Guardian News & Media delivering more

campaigns through smartFOCUS

Guardian 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 on
the Internet.
Background
Cequity's end-to-end suite of
The origins of Guardian Media Group go back to the founding of The Manchester Guardian in 1821. In integrated services includes
1936, ownership of both papers was vested in the Scott Trust, which had been set up to ensure that customer management
The Manchester Guardian would continue to be run on its traditional lines as an independent consulting, marketing database
newspaper. Its increased national standing led to The Guardian being renamed in 1959, and in 1964 & information management
the newspaper moved to London. solutions, analytics, metrics &
dashboards and campaign
Charles Ping, Head of Customer Relationship Management took the decision to bring the measurement support. Our
marketing database, analysis and reporting tools in-house as part of a programme to better state-of-the-art technology
realise the value of the data assets that were held across the business in a large number of solution, Cequity ACE is
disparate systems. The business had access to all the skills required to design and build an powered by smartFOCUS and is
operational CRM database on an Oracle platform and this is what they did. The CRM database is a hosted customer marketing
fed by all the operational databases from across the business to create a single, aggregated system that can be quickly
customer view. smartFOCUS Viper is used as the main view on the CRM database, providing fast implemented without major
train of thought access and the ability for users to visualise the customer data held and create hardware or software
selections and segments from it for use in campaigns. Viper is used on the database because the investments. This helps us
users are typically marketing people not technology people, these users don’t have SQL query deliver rich yet valuable,
skills. Data from all Guardian’s media sources is aggregated into the CRM database including, information-driven, customer
online, email, offline - letter/telephone, reader offer responses plus, more recently, the addition experience opportunities for you.
of enrichment data from Experian’s MOSAIC which has added even greater depth to the customer
“From our experience, the Intelligent
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
Analytical Marketing from
smartFOCUS makes it possible to
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.
instantly analyze, segment, identify and
communicate with large volumes of
Applications of the smartFOCUS Solutions customers and contacts on an
individual basis. Intelligent Marketing
smartFOCUS Viper provides Guardian News & Media with the visualisation capability for the CRM improves customer communications -
database and the ability to create data extracts for campaigns. Viper enables the simplification throughout the entire lifetime of a
of the data through the use of derived fields that create the customer insight required to improve company-customer relationship and
customer communication programmes. This in turn reduces the demand on technical resources to makes performance driven multi-
generate specific value and frequency fields as the business expands. The Customer Database and channel marketing a reality.
Viper are used primarily for traditional marketing applications such as cross and up-selling smartFOCUS is faster and more
campaigns on new and existing services and products to existing customers. efficient than we thought it would be!”

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 CEO - Cequity Solutions
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 was
undertaken 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 weren’t already purchasing the paper every week.

The Fiver - Guardian Unlimited’s 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
 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 per
week 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.
Reach us at:
The Future
105-106, 1st Floor, Anand
There are still further data sources to be added to the CRM database that will add even deeper
Estate, 189-A, Sane Guruji Marg,
customer insight via the smartFOCUS Viper solutions. In addition the marketing team want to
Mahalaxmi, Mumbai-400 011,
undertake more customer profiling exercises to drive advertising spend. Finally The Guardian is
India
looking to add a wider reporting capability across the business potentially using the
smartREPORTER functionality that drives standard Excel spreadsheet reports to all the people Phone: +91 22-43453800
across the business that require the customer information.
Fax: +91 22-43453840
About smartFOCUS
For more case studies, white
smartFOCUS (LSE:STF) is a leading international marketing software company that empowers papers and presentations log
marketers with the intelligence to drive high performance multi channel campaigns and more on to:
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 www.cequitysolutions.com
and relevant communications that increase campaign conversion rates and improve customer’s
insight.
Or Write to:

smartFOCUS now has over 300 customers worldwide using its marketing software including AAA, info@cequitysolutions.com
ABN AMRO, ATOS, Centreparcs, EMI, Fig Leaves, Harrods, Hilton International, NSPCC, Societe
For the latest thinking in
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Analyical Marketing, check out
our blog at:
smartFOCUS is headquartered in the UK, with offices in the US, continental Europe and Asia
Pacific.
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