Advertising & Publishing: Marriage, Data & Analytics

Customer insight and retention drives every publishing company throughout the world, for without the customer we would not exist. Publishers must work to ensure the right audience views the right content – both editorial and advertising – so consumers will engage with the message. This leads to growth and the continued success of the publishing business.

As publishers, our main value proposition is to serve as the conduit between advertisers and the consumers they wish to reach. We work to assure our advertising clients that their ads are being seen by not only customers, but the right customers.

At Tribune Media Group, we are testing a variety of tactics to improve our website and increase retention among readers and advertisers. Recently, we asked readers to sign up for a free digital membership that allows us to better track and understand who is visiting our websites and what content they are consuming when they get there.

By studying the habits, patterns and interests of our users, we can better understand not just what customers do, but why they do it. This research, known as deep consumer insight, allows us the opportunity to provide more targeted content for our readers and to more finitely delineate for our advertisers the customer segments that are more likely to respond.

To measure the success rate of these initiatives, Tribune Media Group developed a program called Media Optimization. Media Optimization allows advertisers to easily take advantage of all available print and digital delivery channels, producing cost-efficient and effective results. With multiple distribution channels now available, advertisers need a way to find an optimum combination to meet their reach and ROI objectives. And, for the first time, these results can be measured akin to how advertisers measure return on investment for their direct mail program.

Tribune Media Group’s media optimization capabilities match advertiser customer data and newspaper subscriber/recipient/registered user data, along with sophisticated demographic overlays, to help advertisers select the most desirable media channel. And most importantly, post campaign results can now be measured via a backend match-back analysis at the household level.

Looking forward, Tribune Media Group will continue to extend media optimization and work to increase the number of publishing partners that actively participate in the subscriber database consortium.

Susan Jacobs is VP Retail Advertising, Chicago Tribune Media Group