Using cloud-based technologies to deliver insights at speed on what readers want to “pay and stay” for to ultimately drive subscription revenue growth
Opportunity
Content is the major media organisation’s core product with research demonstrating it is more than half the reason why customers subscribe to their mastheads.
The objective was to drive subscription revenue growth by better understanding the return on content at a micro level. This would be achieved by:
Developing a truly data-driven culture
Increasing the number of people consuming and subscribing to content
Improving the value to subscribers and consequently their desire to continue subscription
Whilst the organisation was “data-rich”, it had siloed data sources. This inhibited real-time data sharing and dynamic newsroom decision making on insights drawn from a complete data set.
Solution
Collaborated with the organisation throughout their end-to-end transformation journey to become data-driven, and as part of this:
Developed the enterprise-wide data strategy and transformation roadmap
Designed, built, and produced a data analytics platform powered by cloud-based technologies which combined multiple data sources across the organisation
Developed a suite of intelligent dashboards to give real-time visibility of performance metrics across content, customer subscriptions, web analytics, social and promotional channels
Established a new operating model to effectively run the data analytics platform
Applied agile ways of working with joint sprint teams to build sustainable capability uplift and drive uptake of the new platform
Industry:
Media
Essential seven focus
Outcomes
Designed, built, and produced a data analytics platform powered by cloud-based technologies which combined multiple data sources across the organisation
Accelerated the use of data and shifted the culture of the business to insight-led decision making, with real-time visibility of consumption behaviour enabling editorial to better tailor content strategies and make immediate decisions on content placement and promotion
Greater efficiency by producing content which resonates across a broad audience and refocusing journalists on high-value content
Consistent and accurate performance measures and reporting across the business enabling benchmarking between mastheads
The platform was awarded “Best Use of Data Analytics” by the International News Media Association in 2019. Further, PwC were shortlisted as finalists in 2019 ARN Innovation Awards for two awards - Customer Value and Cloud Innovation based on work in this space
“In 2018 new subscriptions driven from premium [paid] content increased by +133% year-on-year. Content driven acquisition as a channel accounted for 35% of new subscriptions, up 19 percentage points relative to 2017 and continues to increase as we optimise the mix of content further.”
