Download Condé Nast Case Study

Leading Media Company Gains New Insights
with Cloud-Based Microsoft BI Solution
Overview
Customer: Condé Nast
Customer Website: www.condenast.com
Customer Size: 6,000 employees
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Media and entertainment—
Publishing
Customer Profile
Based in New York City, Condé Nast is a
leading media company with 164 million
consumers and 20 digital and print
media brands including Vogue, Wired,
and the New Yorker.
Business Situation
Condé Nast needed better insight into
brand performance but struggled with
pulling data together from multiple
sources.
Solution
The company implemented a cloudbased solution with Power BI.
Benefits
 Transforms business intelligence with
self-service BI tools
 Simplifies reporting and deepens
insight
 Empowers users and cuts support
requests by 30 percent
 Gains better business agility
“The ability to ask any question you like and then see
data immediately returned leads to more-informed
conversations. Power BI Q&A will change the way the
whole organization thinks and interacts.”
Christopher Reynolds, Vice President of Data and Marketing Analytics, Condé Nast
Condé Nast, a global media company, wanted better insight into
consumer behavior to improve the performance of its 20
industry-leading print and digital media brands. The company
needed to provide analytics information quickly to internal sales
and editorial teams, but it faced challenges including multiple
reporting tools and unintegrated data sources. For better
efficiency and business intelligence (BI), the company
implemented a solution based on Power BI. As a result, the
company is gaining unprecedented insight into data from
multiple vendors, expects to cut requests for support by 30
percent, and is gaining better business agility.
“Visualization with Power
BI provides instant
access to relevant
information … so that
people can easily see
areas of opportunity.”
Cara Weiss, Senior Director of Marketing
Analytics, Condé Nast
Situation
Condé Nast is a globally recognized media
company with brands that include the
Vogue, Wired, Golf Digest, GQ, and
Architectural Digest. Established in 1909,
the company today serves 164 million
consumers, publishes 20 brands, and offers
content across both print and digital media
such as websites, film, television, and video.
To improve insight into the performance of
multiple brands and media types, the
company’s Marketing and Analytics team
needed better business intelligence (BI)
tools.
The mission-critical Marketing Analytics
team offered BI information to editors,
journalists, and marketers responsible for
developing content and boosting
advertising and subscription revenue. The
data included consumer profiles, insight
into competing brands and market share,
and feedback on digital traffic.
To provide the information, the team
worked with BI tools and data sets from
more than 10 market research vendors
including comScore, Mediamark Research
(MRI), Omniture, and Kantar. The team
struggled with limited analytics capabilities,
and correlating data from the disparate
sources was difficult and time-consuming.
In addition, it often fielded redundant
requests from its internal clients—the sales
and editorial teams. “Because we have
multiple brands, we get a lot of the same
requests for data,” says Cara Weiss, Senior
Director of Marketing Analytics at Condé
Nast. “There’s also a lot of back and forth
with one request, because there might be
four or five iterations before they see the
story they want to tell.”
Instead of having to struggle with diverse
analytics and reporting tools, Condé Nast
wanted a centralized solution that would
pull together disparate data sources and
provide self-service BI capabilities. The
Marketing and Analytics team sought to
push insights out to magazines and
respond proactively instead of reacting to
individual requests.
Solution
In 2011, Condé Nast had started working
with PowerPivot—the Microsoft Excel 2010
spreadsheet software add-in—and liked the
results. So when the company looked for a
self-service BI solution, Microsoft was the
first choice. In May 2013, the company
decided to become an early adopter of
Power BI, a cloud-based business
intelligence platform. “Microsoft was very
attractive to us from the beginning,” says
Justin Glatz, Director of Business and
Corporate Systems at Condé Nast. “It’s a
big incentive for us to have a corporate
tool for data discovery and analytics that
works so well with Excel.”
The Marketing Analytics team began a
proof of concept with Vogue and Wired
magazines. Using PowerPivot for Excel with
SQL Server 2014 Enterprise software, the
team pulled together data sets from
vendors including Omniture, MRI, and
Kantar, and then created Power BI sites for
sharing reports.
Next, the team published a series of reports
each for Vogue and Wired in Power BI.
Through highly visual, interactive features
such as graphs and pie charts, the reports
provide immediate insight into factors such
as consumer behavior, market share,
competitors, and web traffic across PC
browsers, tablets, and mobile devices.
Editorial teams and marketers can quickly
drill down into more detail. For example,
users can easily see not only how many
visitors access a site, but also the types of
devices they’re using and whether they
leave immediately or linger. This
information in turn can be used to tailor
content for specific devices and audiences.
Users work with several tools, including
Power Query in Excel and Q&A, a naturallanguage search feature in Power BI. All the
user needs to do is ask a simple question,
