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SAS for Media

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Analytical insights that optimize content and monetization across media channels.
 SAS® FOR MEDIA

Table of Contents

Executive Summary............................................................................. 1
Four Trends in the New Media Order....................................................... 2
Media markets are converging, but audience insight is not........................ 2
What this means for media companies..........................................................................2
Media audiences are more involved than ever......................................... 3
What this means for media companies..........................................................................3
Media monetization has become more elusive........................................ 4
What this means for media companies..........................................................................4
Media companies are drowning in data, but not capitalizing on it............... 5
What this means for media companies..........................................................................5
Succeeding in the New Media Age......................................................... 6
Data-Driven Intelligence for Media Companies........................................ 7
®
How SAS Helps Optimize Content and Monetization Across Channels..... 10
Goal 1: Analyze audience insights and client ad spending across media properties....10
Goal 2: Granularly segment audiences, predict trends and improve targeting.............12
Goal 3: Create relevant and timely online and offline content.......................................13
Goal 4: Better convert sales opportunities and trigger real-time offers.........................15
Goal 5: Implement more effective campaigns..............................................................16
Goal 6: Predict and optimize inventory of media assets and advertisements...............18
Closing Thoughts................................................................................19
From SAS, a Leader in Business Intelligence..........................................19

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Executive Summary ■ “Improving consumer engagement

in a me-media age involves
Radio and TV broadcasters, advertising agencies, publishers of online and hard-copy
content, and other players in the media industry have been affected by significant
developing the right models for
market, technology and business transformation. The proliferation of new media consumer interaction, harnessing
channels – most notably, digital media and the Internet – has reshaped the industry analytics for better insight into
and challenged traditional business models. Four key trends have put the squeeze consumer behaviors, and creating
on media enterprises:
richer, more relevant and more
• Media markets are converging, but audience insight is not. Most media engaging opportunities for
enterprises operate in multiple areas – such as print and online – and have
consumer interaction.”
difficulty gaining audience insights that span multiple channels.
• Media audiences are more involved than ever. They have more choices Marco Vernocchi and David Wolf,
available to them, more control over the content that reaches them, and more Driving Growth Through Innovation
autonomy to generate and publish their own content. in the Media and Entertainment
• Media monetization has become more elusive. More channels are Industry: New Imperatives for a
competing for audience attention and dollars. Success requires new insight New Digital Age (Accenture, 2010)
and innovation.
• Media companies are drowning in data, but not capitalizing on it. There is
more data available than ever, pouring in from multiple sources, but there’s still a
shortage of deep insight and foresight that can be used for business advantage.

To address these trends – to be able to optimize business decisions at the ■ Nine of the top 10 media companies
one-to-one level, by channel and across the enterprise – media companies need
rely on business analytics from SAS
more clarity about their audiences’ desires and behaviors and how best to use
their media assets and advertisements. to gain insights that drive more
relevant content, effective campaigns,
As audience engagement becomes paramount – and the volumes of data monetization and real-time strategies,
overwhelming – nine of the top 10 media companies are relying on SAS Analytics to
and optimization of ad inventory, ad
deliver more engaging content and optimize revenues and monetization strategies.
spending and media assets.
At first glance at the industry as a whole, it would appear that media companies
are on smooth waters. Following a bleak 2009 economy, media markets made
gains, and the trend is expected to continue. However, balancing the modest gains
are some fundamental and disruptive shifts in the operating environment for the
industry. Whether a media enterprise succeeds or recedes in the coming years will
be a function of how well it can adapt to four inescapable trends.

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Four Trends in the New Media Order ■ “We needed a way to access
massive amounts of consumer data,
combine it with information from
Media markets are converging, but audience insight is not.
our own research panel, and make
The delivery vehicles of today’s media output are anything but homogeneous, but sense of it all quickly enough to
disparate business models and delivery channels are converging. Most media enterprises develop strategies for our clients.
play in more than one area and interact with audiences in more than one outlet.
SAS helps us deliver this solution
For example, “most of the nation’s newspapers and magazines operate Web sites,” and actually cut our analysis time in
wrote analyst Joseph Agnese in Standard & Poor’s Industry Survey: Publishing and half. For us, that’s immediate ROI.”
Advertising (May 2010). “In addition, the major wire services, government news services,
President and CEO of a North
TV and radio programmers and broadcasters, and nontraditional publishers are operating
American Web analysis firm
thousands of Web-based news sites. Through paid subscriptions, listing fees, advertising
or all three, e-publishing is growing and profitable for many companies.”

Print publishers that have expanded into digital publishing have done well. For example,
the Wall Street Journal had more than 1 million paid Web subscribers by April 2010.
Nearly 14 percent of the New York Times Co.’s 2009 revenues came from the Internet.

Programmers and broadcasters all over the world are scrambling to roll out Internet
television services to wired and mobile devices. Consumers can already watch movies
and television programs via streaming video. When 4G technology becomes more
widespread, mobile devices will be a significant avenue for media companies to inform
and entertain their audiences.

