passed their driving test.

The result the end up with is: More dashboards, fewer decisions, and a growing perception that the data team can’t deliver value.

👨🏻‍🔧 Here’s whatcha gotta do

Strong data leadership means knowing when not to give the business what it’s asking for. Democratisation is an earned capability. And earning it requires collaboration, governance, and maturity on both sides.

Here’s how to make that happen.

📏 1. Start with alignment, not access
Before anyone gets the keys to the data, align on the fundamentals: business logic, KPIs, metric definitions, and calculation methods (aka business logic). Every team must speak the same language before they start exploring the data. This is not a technical exercise; it’s a leadership exercise. Facilitate workshops where finance, marketing, and ops all agree on what “revenue,” “conversion,” or “churn” actually mean. (BTW I can help with this so hmu if you wanna chat)

👨🏼‍💻 2. Redefine the data team’s role
The best data leaders position their teams as enablers rather than gatekeepers. Your job is to coach the business to use data responsibly, not to guard it behind a wall. Build frameworks for quality assurance, version control, and metric ownership that make it easier for non-data folks to stay aligned without constant hand-holding.

🔋 3. Set guardrails that empower, not restrict
Self-service does not mean free-for-all. Implement sensible permissions, automated data quality checks, and clear sign-off processes for new metrics or dashboards. Guardrails protect both your data team’s reputation and the business’s confidence in what they see. You must remain in the loop.

🤝 4. Develop real collaboration rituals
Democratisation only works when the business and data teams are in regular, structured dialogue. That could mean a monthly “data council,” cross-functional working groups, or shared OKRs that tie data initiatives to business outcomes. These rituals turn alignment into a valuable habit.

✋🏼 5. Be brave enough to say “not yet”
This is where leadership and political capital come in. Sometimes, the smartest move is to slow things down. If your organisation doesn’t have the governance, literacy, or accountability in place, you’re better off delaying democratisation until the groundwork is solid. Saying no (or not yet) pure leadership!!

Data democratisation can transform how your business uses data. But without the right maturity, it’s like handing out matches in a fireworks factory.

Before opening the floodgates, build the trust, alignment, and collaboration your organisation needs to use data wisely.

Tristan Burns

Find me on LinkedIn or Book a 1:1 call