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Guardian News & Media delivering morecampaigns through smartFOCUSGuardian News & Media publishes national daily and weekly

newspapers in the UK and overseas. These include the

Guardian, the Observer, Guardian Weekly, Guardian Europe,

Money Observer and the flagship Guardian Unlimited service onthe Internet.

Background

The origins of Guardian Media Group go back to the founding of The Manchester Guardian in 1821. In

1936, ownership of both papers was vested in the Scott Trust, which had been set up to ensure that

The Manchester Guardian would continue to be run on its traditional lines as an independent

newspaper. Its increased national standing led to The Guardian being renamed in 1959, and in 1964

the newspaper moved to London.

Charles Ping, Head of Customer Relationship Management took the decision to bring the

marketing database, analysis and reporting tools in-house as part of a programme to better

realise the value of the data assets that were held across the business in a large number of

disparate systems. The business had access to all the skills required to design and build anoperational CRM database on an Oracle platform and this is what they did. The CRM database is

fed by all the operational databases from across the business to create a single, aggregated

customer view. smartFOCUS Viper is used as the main view on the CRM database, providing fast

train of thought access and the ability for users to visualise the customer data held and create

selections and segments from it for use in campaigns. Viper is used on the database because the

users are typically marketing people not technology people, these users dont have SQL query

skills. Data from all Guardians media sources is aggregated into the CRM database including,

online, email, offline - letter/telephone, reader offer responses plus, more recently, the addition

of enrichment data from Experians MOSAIC which has added even greater depth to the customer

view. The smartFOCUS Viper database which is updated from the CRM Database on a nightly basis

contains over 3 million customer records, the largest interaction table contains details of more

than 13m customer interactions (an interaction is any type of communication that a Guardian

customer has made with the newspaper) and the database continues to grow in size.

Applications of the smartFOCUS SolutionssmartFOCUS Viper provides Guardian News & Media with the visualisation capability for the CRM

database and the ability to create data extracts for campaigns. Viper enables the simplification

of the data through the use of derived fields that create the customer insight required to improve

customer communication programmes. This in turn reduces the demand on technical resources to

generate specific value and frequency fields as the business expands. The Customer Database and

Viper are used primarily for traditional marketing applications such as cross and up-selling

campaigns on new and existing services and products to existing customers.

In addition the insight is used to assist in creating advertising profiles to assist the ad sales teams,

and for creating data extracts for list sales. Specific examples of successful analysis applications

include the following:-

Observer Sport Monthly - a hugely successful campaign to drive increased purchase behaviour

for the edition of the Observer containing the Sports Monthly supplement. Analysis wasundertaken using Viper to identify those customers most likely to respond to a Sport Monthly

trigger and an extract made on those people who then receive a regular email promotion to

remind them about the publication of the supplement -. This led to an uplift of over 40%

amongst those recipients who werent already purchasing the paper every week.

The Fiver - Guardian Unlimiteds tea time Football news email sent at 5pm Monday to Friday

- to increase uptake of this Guardian Unlimited service analysis was undertaken of the

Guardian Unlimited subscribers who had indicated an interest in football and these people

were selected for an email campaign.

Reader Offers - campaigns to increase up take on all reader offers are created through Viper

analysis and selection and the extracts are emailed to increase offer success rates on a

regular basis.

Continued overleaf

Cequity's end-to-end suite of

integrated services includes

customer management

consulting, marketing database

& information management

solutions, analytics, metrics &

dashboards and campaign

measurement support. Our

state-of-the-art technology

solution, Cequity ACE is

powered by smartFOCUS and isa hosted customer marketing

system that can be quickly

implemented without major

hardware or software

investments. This helps us

deliver rich yet valuable,

information-driven, customer

experience opportunities for you.

From our experience, the Intelligent

Analytical Marketing from

smartFOCUSmakes it possible to

instantly analyze, segment, identify and

communicate with large volumes of

customers and contacts on anindividual basis. Intelligent Marketing

improves customer communications -

throughout the entire lifetime of a

company-customer relationship and

makes performance driven multi-

channel marketing a reality.

smartFOCUSis faster and moreefficient than we thought it would be!

CEO - Cequity Solutions

8/14/2019 CEQUITY Analytics CaseStudy Guardian Smart Focus

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Targeted activity driving response to recruitment advertising has been generated to specific

employment sectors based upon attributes and behaviour identified and extracted via the

database.

Benefits with smartFOCUS Viper within the Guardian Newspaper

The Guardian have benefited enormously since implementation. The key benefits expressed by

Charles Ping are as follows:-

Viper creates a clear understanding of what would otherwise be a complex data structure for the

marketers within the group. Other tools could have provided the visualisation capabilities but the

users would have needed to know the questions that they wanted to ask - Viper

enables the train of thought analysis required without the users needing to understand the

underlying data structures.

Very easy data import into the smartSERVER ADS and export from Viper to The Guardian

campaign fulfilment capabilities.

The accessibility of Viper to all users over the network (both physically within the office and

via VPN) and the speed of response to users queries ensures that campaigns can be created,

run and analysed within days not weeks or months.

The ability to answer ad hoc queries at train of thought speeds and the graphical

presentation of the query results that assists in the understanding of the data is very

beneficial to the marketing teams.

The ability to easily increase the numbers and targeting of campaigns being run from 4/5 perweek to 10/12 per week to segments from 1K to 150K people.

If the Guardian had to achieve the current level of marketing activity without smartFOCUS Viper

we would need a team of programmers and report writers in addition to the team of marketers

that we already employ. Our ability to proactively select and create campaigns would be very

much reduced without the Viper solution which greatly improves productivity and delivers an

intuitive, easy to use data analysis capability to non-technical users. Charles Ping, Head of

Customer Relationship Management, The Guardian.

The Future

There are still further data sources to be added to the CRM database that will add even deeper

customer insight via the smartFOCUS Viper solutions. In addition the marketing team want to

undertake more customer profiling exercises to drive advertising spend. Finally The Guardian is

looking to add a wider reporting capability across the business potentially using the

smartREPORTER functionality that drives standard Excel spreadsheet reports to all the peopleacross the business that require the customer information.

About smartFOCUS

smartFOCUS (LSE:STF) is a leading international marketing software company that empowers

marketers with the intelligence to drive high performance multi channel campaigns and more

valuable customer relationships. Its Intelligent Marketing solutions integrate off-line and on-line

data, analysis, campaign and performance management to deliver better targeted more timely

and relevant communications that increase campaign conversion rates and improve customers

insight.

smartFOCUS now has over 300 customers worldwide using its marketing software including AAA,

ABN AMRO, ATOS, Centreparcs, EMI, Fig Leaves, Harrods, Hilton International, NSPCC, Societe

Generale and QVC.

smartFOCUS is headquartered in the UK, with offices in the US, continental Europe and Asia

Pacific.

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Note: This is an original paper bysmartFOCU . Cequity ACEis powered by

smar tFOCUSand Cequity uses this distinguished technology to empower its end-to-

end suite of analytical marketing and customer relationship management solutions.