What this means for media companies

Each medium represents a new or different opportunity for engagement and
monetization because each addresses a unique audience demand. Newspaper and
print are considered more trustworthy. Online provides instant, on-demand access to
personalized, endless content. Television provides a satisfying entertainment experience.

Audience behavior needs to be understood as it relates to each channel. More than

that, content must be appropriately optimized and reused across all these channels for
the audience segment, harvesting content synergies across brands and platforms.

However, as media companies expand into new communication channels, they

tend to operate each in a silo and make decisions at the channel level. The most
successful media companies will manage channels more strategically and holistically,
leveraging insights across media channels to optimize audience engagement and
monetization in each.

To do this well – to optimize business decisions at the audience level and across media
outlets – you need clarity about audience content preferences, desires and behaviors in
all the ways they interact with you. For most media companies, this calls for an entirely
different level of sophistication in data management and analysis.

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Media audiences are more involved than ever. ■ “The power to reach consumers
The audience has changed. No longer just passive consumers of prepackaged everywhere comes with responsibility:
content, today’s consumers demand more choice and more voice than ever before. to be meaningful everywhere.”
They want their opinions and observations noticed. They want to vote for the
Mary Beth Kemp, in The Art of
outcomes of reality shows. They want more say in the content and programming they
Connecting with Consumers
consume. They want custom RSS feeds of content of specific interest to them. They
Through Emerging Media …
want to feel part of the media community rather than outside observers.
Everywhere, July 2008

Naturally, we see the impact of this trend particularly in online channels. Search engines
and aggregators enable consumers to sift and choose among thousands of Web-based
publishing sites. Content is consumed and audience-generated anywhere, at any time.
The audience can pick and choose, screen and filter, click and command at will. It is not
necessarily bound by a monthly subscription or one-size-fits-all programming.

What this means for media companies

The unique value that most media companies provide is in their content and their
unique audience base. However, media content is typically spread out among various
media properties such as television, magazines and online publications. Content
variation is a given, but is content optimized for each channel? You might need to
redefine what you mean by “relevant” and “timely” content, because your audience
already has – and it has more options than ever besides your offering.

The audience behaves differently depending on which channel is currently engaging its
interest. One person might read a newspaper cover to cover but go online to get more
in-depth understanding of a particular topic or story. In fact, each channel may tap into
unique audience segments. Some audiences may only listen to the radio, others may
only listen to radio podcasts online. But audiences will tell you what they want because
they want to be involved. They want to customize their searches, provide input into
your programs, and define their unique website settings. Media companies must
analyze these audience inputs.

Content within each property – and audiences that interact with each channel – must
be well-understood, analyzed and optimized. Think about the markets not as a mass
but as a large collection of individuals – and find ways to engage these individuals
in more targeted ways. This requires understanding audiences and their overall
experience more deeply than ever before.

“If a company can’t craft a relevant and compelling experience, people won’t come
back. If they don’t come back, companies can’t learn enough about them to effectively
monetize the relationship,” wrote Marco Vernocchi and David Wolf of Accenture. “An
enterprise is then forced to remain in the world of digital small change – trying to make
money on sessions, site visits and page views” (Driving Growth Through Innovation
in the Media and Entertainment Industry: New Imperatives for a New Digital Age,
Accenture, 2010).

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The good news is that interactive channels are catalysts for new types of audience
engagement and provide clues about how to best monetize each channel and provide ■ “If a company can’t craft a relevant
custom content. and compelling experience, people
won’t come back. If they don’t
come back, companies can’t learn
Media monetization has become more elusive.
enough about them to effectively
The days of huge advertisement budgets for TV and print are over. However, TV monetize the relationship.”
advertisement still has its unique allure and, despite predictions that it would go away
(much like the predictions for paper and pens), audiences are still in love with their TV Marco Vernocchi and David Wolf,
sets – and so are the advertisers who want to reach them. Driving Growth Through Innovation
in the Media and Entertainment
Big media companies are riding a rebound in TV ad spending, according to Andrew Industry: New Imperatives for a
Vanacore of the Associated Press. “[In August 2010] Viacom Inc. and Time Warner Inc. New Digital Age (Accenture, 2010)
reported that their cable TV channels saw improvements in advertising revenue. CBS
Corp. saw a similar rebound at its local television stations. News Corp. saw growth on
both sides” (source: “TV Ad Revenue Rebounds in a Sign of Recovery,” Aug. 6, 2010).

Internet advertising may be growing and is less costly, but often media companies
struggle to convert online customers and drive them to click on ads.

Newspapers still have the greatest overall share of advertising dollars – 21.7 percent,
compared to 13.9 percent for Internet – but the balance is shifting. According to the
May 2010 Standard & Poor’s Industry Survey: Publishing and Advertising, online
advertising is expected to grow 12.9 percent in 2010.

In fact, according to an Associated Press article, “What Earnings Reports Have

Revealed About Ads,” Google Inc. reported a 3 percent rise in its average cost per
click, meaning companies paid more to place ads. People clicked on ads 16 percent
more than they did in the same period in 2009. Executives also indicate that display
advertising accounted for nearly 10 percent of ad revenue in the quarter, and mobile
advertising was almost 4 percent (Nov. 10, 2010).

