Publishing Interests

The Copley Press Dives into their Circulation Data with Dimensional Insight

With nine daily newspapers in three different states and an average daily circulation of 700,000, The Copley Press has an overwhelming amount of circulation data to measure and analyze in order to stay on top of their business. Based is La Jolla, California, The Copley Press publishes newspapers in California, Ohio, and Illinois. Recently, Copley implemented DI-Diver in order to enhance their data analysis and visualization capabilities with regards to their circulation and advertising data.

Copley began using DI-Diver in February of 2002 at their corporate Information Services group and at its Torrance, California-based daily newspaper, The Daily Breeze. DI-Diver is running on an Intel server, with users accessing data on Microsoft Windows^TM 2000 machines.

For the past six years, Copley had been using database-marketing software, but felt the need to evaluate a business intelligence solution that would allow them to better analyze their circulation data. David Bessen, Director of Information Services at Copley, felt that implementing a Business Intelligence solution, like DI-Diver, would allow Copley "to gain a better understanding of subscriber patterns and behavior."

"We are using DI-Diver as a visualization tool, and as such, it has been extremely popular. With DI-Diver we are able to navigate through the data so much more easily. This product is much more intuitive and easy to use for a casual end-user than any of the other tools we had tried. We are really doing a better job of looking at our subscriber retention characteristics," states Milt Goldwasser, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Copley.

Since implementation, Copley has spent a significant amount of time enhancing its Circulation DiveBook, which contains several different circulations reports, such as subscriber retention, rate information, and service history, as well as the various Data Models that have been developed at the corporate level by the Information Services group. "Currently, all of the Data Models that we have developed are circulation-based. We have specific Models for circulation retention analysis, which is specific to subscription starts and stops, a service history Model, and a circulation queries Model. These Models allow us to go in and take a better look at both circulation transactions and historical transactions," explains Rosanne Smola, Project Leader at Copley Information Services.

The ability to effectively analyze subscriber retention characteristics is a key initiative at Copley. "Recently, we ran a campaign with one of our outside telemarketing vendors that involved upgrading our existing weekend subscribers to a Daily/Sunday subscription. With DI-Diver we were able to create a Model and then create a report of all those people who made the transition from a weekend subscription to the Daily/Sunday subscription. Furthermore, DI-Diver allowed us to track the subscribers and see how many of them stayed with the Daily/Sunday subscription, how many switched back to weekend, and how many subscribers stopped all together," states Smola, who continues, "...We could then start analyzing the subscribers by zip code, previous history, or just about any other factor... there are so many things we can look at now with the Models we have put together in DI-Diver." Utilizing DI-Diver to analyze new subscriber solicitation programs enabled Copley to easily view sales success, promotion effectiveness, and retention characteristics relative to each program.

DI-Diver has been well received at Copley as well as The Daily Breeze due to it's ease-of-use and performance speed, "the response to the product has been very positive," states Smola, who believes that DI-Diver's biggest strengths are the speed with which she can create Data Models and the detail she is able to view with those Models that have been created. "We have been able to bring in a lot of detail data that, until now, was the type of information that was kept out on spreadsheets on a user's desktop. This has added a lot more value to what our users are able to dive into."

Copley's users have been able to view an exceptional amount of detail specific to their subscriber-base with DI-Diver. As a result, they are able to easily point-and-click their way to the answers they need. "We are able to look at past history and see what type of subscriber we are doing business with. Are they the type of person that perpetually starts and stops their subscription? Are they changing rates frequently? How many times are they solicited in a year? Which one of our vendors is doing the soliciting... are they door crew or telemarketing vendors? We can see if a subscriber falls into the non-pay category and analyze their billing information. We were also able to build into one of our Data Models our entire rate table. This allowed us to take a look at the initial subscription offer, number of weeks for that subscription, the amount that is paid monthly or weekly, as well as the discounts that are offered. We can even see the subscribers that are changing rates back and forth," details Smola.

Due to Copley's success with DI-Diver, future plans involve rolling the product out to various divisions within Copley as the interest and need arises. "We are also interested in implementing DI-WebDiver so that our reports and Models can be accessible via the Internet," states Bessen. Copley will soon be able to take the data they have gathered on subscription durations and use this information to draw retention curves, improving the picture they have of subscriber retention. In addition, Copley will also begin analyzing their advertising data and improving an existing Advertising DiveBook later this year.