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TI Media is the UK’s third-largest consumer magazine and digital publisher with more than 40 brands that reach 14.1 million UK adults monthly across print and digital. Its market-leading portfolio spans a range of interest areas, from entertainment and women’s lifestyle to luxury, sports, and technology and includes titles such as Woman’s Weekly, Country Life, Ideal Home, Marie Claire, What’s on TV, TV Times, and many others. The company sells 117 million magazines per year and has more than 37 million global online users.

Creating a single customer view TI Media faced similar challenges to other consumer magazine publishers—a drop in print readership and advertising revenues that could not be made up with online advertising. The company needed to generate more revenue from each customer that interacted with its brands in order to close this revenue gap. But in the UK, only 20 percent of readers get their magazines through subscriptions, with the rest buying them at newsstands. This makes it impossible to capture customer data at the point of sale. Further, the move to digital formats means that the company’s customers consume content in myriad ways, including print, websites, digital editions, social media, video, apps, podcasts, and events, presenting further challenges for capturing customer data.

Lee Wilmore, Data Intelligence Director at TI Media, developed a plan to bring together all TI-Media’s data silos into a single comprehensive customer database to enable an effective contact strategy. However, he knew that the company’s existing outsourced “black box” database solution would be a liability. “The system was single domain, inflexible, expensive, and slow,” Wilmore explains. “If

we wanted to make changes, it took weeks or months, and if there was an issue with data quality, there was no way to figure out where the problem was. Without extensive development, the database also could not store data from our unknown customers—those who interact online but for whom we do not have a phone number or email address.”

Why AWS? After much research, Wilmore decided that moving to the cloud would enable TI Media to accomplish its goals. The company had several requirements for the new system. First, it had to provide accessibility across the organization. Scalability was also important because the company’s needs change constantly. Further, it needed to be cost-effective and manageable in-house, without the need for an operations manager. And the system had to be compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“In short, we needed a system that would enable us to do more with our data, do it faster, and save money,” says Wilmore. “We also had a 60-day implementation window.”TI Media chose to integrate all of its customer data into a cloud-based data lake. It implemented Talend Cloud Data Quality on a Snowflake database in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“I’ve bought many systems over the years,” states Wilmore. “I’ve never seen three systems work together so easily and in such a frictionless way as Talend, Snowflake, and AWS.”

He goes on: “As we continue to buy and sell brands, AWS gives us the ability to easily scale our data storage up or down, depending on our needs, and helps us keep costs down. Snowflake enables TI Media to utilize a cloud

Building meaningful relationships with 14 million consumers

“If we convert just one percent more of our readers coming to our websites to sales, we can gain £40 million of additional revenue. Data is the answer to drive revenues.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Media & Entertainment/ Publishing

INFORMATION• HQ: UK

• 1,001-5,000 employees

USE CASES• Sales and Marketing effectiveness

CHALLENGE• Creating a single customer view

TALEND PRODUCT USED• Talend Cloud Data Quality

PARTNERS• Amazon Web Services

• Snowflake

RESULTS

• Reduced time to onboard new data sources by 85 percent

• Shortened time to fix data quality issues by 90 percent

• Reduced data budgets by 50 percent in the first year, with further reductions expected

• Executed marketing campaigns 10 percent faster

• Enabled increase in response rates by 5 percent

”Lee Wilmore, Data Intelligence Director, TI Media

database without needing an operations manager. And Talend makes it easy to bring data into Snowflake without the help of IT.”

Why Talend? Talend has met all of the requirements Wilmore set for it, from accessibility and scalability to ease of use, cost, and GDPR compliance.

The cornerstone of the TI Media data strategy is to bring together customer data, advertising data, content data, and online data all into one place where TI Media can analyze it faster and more easily. Talend enables TI Media to easily pull data from many sources into Snowflake and clean, decrypt, and deduplicate it—all without the help of IT.

Wilmore continues, “We chose Talend Cloud Data Quality because, out of the box, it had all of the routines we needed to implement on our data. Other solutions didn’t have that full breadth of data quality that we needed. And because our project had to be done in two months, speed was essential for us. We have built, using Talend and Snowflake, our new customer data domain in two months.”

“Talend is easy to use. The cleaning and deduplication functions are built in. We built the cleaning process in about five minutes,” says Wilmore. “With Talend, we can use its standard deduplication functions to identify matching pairs in our data. And we can use the golden record and survivorship rules to hand off to marketing a golden record that they can then use to market to customers.”

TI Media adds roughly 500,000 records per week to the new system. These records are cleaned through name and address, email, and telephone number cleaning processes in order to produce the best customer record. With Talend, the company has reduced the time it takes to onboard new sources by 85 percent compared to its previous system.

“Data quality is critical to TI Media. We have a variety of ways that we clean the data before we load it into the system. And once data is on the database, we have a process that, as we add new data to a customer’s record, we can figure out which is the best customer record to share with our marketing team,” Wilmore states.

And while identifying the source of data quality issues previously was time-consuming and difficult, with Talend, TI Media has shortened this process by 90 percent.

Content + context + data = resultsTI Media realized that its masses of content could provide it with innovative opportunities to close the revenue gap and that it could monetize this content through affiliates and partners such as Ownable.

“Consumers interact with our brands more than a quarter of a billion times a year. That’s over 10 meaningful interactions per second,” Wilmore says.

With a holistic view of all customer data in one domain and clean customer data, TI Media can better target its customers. The company sends out 30 million emails per month in order to drive customers back to websites to engage with content online. With its better, cleaner data, the company has seen a five percent higher response rate to its email campaigns.

Further, since implementing Talend, the company is executing marketing campaigns ten percent faster. Wilmore and his team also were able to deliver a greatly improved recency, frequency, and value (RFV) segmentation within a week of the system going live, a great benefit for the marketing team. And the company’s analysts can run scouting reports in 90 minutes rather than the day it took previously.

All of these benefits translate to reduced costs and increased revenue for TI Media. Wilmore and his team feel they have just scratched the surface of what the new system can provide to TI Media. In addition to customer data, they are looking at how to use the data lake to improve revenues and reduce costs for other domains in the company.

“With Talend, our Snowflake cloud-based data lake, and AWS, we can see our data, share it with other systems, share with our marketers and analysts, and easily push data in from other sources.”

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