Optimization Transforms Newspaper Advertising

One of the world’s savviest publishers used optimization to gain a greater share of advertising in its two flagship business publications.

Opportunity

A publisher upgrading its aging legacy IT system sought to improve its ability to configure and sell complex advertising campaigns in its flagship publications: a worldwide daily business newspaper and a weekly edition.

Approach

Line-of-business and IT executives hired Princeton Consultants to design a custom optimization “brain” to communicate with the core IT system. The custom application models all of the publication’s press, paper and policy constraints and it configures sections, pages and color placement to maximize advertising placements.

Complexities

• Real Time: provided optimal configurations in less than 2 seconds
• Black Box: provided automated solutions, delivering fast and low cost service to the sales force

Results

• Used in production for all worldwide editions from launch.
• Provided sales force the ability to quickly and confidentially book advertising and to upsell more sophisticated advertising campaigns. Through rapid changes in layouts, there was much greater ease in meeting urgent or complex requests.
• Improvements in sales and customer service.
• Drove down printing cost by minimizing house ads.
• Fast Time To Payback (TTP) for the project because each additional advertisement sold for $100,000 or more.