However, the transience and sheer number of online ads diminishes their actual value. ■ “With SAS, we have the capabilities
According to digital media advertising guru Greg Stuart, there are more than 4.5 trillion
we need, and as our confidence
online ads served annually; an average of about 2,000 ads per person per month. (Review
of the Digital Advertising Ecosystem, January 2010.) How does an advertiser optimize a
grows, we will be executing more
placement strategy in this inundated channel alone, much less across all channels? and better-targeted campaigns but
with less effort.”

What this means for media companies Chief operating officer of a large
European infotainment company
Monetization has always been a challenge. The sheer variety of advertisements and
sponsorships highlight the unique opportunities to target very granular audience
segments. Advertisers must rely on a mix of media properties to reach their target
audiences and to optimize their ad assets. Most media companies rely on multiple,
hybrid revenue streams – a blend of advertising-funded models, subscription services,
tiered services and hybrid approaches.

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Print publications tend to carry more credibility and clout than online news sources,
so print publishers can continue to count on advertising revenues. A McKinsey & ■ “One thing is for sure: We are now
Company study reported that 66 percent of respondents described newspaper succeeding in areas where we
advertising as “informative and confidence inspiring,” compared to only 44 percent could not possibly have succeeded
for TV and 12 percent for the Web (Philipp M. Nattermann, A Glimmer of Hope for
without SAS. It was a prerequisite
Newspapers, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2010).
for moving forward.”
Television broadcasters and carriers are under pressure as well; the cost of upgrading Chief operating officer, European
networks to carry bandwidth-intensive video services (including ad-free programming) multimedia publisher
will not be matched by new subscriber revenues.

Media companies in general should be thinking about using audience insights

across channels to optimize monetization of each. For example, the opportunity is
there to optimize advertising assets across these channels, but this requires more
understanding of both the audience behavior within each channel and the assets
themselves – more insight than most media companies have today.

Paid subscriptions represent another means of monetization, but audiences need to

see the value of the content and know that their unique needs are being met before
they commit to a paid subscription. Another opportunity to improve profits is to
optimize the inventory of media assets to reduce returns and stock-outs.

Media companies are drowning in data, but not capitalizing on it.

There are more sources of useful data than ever. There are the old standbys: audience
demographics, set-top box data, Nielsen rating data, surveys, focus groups and such.
Now, online visitors also leave behind a wealth of information about what they viewed,
clicked, linked to and commented on. Once subscribers begin streaming TV shows on
their phones, operators will have detailed data about their viewing habits, coupled with
the subscriber demographic information they already had.

In spite of this wealth of data, media companies aren’t getting much value from it
because:

• The data from each channel isn’t shared with the others or across the business.
• Online content that remains static is short-lived and is of limited value.

What this means for media companies

The real value lies in bringing data together for analysis – correlating it so as to
understand viewers across all these channels. “A potential benefit of an audience-
centric strategy is that publishers will become audience experts, and they can leverage
that insight to establish their value to advertisers,” wrote Sarah Rotman Epps in What
Does an Audience-Focused Model Really Mean for Publishers? (Forrester Research,
August 2008). “But to do this effectively, publishers need tools to catalog the data they
have about their audience and make that data readily accessible and useful.”

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Ultimately, you want to be able to say with confidence, “I know what kind of content will
best serve this audience,” and “I can show which audience matches your advertised
■ “Using SAS, we don’t roll out
product and how this audience wants to see your ad.” anything to the website that will
not drive value for the customer.
In a perfect world, you want to be able to correlate all the data trails that consumers
And simultaneously, when we roll
either volunteer or leave behind as a result of their activities, from demographics to Web
page views and clicks, from loyalty card data captured with offline purchases to online
something out, we know what it’s
transaction records, from set-top box data to exposures to advertisers’ messages. This going to do for the business and for
requires a level of data management and analysis not commonly found today. the customer. That measurability
is critical for us, and it’s clear that
SAS helps us do that.”

Succeeding in the New Media Age Senior manager of data mining

for an online provider of print
If you are in the media industry, these four key trends are not news to you. Cultural
publications
and technology upheavals have already caused you to fundamentally rethink how
you interact with your audiences, how you manage and deliver content, and how you
monetize each of your channels.

“Improving consumer engagement in [today’s] me-media age involves developing

the right models for consumer interaction, harnessing analytics for better insight
into consumer behaviors, and creating richer, more relevant and more engaging
opportunities for consumer interaction,” wrote Vernocchi and Wolf.

If you deliver both an experience and content that is highly relevant to consumers, they
are more likely to stick around to become long-term customers. If they stick around,
you have more of a chance to really understand them and keep them engaged. That
understanding can translate directly into revenue.

How do media companies acquire that deep insight? Even if they can capture data
from all the relevant sources, today’s media world is still one of masses of data: millions
of online users, billions of tweets, trillions of online ad exposures.

