How UBM is using analytics in a bid to become the biggest B2B events company in the world

Data scientist Jody Porrazzo explains how UBM is blazing a new trail in events-focused analytics

UBM has been a publishing company since it was founded back in 1918 as United Newspapers, but as the company has developed over the past century, its focus has switched to events. UBM has ambitions of becoming the biggest B2B events company in the world - a position currently occupied by Reed.

In order to do that, the firm has had to focus on its data and the analysis of that data.

Jody Porrazzo was hired by UBM to lead this agenda, but when she came into the organisation there was no analytics or standardised reporting at all.

"The objective was to build that out; we had to standardise our data and reporting, and then derive as many insights as we could from that data. We couldn't wait two years because two years down the line things are going to change and you lose your competitive edge. [At the time] we were losing insight, not gaining it," Porrazzo told Computing at SAS Global Forum last month.

According to Porrazzo, who is the company's EMEA data scientist, UBM has "tons of data", and has run into all of the typical problems that are associated with that.

"The data was disparate, of poor quality, and had every other data management problem you can think of," she said.

At the time, UBM had PC-based SAS analytics in the form of Enterprise Miner and Text Miner, and Porrazzo and her team started looking at using those tools to gain more insight into the company's customers.

"We had a process in place called DITLOAC or ‘a day in the life of a customer' where we interview our customers to get information," she said.

The firm used SAS's Text Miner and analytics tools to provide that information to the sales team, while at the same time building out standardised data and platforms with concrete definitions.

"That sounds like an easy task but UBM has always been a holding company; so companies come in, we buy and sell, they come in with their platforms, we migrate their data and it's difficult to do that, especially as everyone has their own definition of customer loyalty," said Porrazzo.

This includes the answers to questions such as ‘what is retention?' and ‘what is churn?'.

It's so hard, said Porrazzo, that the company still hasn't come to a standard definition of customer loyalty across all of its 280 brands.

"If we start small and take a portfolio, and then perhaps the findings for the portfolio aren't applicable to all of the other brands but the process is," she said.

But how can the firm measure success from its findings?

"We use smart KPIs, they are measurable and attainable. People will ask how your customer insight programme is a success and you have to be very specific," said Porrazzo.

"Right now we segment based upon bias, so the marketeer will get the data and they will say I want to target males who are 36 years old from London. They're putting in their bias rather than the data giving you the segments and we're just starting to do that now and just getting people understanding why that's important," she added.

According to Porrazzo, UBM has had to define metrics of its own because the B2B events sector is behind the curve in this regard.

She likens the events industry to the property market.

"The idea is to sell spaces like empty houses, and it's better to sell spaces when we can demonstrate that we don't want to charge too much. So we used value-based pricing, which is an analytic function that I'm trying to build on SAS right now, and then we have to attract an audience, so we go to marketing to bring people in.

"You have to price the real estate accordingly and understand what the best part is. A lot of people think that the best booth is at the front when you walk in, but we have data that shows that isn't the case - charge a cheaper rate for that one, there are different parts of the floor that get much more traffic," she said.

Porrazzo knows this because the company looked at data from sensors and badges at one of its events - in what may be one of the first examples of the Internet of Things being used in the B2B events market.

"If you think about scanning badges and having that data in real-time, you know that if a lot of people were getting scanned at one booth, something is going on there [that works]. If you have that on a dashboard, that's worth a lot of money.

"Then there's traffic. I did an analysis using SAS looking at a traffic pattern on a floor where we put sensors around the room," she explained.

[Please turn to page 2 - the pros and cons of SAS]

How UBM is using analytics in a bid to become the biggest B2B events company in the world

Data scientist Jody Porrazzo explains how UBM is blazing a new trail in events-focused analytics

Using SAS

Other SAS tools in place include Visual Analytics and Enterprise Guide, which Porrazzo is looking to swap for Visual Statistics.

"That's the next step to our maturity. What's good about it is that it is a sandbox in which analysts can play in so we can test our models before deploying them on a large scale," she said.

Currently, UBM's infrastructure is cloud-based and it runs SAS's Visual Analytics alongside its main BI platform, Tableau.

But what is the company looking for next when it comes to its analytics capabilities?

SAS's new digital marketing hub Customer Intelligence 360 is on the radar, and Porrazzo is going to go to SAS's headquarters in North Carolina to have a look at it.

"It just makes sense to have everything digitally interconnected and to have that overall view. You can grab your customers on social media, take them into dynamic tagging, throw data in some sort of repository, hook that repository to transactional data, and also hook it up to the BI platform and then bring in predictive models to feed into the repository back to the marketing platform - that's the dream," Porrazzo said.

Achieving that dream will not happen overnight, she went on.

"UBM is changing now, we're moving rapidly towards consolidating and integrating our data, so we're thinking about starting that kind of concept within the next two years," she said, explaining that a final decision on Customer Intelligence 360 has not been made.

"We will still require SAS whether we choose another marketing automation platform like Eloqua or Marketo or anything else," she added.

She said that the analytics firm has improved its customer support through its SAS Cares programme.

"People can now call with questions and not have to go through tech support - it's one of those things that I immediately set into practice and I have my team already reaching out to those guys there," she said.

The main area that she believes SAS still needs to work on is with help in deploying the platform.

"It's hard, and that is an issue," she said.