Oliver Gomes

Executive Director Business Intelligence, Condé Nast

Supernova Award Category: 

Digital Marketing and Sales Effectiveness

The Organization: 

Condé Nast is a global media company producing the highest quality content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers in over 30 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company’s portfolio includes many of the world’s most respected and influential media properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Self, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit, Wired, among others. Condé Nast Entertainment was launched in 2011 to develop film, television and premium digital video programming.

The Problem: 

For over a century, Condé Nast succeeded in the international print magazine market through prolific properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and GQ. When digital came to the industry, the company used existing data and personalization efforts to extend brands digitally and attracted over 100 million users. However, the integration of digital properties into the portfolio also brought massive volumes of new data and higher customer expectations. The new data volumes had the potential to obfuscate customer trends and insights that were crucial in the effort to continually personalize experiences and content, and seize advertising opportunities with higher accuracy in this newly fickle customer environment. It was important to combine these trends with a new way of selling digitally and staying on top of making revenue goals while growing the digital properties.

“With digital, you know how long people are spending on an article and what articles they’re most interested in. You can get a lot more data and crunch those numbers, put it together and learn a lot more about your audience.” - Danielle Carrick, Data Visualization Engineer at Condé Nast.

Condé Nast began developing an evolved business intelligence infrastructure to make smarter use of its data and extend its leadership position.

The Solution: 

Condé Nast needed a solution to be a single source of truth, provide a 360-degree view on trends and opportunities, and integrate advanced analytics capabilities. Condé Nast chose Qlik for its open platform and robust ecosystem of APIs and extensions. There were 3 main focus areas:

Single source of truth: Make sure all data was housed and accessible in a governed layer with many business rules to create trust in the solution.

Automation of business process: Eliminate many daily manual processes to find insights. Many new strategy decisions and other KPIs are now tracked with data giving an easier way to get a pulse on the sales team and revenue tracking.

Visualization: Often overlooked, visualization really drives adoption and pushes a more data driven culture through intuitive design. The product was launched with many design experts interviewing stakeholders to really understand their requirements and translating that to modern day visualizations.

The Results: 

Condé Nast is leveraging the Qlik platform for internal users who need data for analysis to run the business, as well as increasingly for advertisers who give them revenue, morphing into data as a service. They are also very early adopters of conversational analytics (Qlik Insight Bot), and Qlik’s Associative Big Data Indexing. These efforts are helping Condé Nast sustain leadership in a very competitive space while analyzing and executing on insights from a trillion data points a day.

The solutions provided the sales ad operations and the various teams a direct understanding of the business KPIs with very little friction. The days of manual reports and spreadsheets have moved to analyzing data on the cloud in a collaborative way on the Qlik platform. Users are now more confident on the data due to rigor around quality and focusing on deep dive analysis than data wrangling. Cloud based solutions have also enhanced the user experience with advanced visualization driving a lot of adoption across various business units.

“Qlik allows me to build a lot of data visualizations on top of a platform where I know the data is secure, where the data is getting to the correct parties, and I am able to create something that users can now make decisions upon.” - Caprice Carstensen, Manager, Data Visualization at Condé Nast.

Metrics: 

Condé Nast has been able to eliminate a number of reports and realized deeper integration across the organization through data that has saved hundreds of man hours per week, translating to over triple digit cost savings.

 

The Technology: 

Qlik Sense is Qlik’s platform for self-service oriented analytics, supporting a full range of use cases including self-service visualization/exploration, guided analytics apps and dashboards, custom and embedded analytics, mobile analytics and reporting, all within a governed multi-cloud architecture. Users benefit from associative exploration and search, smart visualizations, self-service creation and data preparation, geographic analysis, collaboration, and fully interactive mobility.

Disruptive Factor: 

Consumers expect highly personalized experiences. Condé Nast’s portfolio breadth challenged the company in getting real-time insights based on micro-level interactions to all the stakeholders across the various internal groups in a way that translated to meaningful and impactful engagements for their audience – be it a new content offer, an extended promotion or personally relevant ad.

With its new data analytics expertise enabled by Qlik, Condé Nast now makes business decisions inspired by timely, relevant, actionable information. With this customer intelligence, the company can identify new business opportunities in a flash, often taking advantage of them before the competition even knows they exist.

Condé Nast is also using data to analyze customer trends and create more enticing content. For example, if health-related articles are trending on one site, the BI team can pass that information on to other publications, which can then choose to increase the frequency or placement of those types of stories on their own digital properties.

“We built out dashboards to track KPIs within the company, and these are live where employees can see exactly how they are tracking to their goals and can dig in and make adjustments as needed. We’ve been able to deliver dashboards to the brands so they can understand what content is working and optimize their strategies around that” - Caprice Carstensen, Manager, Data Visualization at Condé Nast.

Shining Moment: 

The same commitment to innovation and excellence that helped Condé Nast dominate its first century of operations are now moving it through a digital transformation to take on the challenges of today, certainly setting the stage for another hundred years of media excellence.

“Using data and personalization, we’ve extended our print brand to digital, and it’s attracted over 100 million users.” - Karthic Bala, Chief Data Officer, Condé Nast

About Your Organization

Condé Nast is a global media company serving over 1 billion consumers in over 30 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company’s portfolio includes influential media properties like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Self, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit, Wired, W, and Brides among others.