The ideal of an intimate relationship with a familiar audience relies on analytics to distill
new insights from gigabytes of data points. In fact, nine of the top 10 media companies
rely on business analytics from SAS to gain insights that drive more intelligent
monetization and engagement strategies, grow advertising and subscription revenue,
provide relevant real-time offers and accurately forecast content demand.

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Data-Driven Intelligence for Media Companies ■ “By using SAS, we make sure every
action our marketing and sales people
Media companies are using – or should be using – a variety of data management,
reporting and analytic capabilities.
take is data-driven and profitable.”
Senior director of business
intelligence and predictive analytics
for an online career development
portal service

Figure 1. A complete business analytics framework couples data management,

reporting and analytics with media-specific business solutions.

Data management capabilities provide quick and easy access, cleansing and
integration of data from across departments and media properties. Good data
management enables you to confidently answer questions such as:

• How many audience members do I have accessing more than one media
property?
• Do I have duplicate or conflicting audience information from one channel to the next?

Reporting reveals what is going on in the business today and can answer questions
such as these:

• How many viewers watched the program this season? Has the number of
subscribers increased?
• Which search requests/TV programs/news articles/advertisements are in highest
demand?
• What were the results of a one-time promotion?
• How was the audience view rate today affected by the competing program?
• Which audience segment had the biggest decline in viewers this season?
• Which search words are the most popular on our website?
• Ad revenue declined sharply. What action is needed?

Reporting is essential hindsight for running the business – looking at what already
happened – but it doesn’t tell you much about what’s likely to happen in the future. For
that you need analytics.

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Analytics refers to a broad range of capabilities, from creative investigation of existing

data to statistically derived foresight about future outcomes. Analytics can answer ■ “Companies now have
questions such as: unprecedented access to data and
• What is leading to a decline in subscriptions/viewers? sophisticated technology that can
• What content is most relevant and timely to this particular reader? inform decisions as never before.
• How can I improve tagging and automating for online content? How successful are they at helping
• How can I improve the “findability” of content for my readers? forecast what customers want to
• What will online content demand be in six months? watch, listen to and buy?”
• Which audience segment is most likely to respond to this campaign?
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne
• Which customers will churn? G. Harris, “What People Want (and
• How do we optimize the number/type of publications and ad assets to achieve How to Predict It),” in MIT Sloan
objectives? Management Review, Winter 2009
• What is the optimal mix of customer, offering, price and channel?
• How can we optimize our advertising inventory?
• How can we optimally price advertisements remaining in inventory?

Business solutions combine these technologies with domain and industry intellectual
property to automate and optimize processes and enable real-time decision making.
These solutions answer questions such as:
• While the customer is on the call, what is the most relevant offering I can make?
• How can I automate the selection of subscriber lists and the implementation of
complex campaigns?
• How can I execute multichannel, inbound and outbound campaigns while factoring
constraints such as budget and contact policies?

More media companies are embracing analytics, but often minimally, such as just using
reporting. Every analytic technology adds value, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition,
and it is not enough to only answer some of your pertinent questions. Media companies
need to use a variety of analytics to solve both the issues of today and the concerns of
tomorrow. As the degree of foresight increases, so does competitive advantage.

Media companies need to use a variety of analytics to solve

both the issues of today and the concerns of tomorrow.

What is the next best offer I can make on this call?

How can I optimize my mix of advertising assets?

Which audience segment is most likely to respond?

What will on-line content demand be in 6 months?

How can I improve the ‘findability’ of content?

What is leading to a decline in subscriptions?

Ad revenue declined sharply.

What action is needed?
How was the audience view rate
affected by the competing program?

Which programs/articles are in highest demand?

How many audience members do I have accessing

multiple media properties?

Figure 2. Analytics – from reporting on the past to delivering insights about the future.
As the degree of foresight increases, so does competitive advantage.

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How SAS® Helps Optimize Content and Monetization

Across Channels
In this more complex business environment, SAS delivers insights that drive more
relevant content, effective campaigns, monetization and real-time strategies, and
optimization of ad inventory, ad spending and media assets.

SAS provides the data management, reporting, analytics and business solutions to
help media companies perform more effectively toward five key goals:

• Analyze audience insights and client advertising spending across media

properties.
• Granularly segment audiences, predict trends and improve targeting.
• Create relevant and timely online and offline content.
• Better convert sales opportunities and trigger real-time offers.
• Implement more effective campaigns.
• Predict and optimize inventory of media assets and advertisements.

Goal 1: Analyze audience insights and client ad spending across

media properties.
Media companies need a more comprehensive view of audience members and
how they respond to content – online and offline. That requires blending data
from user demographics, online transactions, offline purchasing behavior and
media consumption – all correlated with marketing/advertising stimuli – to create a
360-degree view.

SAS assembles, integrates and cleanses the necessary data from disparate systems
and across business units to support that holistic view. Because there is additional
insight to be gained by integrating third-party data, SAS integrates and analyzes data
from sources such as Nielsen, Comscore, Hitwise and Quantcast, survey data, set-top
box data and more.

