Publishing Interests

Accessing and Analyzing Data Quickly: Keys to Southam's Success Using DI-Diver

Southam Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hollinger Canada. As a corporation, Hollinger Inc. publishes 65 daily newspapers and 80 weekly newspapers in Canada with an average daily circulation of 1.6 million. At Southam, DI Solution runs on VAX/ VMS, and users access data Models from Microsoft Windows 95 clients.

Revenue from advertising was down in the early 1990's, so Southam decided to take a hard look at newspaper data and get to the details in their marketing and circulation legacy systems. The solution needed to be quickly implemented and flexible enough to adapt to an evolving business.

When they implemented DI-Diver, they were "up and running in one day, building Models and already looking at our data in new ways," remembers Rob Foster, Project Manager for advertising and circulation business systems at Southam. "We went through four consultants in the past two years with another product. In six years I've made only one technical call to Dimensional Insight."

The Information Technology group, headquartered in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, now distributes DI-Diver to analysts and information coordinators for twelve of its largest newspapers. Users are able to filter certain pieces of data out of a statistics processing system to include in the build of their own Models. Models allow users to cross reference categories and dive into a range of data such as account, date, publication, department, product code, rate class, salesperson, or sales method. Users navigate through data without having to determine the route in advance. Having access and the ability to manipulate data has improved the quality of services.

Michael Kooner, Information Coordinator for Pacific Press (one of Southam's newspaper groups), has been preparing reports using DI-Diver for five years. Reports for advertising managers cover two newspapers (Vancouver Province and the Vancouver Sun) with a circulation of 575,000 daily. Some reports are standardized, and "then there's another ten to twenty reports a week that managers specifically request," Kooner explains. Business management wants account analysis and market share data. They want to know about the different types of existing and potential customers. They look for a correlation when analyzing classifieds to see how and which customers are buying ads. "By analyzing linage, revenue, and ad-count, I'm able to track statistics and promotions and provide managers with the exact detailed information they requested. Access to the data is fast. I can look up data and, in less than a minute, pinpoint the details that I'm looking for," says Kooner.

Jennifer Lalonde, Financial Analyst for the Windsor Star, analyzes advertising revenue using DI-Diver. She explains that in the newspaper business, they sell many tens of thousands of units at small costs, versus selling fewer units at large costs. This results in thousands of customers. Keeping track of these customers has become less of a daunting task. "In the past, our internal reporting has been a collage of reports that left some revenue not accounted for and some revenue double counted. Accountability has increased and our commission calculations have become much tighter since we have used DI-Diver to pull data. Also, turnaround time for revenue reports at the end of the month is much faster."

Future plans include upgrading to DI-Diver 3.0 to take advantage of advanced timeseries and mapping features. Timeseries is used to display data and calculations for a selected period of time only, rather than for the entire Model. Periods of time used for comparisons may include weeks, months, fiscal months, quarters, etc. The mapping feature will allow users to see a map of subscriber demographics and make it easier to identify geographic opportunities for marketing.