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From risotto recipes in Allrecipes to newborn sleep strategies in PARENTS, Meredith has brought essential, inspiring, and trusted content to Americans for nearly 120 years. Meredith’s National Media Group reaches more than 190 million American consumers and 95% of all US women.

With over 40 sites across entertainment, parenting, food and beverage, style and beauty, health and wellness, home, and travel, Meredith has an unparalleled amount of first-party data on US women.

Since 2015, Slalom has been a trusted adviser and implementation partner on Meredith’s data journey.

“Meredith brought us in to help develop a framework for analyzing and structuring its first-party data—a framework to bring all the data together where they could gain the most insight from it,” says Pallavi Tyagi, a Senior Principal consultant at Slalom.

“Slalom has this huge reservoir of talent, so we were able to pull in Slalom consultants who could help out with very specific types of data analyses that we just couldn’t do internally,” says Corbin de Rubertis, Meredith’s Head of Innovation.

Slalom helped Meredith build a modern culture of data by:

• centralizing its data sources—giving executives direct access to metrics;
• analyzing billions of data points across data sources to identify and predict trends and patterns in consumer behavior;
• providing ML-driven insights to influence advertiser marketing, targeting, creative, and product development;
• developing a consumer-decision framework that understands consumer actions from the lens of their key daily decisions to optimize media spend and placement; and
• leveraging capabilities of underlying AWS and Snowflake platforms.

   

Meredith enlisted Slalom to help support the exciting launch of Meredith Data Studio, Meredith’s in-house research and insights division leveraging its vast, proprietary, first-party data and predictive insights capabilities to offer full-service data solutions to advertising partners about women’s habits, preferences, and motivations. The solutions include predictive analytics, paid consulting, and self-service tools.

“We’re providing an unmatched, comprehensive, and timely understanding of women and their purchase intent—the holy grail for our partners,” says Alysia Borsa, President of Meredith Digital.

Meredith Data Studio provides insights powered in part by Slalom. The suites of solutions are offered in a flexible tiered model. This includes a custom consulting solution, which is an ongoing, annual retainer service that leverages Meredith’s data, social listening, market research, and editorial expertise. This offering provides insights tailored to clients’ business needs. Advertisers can also choose the Insights Pack solution, which gives access to onetime, trends-based insights at a brand or category level. With Meredith Data Studio, advertisers get a multidimensional view of consumers that fills in knowledge gaps.

“Meredith owns so many brands across so many different types of industries, and the ability to have a holistic view of the content someone chooses to interact with is really powerful,” says Erica Kilbride, a data and analytics Director at Slalom. “It’s a lot of breadth and depth we’re covering.”

Consumers don’t make decisions in isolation, Tyagi adds. “Our overall lives influence how we behave with a product. Having that full 360-degree view of the consumer—of her and her life—helps us see what else she would do, what else she likes, how else advertisers can reach or influence her.”

The foundation of Meredith Data Studio is a proprietary and evolving taxonomy of over 13,000 terms. For example, lavender relates to colors and patterns, gardening, and cooking. Having a detailed and robust taxonomy enables us to combine terms across levels of the taxonomy and slice data with high specificity. Knowing the different uses of lavender helps answer questions like What colors are trending in home decor? Which herbs do home cooks commonly use in desserts? Are edible landscapes trending?

The next step for Meredith was to create an identity graph that allows us to uniquely identify consumers as they engage with content across multiple channels and devices.

“With the identity graph, you can see, for example, that suburban moms between 26 and 35 years old tend to be interacting with diaper content more frequently—and maybe 50-plus female and male users are looking at that content as well—potentially grandparents reminding themselves on how to do it,” says de Rubertis.

Meredith captures over 12 billion intent signals—what visitors are searching for, clicking on, subscribing to, buying, sharing, or adding to a list. For example, if you’re typing in “quick dinner” on Allrecipes, your intent is to make a meal. If you’re emailing a recipe, your intent is to share it with someone.

Meredith Data Studio is also able to predict women’s future behavior and preferences using machine learning. One way our teams do this is by using natural language processing to scrape comments sections, finding sentiments and trends.

“Not only can we see what people were doing in the past, we can actually forecast what they might be doing over the next couple of weeks, months, or years in certain categories, which is fascinating for advertisers,” says de Rubertis.

In addition to capturing clickstream data, the Meredith Data Studio team works with Meredith editors to validate and expand on these insights.

“Meredith has some of the most savvy and sophisticated editors in the industry, and we have direct access to them,” says Tyagi. “They share their expertise and foresight, which helps bring the art and science pieces together. They help validate insights we’re seeing or provide their editorial expertise on emerging trends.”