With analytics, media companies can now understand client advertising spending
across properties and gather audience insights across media outlets. They can gain
additional insights from unstructured data using text analytics to examine all content
in conjunction with audience information. SAS helps media companies capture every
mouse click, page view and other online activity – and combine this information with
behavioral history (behavioral targeting) and contact strategy across multiple channels.

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Goal 1: Analyze audience insights and client ad spending across media properties.
Technology
Data management and reporting capabilities
pull data from nearly any source – internal and
external – and transform it to be analysis-ready.
Integrates and analyzes data across data sources
– such as Nielsen, Comscore, Hitwise and
Quantcast – survey data, set-top box data and
more.
Integrates third-party data (demographic,
geographic, psychographic, etc.) into a unified
customer view.
Text analytics automates manually laborious
activities for online channels and archival search,
associating materials to increase audience
relevance.
■ “SAS helps us convert the raw data
we have into actual knowledge. …
What SAS Software Does for Media Companies
So we have a total picture of the
Creates a unified, accurate understanding of
the audience/ consumer segment across media customer and therefore a much more
channels and of client advertising spending and solid foundation for communication.
future value.
Identifies numbers of subscribers, viewers and It is definitely a new way of doing
inventories as well as which programs/content business, and gives us a clear
solicited the best response.
advantage over our main competitor
in magazine subscriptions.”
Vice president, European publisher
Creates metadata from unstructured content,
automating tagging to improve content
management systems and search engine retrieval
relevance.
Classifies all news feeds from all content
properties – with industry-standard taxonomies
that you control.
Effectively uses all information, both structured
and unstructured, in analysis.

Customer experience analytics solution Provides an immediate and complete picture of

captures and analyzes Web interactions and consumers and how they interact with your media.
integrates them with other channel views. Reveals how your best customers react to new
website design changes.

Customer Examples – Analyze audience insights and client ad spending

across media properties
• A leading provider of publications, information and consulting services in the
UK wanted a system that would deliver customer intelligence for more targeted
management. Having grown through acquisitions, the business had many
different pools of data, ranging from corporate systems to a regional salesperson
with a laptop database. Customers were often hidden within individual group
companies. SAS enabled the company to pull diverse sources together into a
complete view of the customer to drive a customer-focused approach.

• An online media company aggregated content coming from its properties in 20

major US markets. It also needed to categorize and make searchable content
added by users, such as photos, blogs and comments. “SAS technologies
enable us to define and categorize our vast amount of content so that we can
more frequently surface the news and information and drive page views,” said the
company’s vice president of the Internet division.

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Goal 2: Granularly segment audiences, predict trends and improve

targeting.
To be relevant, to engage in the right kind of dialogue and deliver a more customized
experience, media companies need a more profound level of audience understanding.
Page views and impressions alone do not capture the complexity of consumer
interactions, nor do they help you drive conversion, improve online content and target
advertising. With predictive analytics, data mining, segmentation and modeling, SAS
creates customer profiles that explain and predict audience behavior. With SAS, media
companies can score users to assign them to appropriate segments and be alerted to
changes in behavior that might indicate likelihood to churn.

Goal 2: Granularly segment audiences, predict trends and improve targeting.

Technology What SAS Software Does for Media Companies

Predictive analytics, data mining, Identifies important attributes, behaviors and

segmentation and modeling reveal hidden
patterns, associations and likely future outcomes.
needs/wants of each audience group, and scores
users to accurately assign them to segments.
Creates profiles and segments that explain and
predict customer behavior.
Identifies behavioral trends and automatically
sends alerts for early warning of changes in
behavior that might indicate likelihood to churn.

Customer Examples – Granularly segment audiences, predict trends and

improve targeting
• A major provider of online travel information and booking uses SAS to regularly
compare different website layouts, looking for the combination of content and
offers that drives the best revenue. Since the ideal offers and approaches will
depend on customer needs/wants, SAS goes beyond traditional demographics-
based segmentation and identifies customer segment groups based entirely
on customers’ purchasing behavior. SAS also scores credit card transactions
immediately to decide whether to confirm a purchase on the spot or hold it for a
second look. The system learns from closed-loop feedback and retrains models
for continuous improvement.
• A global technology online media company focused in targeting ads for its
Fortune 500® customers needed a better way to automate its ad placements
and simultaneously improve targeting to its growing audience. With SAS, it now
delivers ads to site readers who are actively viewing related information – based
on real-time categorization that ensures the ads are not only highly relevant to the
immediate content, but also appear on related news and editorial sites.

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Goal 3: Create relevant and timely online and offline content.

■ “Publishers must take a more
With deeper insights into the audience, media companies can deliver content that better
strategic view of technology in terms
meets their needs and preferences, which in turn ensures a better consumer experience,
thereby reducing churn and increasing the value of the audience to advertisers. With of how it supports an audience-
targeted content, media companies can maximize hits/views and present users with the focused strategy. Publishers need
most relevant content for their needs, without them having to ask for it. to manage content and inventory
around serving audiences.”
Delivering highly targeted/more personalized content also applies to the customer
experience across media channels – and across sales/circulation, billing, marketing and Sarah Rotman Epps in What Does
other customer touch points. For example, how does your audience want information An Audience-Focused Model Really
surfaced? How does it want to be contacted? Does it want billing/subscription Mean For Publishers? (Forrester
information online? If so, how does it want it? Media companies can analyze multiple Research, August 2008)
inputs from both structured and unstructured information sources to understand how
audiences interact with the media and the organization in general – and optimize the
value of the total experience.

