Leading Media Company Gains New Insights with Cloud-Based Microsoft BI Solution
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Power BI
- PowerPivot
- SQL Server 2014 Enterprise
- Office 365
Tech Stack
- Power BI
- PowerPivot
- SQL Server 2014 Enterprise
- Excel
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Condé Nast is a leading media company based in New York City, serving 164 million consumers with 20 digital and print media brands, including Vogue, Wired, and the New Yorker. Established in 1909, the company offers content across print and digital media such as websites, film, television, and video. With a workforce of 6,000 employees, Condé Nast is recognized globally for its influential brands and high-quality content. The company's mission-critical Marketing and Analytics team provides business intelligence information to editors, journalists, and marketers responsible for developing content and boosting advertising and subscription revenue. The data includes consumer profiles, insights into competing brands and market share, and feedback on digital traffic.
The Challenge
Condé Nast, a globally recognized media company, faced challenges in gaining insights into the performance of its multiple brands and media types. The Marketing and Analytics team needed better business intelligence (BI) tools to provide analytics information quickly to internal sales and editorial teams. The team struggled with limited analytics capabilities and correlating data from disparate sources, which was difficult and time-consuming. Additionally, they often fielded redundant requests from internal clients, leading to inefficiencies. Condé Nast wanted a centralized solution that would pull together disparate data sources and provide self-service BI capabilities to push insights out to magazines and respond proactively instead of reacting to individual requests.
The Solution
In 2011, Condé Nast began working with PowerPivot, a Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet software add-in, and liked the results. In May 2013, the company decided to become an early adopter of Power BI, a cloud-based business intelligence platform by Microsoft. The Marketing Analytics team started a proof of concept with Vogue and Wired magazines, using PowerPivot for Excel with SQL Server 2014 Enterprise software to pull together data sets from vendors like Omniture, MRI, and Kantar. They created Power BI sites for sharing reports and published a series of reports for Vogue and Wired. These reports, featuring highly visual and interactive elements like graphs and pie charts, provided immediate insights into consumer behavior, market share, competitors, and web traffic across various devices. Users could quickly drill down into more detail, tailoring content for specific devices and audiences. The team also utilized tools like Power Query in Excel and Q&A, a natural-language search feature in Power BI, to simplify data retrieval and reporting. Condé Nast planned to launch the solution in February 2014 and expected other publications to adopt the new tools, with future plans to integrate unstructured data from social networking sites and marketing research databases.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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