and the tool quickly returns results from
“With Power BI, we can
provide the right insights
to both the sales and
editorial teams ‘just-intime’ so that they can
make informed decisions
about how they manage
the success of their
magazine brand.”
Christopher Reynolds, Vice President of
Marketing Analytics, Condé Nast
multiple data sources in the form of
interactive charts and graphs.
Condé Nast is launching the solution in
February 2014 and expects that other
publications, including Glamour magazine,
will soon want to use the new tools. Plans
include integrating unstructured data from
social networking sites such as Facebook
and Twitter and information pulled from
marketing research databases.
Benefits
With Power BI, Condé Nast is transforming
the way it works with data from internal
sources as well as vendors. As a result, the
company is improving efficiency while
empowering users to make better, datadriven decisions.
Transforms Business Intelligence
With its Microsoft BI solution, Condé Nast
is not only using data in a whole new way,
but also gaining insight that wasn’t
possible in the past. And the company
expects to transform business operations as
a result. “Power BI is a pragmatic,
impressive approach to business
enablement,” says Joe Simon, Chief
Technology Officer at Condé Nast. “The
convergence of technologies in the
platform—including natural-language
processing, cloud architecture, and an
integrated productivity suite with Office
365—puts deep analytical capabilities in
users’ hands in a very accessible way.”
The comprehensive platform and improved
accessibility benefit multiple business roles
and processes. Weiss explains,
“Visualization with Power BI provides
instant access to relevant information, and
it can be used in sales and marketing
documents, as well as from an editorial
standpoint, so that people can easily see
areas of opportunity.”
The solution provides more opportunities
on the back end too. “Power BI is highly
flexible,” says Jeff Petrusa, Associate
Director of Marketing Analytics at Condé
Nast. “We can do a lot more than we ever
could before not only in terms of
visualization, but also in terms of
supporting reports from multiple data sets.”
Simplifies Reporting and Deepens
Insight
The team anticipates that capabilities such
as natural-language searches will also
simplify reporting as well as drive user
adoption. “The ability to ask any question
you like and then see data immediately
returned leads to more-informed
conversations,” says Christopher Reynolds,
Vice President of Data and Marketing
Analytics at Condé Nast. “Power Q&A will
change the way the whole organization
thinks and interacts.”
New insights often lead to more probing
questions and greater business intelligence.
“Power BI is a solution for the ‘second
question’ problem we’re increasingly
seeing,” says Glatz. “Many other BI
solutions work well for answering that first
question, but it’s almost impossible to
follow up. In contrast, Power BI seems
designed from the start to quickly answer
the chain of questions that arise after that
first inquiry.”
Empowers Users and Cuts Support
Requests by 30 Percent
The Marketing and Analytics team at Condé
Nast expects measurable improvements in
efficiency. Petrusa designed the Power BI
reports that he says will make his job
significantly easier. He explains, “We
believe we can eliminate at least 30 percent
of redundant reporting tasks by using
Power BI.”
The solution will also empower decision
makers to find information on their own,
without waiting for help from the
Marketing Analytics team. “By taking
advantage of Power BI, people can dive in
without waiting for a response,” says Weiss.
“This in turn frees up our team to do more
of the insight and storytelling instead of
just pulling data and handing it off.”
Unlock insights on any data
Microsoft business intelligence (BI)
solutions simplify access to virtually any
type of data, whether it resides in the
business or the cloud. Microsoft BI tools
speed insight into data from multiple
sources, including business applications,
blogs, and sensors.
For more information about unlocking
insights on any data, go to:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/servercloud/cloud-os/data-insights.aspx
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United States and
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
www.microsoft.com
Gains Better Business Agility
And because decision makers can work
independently with self-service BI tools,
they can also gain faster insights and react
more quickly to trends in consumer
behavior and technology. A response might
include publishing articles in a format more
easily consumed by mobile devices, or
creating a more graphic-intensive,
interactive piece for tablets. “Certainly, the
ability to put a report such as segmentation
by device type into an editor’s hands is very
important,” says Reynolds. “Consumers
enjoy our brands across multiple devices
and interact with us differently based on
their choice of devices. With Power BI, we
can provide the right insights to both the
sales and editorial teams ‘just-in-time’ so
that they can make informed decisions
about how they manage the success of
their magazine brand.”
For more information about Condé Nast
products and services visit the website at:
www.Condenast.com
Software and Services
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise
 Services
− Microsoft Office 365
− Power BI

This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published January 2014

Technologies
− Microsoft SQL Server 2014 PowerPivot
for Excel
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