Because audiences’ needs change, it is important to understand trends and predict

future needs. These insights can help media companies better target content and
advertising – both online and offline.

Goal 3: Create relevant and timely online and offline content.

Technology What SAS Software Does for Media Companies

Predictive analytics, data mining, segmentation Supports better decisions about which
and modeling reveals hidden patterns, advertisements and content should be offered.
associations and likely future outcomes. Identifies which programs will or will not likely have
the most interest to particular audience segments.

Text analytics organizes, associates and
evaluates large volumes of unstructured data
from online and offline channels, such as
content, opinions and comments from e-mails,
social media comments, call center and online
entries/searches.
Identifies audience opinions of you and your
competition.
Guides decisions about content/programming,
Web design, and which communities/advocates to
engage.
Drives faster and more efficient content
organization, association and access within a
network of content sources and sites – eliminating
manual and redundant content tagging and linking.
Proactively identifies new, emerging topics
expressed by your customers from all your
channels.
Improves search engine placement and
performance, even when keywords don’t appear
in the headline – associating all the relevant
information and ads for maximizing readership
and revenues.

Forecasting identifies previously unseen trends
and anticipates future fluctuations for better
planning.
Forecasts online and traditional programming
schedules to maximize ratings and track and
analyze additive/dilutive effects across properties.
Forecasts program or content demand for a given
audience segment during a given time period
or promotion to help media companies optimize
content and better target advertisements.

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Customer Examples – Create relevant and timely online and offline content
■ “The breadth and completeness
• A major US news organization uses SAS to categorize online articles so they
will be organized under the correct topic categories, boosting the position of its of SAS Analytics let us use any
articles in search engine displays. Now all content is automatically tagged, articles modeling methodology we need,
are showing up higher in search engine displays, and news alerts have a 50 unlike black-box tools with limited
percent click-through ratio.
capabilities. With SAS, we can
• Canada’s leading career management Web portal uses SAS to automatically
deliver just the right audience to
categorize job postings and résumés within hundreds of categories – in multiple
languages – and store them as metadata in the database. The SAS system our clients in real time, every time.
correctly parses and analyzes content for entities and events, which are then These clients boast performance
used to trigger calls to the most appropriate candidates. lifts of 30 to 80 percent by selecting
• A Web analysis firm uses SAS to deliver insights about the online customer the right creative.”
experience for its FORTUNE Global 500® clients. SAS has enabled them to
analyze more data in half the time, detect potential problems with client websites Executive vice president of
in half the time, reduce work-hour costs and improve customer satisfaction. optimization at a leading provider
• A major online employment portal in Asia uses SAS to process large volumes of predictive marketing solutions
of content and eliminate manual and redundant content tagging processes.
SAS drives faster, efficient information organization, access and findability,
while drastically reducing the resource overhead associated with the content
categorization process. These capabilities resulted in a dramatic drop in costs.
Improving the matching algorithm between résumés and job postings increased
accuracy to more than 95 percent.
• A world-leading publisher serving more than 30 million users worldwide needed
to better manage constantly changing content, reduce manual tagging errors,
and improve search across 28 different and equally large archive databases. With
SAS, the information is now collaboratively managed from three different countries,
generating high-precision search and retrieval results in multiple languages.

Goal 4: Better convert sales opportunities and trigger real-time offers.

Without audience insight across media properties, granular segmentation and relevant
content, there is little hope of improving monetization strategies. But to perform these
activities and stop would also be foolhardy. Those insights should be used to help
make sound decisions in real time. SAS uses the insights gained through predictive
modeling and analytics to help prioritize sales efforts and deliver real-time solutions to
substantially improve win rates.

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Goal 4: Better convert sales opportunities and trigger real-time offers. ■ “The results we were getting were
stunningly better than before. This
Technology What SAS Software Does for Media Companies
not only showed our targeting
Real-time decision management delivers Brings real-time analytic capabilities – such as
real-time decisions and recommendations to customer lifetime value, propensity, attrition and was far better, but that we also
interactive customer channels, such as the credit-risk modeling – into the decision-making had the ability to take a far more
Web, call center and point of sale. process.
Understands the user’s profile within a few
‘real-time’ approach. We can be
clicks on the website, and immediately triggers more responsive in how we run
appropriate follow-up campaign decisions.
campaigns, using data extracted
Maintains a library of personalized offers ready for
presentation to the right user at the right moment in a few days rather than a month
in time.
before a campaign.”
Enables business users to construct, implement
and manage decision criteria across all channels. Head of management information
systems at a leading global
Customer Examples – Better Convert Sales Opportunities and Trigger information services, consulting
Real-Time Offers and publishing company
• A Scandinavian magazine publisher was concerned that 50 percent of subscribers
left at first annual renewal. SAS helped the company manage one-to-one
communications with nearly 800,000 subscribers, which resulted in an increase in the
renewal rate from 52.5 to 58.5 percent.
• A North American online employment portal wanted to increase customer retention,
market share and profitability through better cross-selling and up-selling. Using SAS,
the company analyzed internal and external data to score 1.4 million companies in
the Dun & Bradstreet database and rank those not yet using the company’s service.

