Making Sense and Nonsense of Data: Successes and failures Using Big Data in Magazine Marketing

Pegg Nadler, award-winning magazine marketing guru from New York spoke about magazine business in US. She has made a survey, where she interviewed 15 major magazine publishers representing 250 titles in US.

At the sBig Data for Media conference on May 8 in London, sponsored by World Newsmedia Network and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said that in 2014, there are 2,675 consumer magazines in United States. Consumer magazine circulation revenue declined from US$9.8 billion in 2008 to $7.5 billion in 2013. Newsstand sales continues to drop. The entire industry is in a flux and hoping that big data will save the industry, she said.

What is then Big Data? Traditional data is now being called in US as "big data", because there is so much of it and it has been collected for ages from multiple sources. It's also a combination of offline and online data.

The old data concerns are gone, because data storage is no longer an issue, data is easily attainable, data processing quicker than ever and data matching and cleansing improving. 

The "true" big data means detailed data collected from websites and digital sources. Big is not just volume, but velocity and increased activity, size and scales not important, but the most important is, what you do with it.

How to use big data: 

1. Start with determining the business needs and questions to be answered. What is troubling?

2. Identify the data that will get you there.

3.  Build the technology around the information to get it.

Different business needs and questions: customer buying cycle, cross channel view, customer purchase path & preferences, customer research modes, feedback behaviours, next best offer.

Data assessment: What data do you have? What data do you need? What other data is available?

After that you have to identify the different data resources and start analyzing, e.g. do customer segmentation.

“The traditional plan was to use data to understand the past to predict the future. Now we are going into uncharted territory, where the past does not excist”, says Charles Swift from Hearst Magazines.

Hearst succeeded in using big data for multi-channel customer understanding. They discovered that the database needs to be rebuilt to succeed in the data-driven analytics environment.

Forbes discovered by analyzing the data, that timing is everything, when publishing content.

The amount of available technology for data analyzing has grown dramatically.  

Magazine publishers are at all different stages in learning, using and understanding big data. Marketing needs will drive advances in database systems and solutions to track, communicate and monetize customers. Big data usage involves a blend of technology, people and process to ensure success. Big data spans all types of data (including traditional) to maximize using information and analytics.