United Business Media

UBMI has its headquarters in the UK and additional operations in the USA and Europe. It operates integrated portfolios of traditional and online media across vertical markets. These include: Agriculture, Building/Construction, Entertainment Technology, Fire/Health & Safety/Security, Food & Pharmaceutical Ingredients, Healthcare, Interiors/Furniture, Music, Printing, Packaging, Travel/Venues. It also operates a number of ‘business to consumer’ online properties.

Identification of Business Opportunities

Each vertical market has industry specific solutions with systems to support:  

• Placement of advertisements

• Industry focused directories

• Exhibition management, both exhibitors & visitors

• Journal readership, both controlled circulation and paid subscriptions

• Readership enquiry services

• Web based products

UBMI recognised the need and invested in the development of a corporate strategy to extract the most value from its in-house systems. Exploiting the knowledge contained in these systems was essential to the provision of enhanced and new services for its customers, and increasing revenues from these activities.

With consideration to the dynamics of each market, it was clear that the best approach was to focus attention on a single market and then repeat the exercise for all markets on a priority basis.

Key to success of the project(s) was the delivery of rapid results, thus ensuring that UBMI could take advantage of the opportunities at the best possible time. The ability to load and combine diverse data sets from UBMI’s systems into a single knowledge base and then to explore, assess and analyse its content in rapid time was essential to supporting the business.

• The main objectives of each project were:  

• To find important features regarding companies that visit, exhibit and advertise or combinations of these.  

• To identify key performers and appraise their relationship with UBMI across all activities.

• Taking one single year, assess the cross sales activity of companies within that year.

Train-of-thought data exploration and analysis

The results of analysis are only as good as the data upon which they are based. We were able to quickly assess the quality and integrity of the loaded data from each of the discrete source systems, resulting in early resolution of the problems found.

We didn’t have to wait for the knowledge base to be completely loaded before starting our exploration. In fact we started our analysis just as soon as the first Exhibitor tables were loaded. We were able to easily identify the top exhibitors based on appropriate business rules that defined those companies that should be included in the analysis, and then identify their level of expenditure year on year and exhibition participation.

As more data was loaded we were able to easily link the discrete systems data via a customer cross reference table held in the knowledge base.

Having identified our top exhibitors we were then able to simply navigate through to see what else these customers had done with UBMI. For instance we could review and analyse advertisement expenditure, exhibition visitor attendance and journal take up for these customers without the need for database reorganization.

External data was also incorporated, enhancing the knowledge base and providing insight into customer buying patterns with UBMI’s competitors. This made possible the comparison of UBMI products and services along side its competitors.

Speed of delivery

"extensive knowledge of data-driven marketing produced some remarkable results. In a fraction of the time it had taken one of the global consultancies to identify potential business direction, DMC had established true business opportunities based on live data. We were so impressed we commissioned more projects ……” 

Mike Turner, formerly Business Systems Director, UBM