The BI scoring model divided prospect companies into three segments based on
their potential value and propensity to buy. An advanced calibration model assembled
balanced prospect lists for new sales representatives. Each sales rep was given
the same mix of high, medium and low probability clients to contact – then started
shifting more important customers to the more successful salespeople. During its first
year using SAS, the company increased customer retention by 15 percent, salesforce
productivity by 40 percent and marketing efficiency by 40 percent.

Goal 5: Implement more effective campaigns.

Media companies can be more efficient and effective in marketing and promotional
campaigns by taking advantage of campaign automation, optimization and real-time/
next-best-offer support. Analytic insights reveal unproductive spending and enable
companies to focus investments on the marketing activities and channels that have the
highest potential. Predictive modeling determines which audience segments are most
likely to respond to an offer.

With SAS, companies gain the insights necessary to design, implement and automate
highly customized, multichannel campaigns, applying the best offer/channel for each
segment. With marketing optimization, multiple weighted campaign objectives and
constraints, such as contact policies and budgets, can all be factored in to ensure the right
offer is matched to the right customer and the right channel to achieve those objectives.

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Goal 5: Implement more effective campaigns.
Technology
Predictive analytics, data mining,
segmentation, and modeling reveal hidden
patterns, associations and likely future outcomes. Through behavioral targeting, ensures relevance
Marketing automation provides an integrated
framework for planning, testing and executing
marketing campaigns of any size or complexity.
Digital marketing solutions support the rapid
execution of integrated e-mail, mobile, RSS and
Web campaigns.
■ “Before SAS we were in the dark
when it came to understanding
What SAS Software Does for Media Companies
what activities worked and what
Determines which audience segments are most
likely to respond to an offer. didn’t at the level of the individual
customer. Now we’re getting that
and a corresponding lift in digital ad revenue.
understanding. And that means we
Enables creation of models that identify customers
likely to churn or audience most likely to respond to can put our resources into activities
cross-sell/up-sell initiatives.
that deliver a return on investment.”
Streamlines the creation and execution of Vice president, European publisher
multichannel, multi-offer communication strategies
– for online and offline media, inbound and
outbound interactions.
Manages customer contact strategy and segments
in an accurate, integrated fashion.
Records and tracks every offer and response
across channels, using rules and suppressions
to ensure that customers are not contacted with
too many offers or offers that conflict with others
already made.
Delivers consistent content and personalization
across online and offline channels.
Improves marketing performance and
accountability through measurement and closed-
loop activities.
Supports RSS feeds to enable customers to receive
messages without sorting through their inboxes.
Links marketing activities and aligns them with
overall company goals, while optimizing marketing
expenditures.

Marketing optimization balances multiple Simultaneously evaluates multiple campaigns to

constraints such as budget, channel and contact
strategy to make the most of each customer
interaction and maximize campaign ROI.
determine which products should be marketed
to whom.
Evaluates alternative scenarios with different
objectives, constraints and parameters to identify
the best communication strategies.

Customer Examples – Implement more effective marketing campaigns

• A large European magazine publisher wanted to reduce churn among the 3
million subscribers and 5 million to 6 million passive customers in its database.
The solution puts sophisticated analytical reporting tools directly into the hands
of the marketers, to enable them to do their own pre-campaign selections and
to analyze campaign results – as well as manage internal competition among
titles. Marketers can now get reports rapidly, and focus their efforts on analytical
activities that add the most value, such as identifying successful campaigns that
are reproducible and reusable for other titles. SAS is also used to ensure that the
right magazines reach the right stores in the right quantities to maximize sales
and minimize waste.

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• An application service provider within a major media and magazine distributor

sought to increase revenues by strategically cross-selling and up-selling other
products. Advanced campaign management capabilities from SAS enable it to
gain deeper insights into its more than 8 million active subscribers. With SAS,
“we could quickly determine what was happening, which campaigns were
profitable and which ones were not,” said the company’s manager of business
development. “Knowing this, we can easily refine our campaigns and achieve the
right balance of contact with our customers.”
• A provider of information and publications for the legal profession used SAS to
improve its ability to make the right offers to the right people at the right time.
Data integration capabilities consolidated numerous data sources, including
legacy databases and list sources, into a single customer-centric database from
which highly targeted marketing campaigns can now be automated, with SAS
also used to manage and track campaign success. Using SAS, the company
realized a threefold increase in ROI on marketing spending, a 75-83 percent
increase in customer retention, and a jump in sales conversion rates for customer
acquisition from one in 33 to one in 11. Overall, the project delivered an ROI of
225 percent.

