A century-old publishing leader with a multi-billion-dollar portfolio faced a challenge common across media. With more than 20 publications and business units spanning subscriptions, events, and ad sales, customer data was decentralized. There was no central warehouse, no unified customer view, and no clear way to activate insights across the enterprise.
The result was missed opportunities to engage high-value subscribers, inefficiencies in campaign execution, and limited visibility into where growth could come from.
Building the Foundation: A Customer Intelligence Hub
Within ten weeks, the publisher partnered with Actable to design and deploy a Customer Intelligence Hub. Using our Customer101 framework for publishers, we unified subscription, event, and ad sales data across all brands.
The hub, created to conform with client IT standards, created a single source of truth for marketing teams while still allowing for brand-level analysis. By structuring attributes such as churn risk, engagement behavior, and lifetime value, the Customer Data Hub for Publishers became a foundation every team could use.
Speed came from accelerators, not shortcuts. Actable leveraged pre-built pipelines and templates to move faster than typical IT-driven builds, without sacrificing quality.
From Data to Activation: Action Engine
With the hub in place, the next step was activation. Together, we:
- Prioritized six high-value pilot use cases through a structured roadmap.
- Implemented a CDP in under 90 days to power email, site personalization, and ad campaigns.
- Connected the Customer Intelligence Hub to paid media and ad platforms for cross-channel reach.
All six pilots went live within three months of the CDP going live. Rapid deployment was possible because use cases were prioritized and sequenced based on business value, rather than being pursued as isolated projects.
Adding Predictive Intelligence: Insights Engine
Renewal pricing was a major opportunity. Renewal rates were strong, but adjustments were manual and time-consuming. Actable’s Insights Engine delivered predictive models that scored renewal propensity and guided targeted pricing increases.
The impact was measured directly against baseline processes:
- Double-digit lift in monthly renewal pricing on the publisher’s largest title.
- Predictive models were extended to 10 additional brands in under two months.
- Dozens of hours of manual work are eliminated each week.
By embedding predictive models into the Customer Intelligence Hub, results were explainable and repeatable. This was not a black box. The publisher’s teams owned the data and the logic, which meant confidence in the outputs and faster scaling across titles.
Results That Matter
Six months after the engagement began, the publisher had transformed how it used customer intelligence:
- 13% growth in registered users.
- 10% lift in renewal price increases.
- A scalable, owned Customer Intelligence Hub powering marketing, sales, and analytics.
The Takeaway
This case shows why a Customer Intelligence Hub, or Customer Data Hub for Publishers, is a cornerstone for growth in media. Without it, publishers are left piecing together fragmented signals. With it, they can move from static reporting to predictive intelligence, turning customer data into measurable business outcomes.
Ready to Build Your Customer Intelligence Hub?
If your teams are still fighting siloed data or waiting months to launch high-value use cases, you don’t have to. Actable helps publishers and enterprises stand up a Customer Intelligence Hub in weeks, not quarters, and tie it directly to measurable business outcomes.
Schedule a call to see how.
