At the new Meredith Corporation, the term “so what?” isn’t a reference to the song popularized by the singer Pink. It’s the desired nexus between the “persistent and dynamic data” that America’s largest magazine publisher collects on its consumers.
“It’s great to have data, but you need to turn it into the so what?” says Alysia Borsa, the company’s Chief Marketing & Data Officer, whose team is responsible for all consumer data and insights across the merged assets of Meredith and Time Inc.
“The common goal for all of my team is really to understand our consumers. When we understand our consumers we drive advertising, we drive product, we drive editorial, we drive consumer revenue. So we have this common goal.”
One element of that goal is capturing and understanding user data not just based on the life stage of a consumer and their interests but on capturing the “billions” of intent signals that Meredith sees.
“Every time someone clicks on a video or opens an email or creates a shopping list or clicks to buy, they’re helping us to understand their intent. So life stage, plus interest, now intent,” Borsa says in this interview with Beet.TV.
Complementing intent signals is the capability of creating profiles to understand consumers who are always changing. This is where persistent and dynamic means intersect.
“Persistent is I am a mom, I’m interested in sports. There are persistent aspects about who I am and what I’m interested in. But on Monday mornings versus Saturday afternoons I have different needs.”
Bringing everything together to create the “so what?” is what really unleashes the power of consumer data, according to Borsa.
“The whole team is focused on how do we develop insights to create, for example, video programming that impacts a client or that can drive engagement.”
Two recent examples are when the Better Homes & Gardens team “saw a really interesting trend toward an interest in whipped cream and decorating eggs,” Borsa explains. They created a video about dyeing Easter eggs that garnered 60 million views on Facebook, was shared one million times and was “cross-promoted across multiple brands where we saw a seventy percent completion rate.”
Meredith’s Real Simple title created a “momfessions” video based on insights. The resulting brand-sponsored video got 17 million views, according to Borsa.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