Goal 6: Predict and optimize inventory of media assets and

advertisements.
Media companies need to predict the right quantities of each media product to
distribute to the right locations – especially for high-margin print products – to meet
demand and to reduce costly returns and stock-outs. Text analytics automates
content tagging of text repositories and manages an extremely high volume of
collections of assets and ad stores. In this way, media companies know what their
assets really are, can find them when needed, and even automatically associate –
improving asset usage and inventory management.

Equally important, media companies need to create, manage and optimize advertising
inventory across media properties. SAS organizes inventory for real-time, relevant retrieval
and incorporates updated supply/demand forecasts to further optimize yield while
ensuring purchase order compliance. With SAS, media companies can gain a complete,
accurate view of advertising activity, spending and profitability across media properties
and analyze marketing elements to create the optimal advertising and promotion mix.

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 SAS® FOR MEDIA

Goal 6: Predict and optimize inventory of media assets and advertisements.
Technology
Text analytics solves content chaos, automating
the organization of archival stores and databases
for effective search and retrieval.
■ “As a direct result of this first phase of
What SAS Software Does for Media Companies
our project, we were able to measure
significant gains in terms of cost
Automates manual content tagging of all text
repositories, generating metadata for search reduction and reporting time saved.”
engines and content management systems.
Manages extremely high-volume collections of Director of production for a large,
assets and ad repositories – creating summaries, European infotainment company
removing duplicates and associating only the
most meaningful information.
Improves asset use and inventory management
from systematic and ongoing classification of all
text content.

Marketing mix analysis forecasts and optimizes Analyzes marketing elements to create the optimal
the mix of advertising and promotions. advertising/promotion mix.
Quantifies the effect of marketing and media on
business metrics such as brand awareness and
Web traffic.

Optimization/operations research (OR) Intelligently matches ad inventory to complex

determines the best allocation of resources demand.
within constraints. Optimizes media assets to reduce returns and
stock-outs.

Customer Examples – Predict and Optimize Inventory of Media Assets and

Advertisements
• A North American broadcast rating service uses SAS to help provide accurate
audience data on millions of households, so television and radio stations, networks,
advertising agencies and national advertisers can determine the value of radio and
TV commercial time in order to price it accordingly. With huge volumes of data to
process and analyze from its ongoing audience survey sweeps, the company relies
on a powerful SAS Analytics solution with automated modeling to improve accuracy
in survey sample forecasting and provide deeper data analysis. SAS automated the
forecasting process while improving the number of surveys that met the company’s
accuracy criteria – up from 60 percent to 80 percent – thereby enabling its media
company clients to better price their commercial time.
• A North American broadcaster with a presence in 14 countries (with hundreds of
local stations) uses SAS to optimize its advertising inventory. Through better rating,
demand forecasting and pricing, the company saw a 3 percent lift in ad revenue,
representing an additional $25 million in the first year alone.
• A North American broadcaster realized a 3 percent lift ($24 million a year) by using
forecasting and optimization in its ad inventory sales process. Statistical forecasting
methods typically drive a 20 percent improvement in accuracy.
• A European publishing giant uses SAS to provide high-quality and transparent
reporting of critical circulation information, which is used to guide marketing and
distribution initiatives for a broad range of publications and millions of readers. Before
SAS, these reports were produced by manually consolidating Excel tables. Now the
weekly process has been automated, using data from multiple Oracle databases,

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Excel tables and text files. Now reports are produced in half the time – enabling more
timely insights to adjust content or campaigns in alignment with customer and
market trends.
• An American publisher that provides reference databases, subscription
management, online journals, books and linking services had to improve its search
procedures for 200 staff members. With SAS, its semi-automated process includes
automatic summarization, spelling correction and stemming – so employees can
readily evaluate articles from abstracts alone, and content is automatically tagged
to help manage the huge knowledge base. As a result, the speed of processing
materials improved by 67 percent.

Closing Thoughts
The future of the multichannel, multiplatform media industry depends on companies’
ability to deliver a high-value customer experience, coupled with a high-value business
model. That ideal requires a deeper level of insight: holistic perspective about what and
how audiences want to engage with the content, and understanding how to monetize
value to audiences and advertisers across all media outlets.

That’s where SAS comes in, transforming masses of disparate data into usable
business intelligence – unified, analytics-driven perspective in a fast-changing media
landscape. SAS delivers insights that drive more relevant content, effective campaigns,
monetization and real-time strategies, and optimization of ad inventory, ad spending
and media assets.
For more information, visit: www.sas.com/industry/media.

From SAS, a Leader in Business Intelligence

SAS has helped organizations across all industries realize the full potential of their
greatest asset: data. Simply put, SAS allows you to transform data about customers,
performance, financials and more into information and predictive insight that lays the
groundwork for solid and coherent decisions. That’s why SAS is used at more than
50,000 sites in over 100 countries, including 93 of the top 100 companies on the 2010
Fortune Global 500® list and nine of the top 10 media companies. www.sas.com

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