Hearst: Global Multi-Brand DTC Ecommerce
Annual revenue
$12B
Industry
Consumer Media
Website
hearst.com
Hearst’s diverse portfolio includes global financial services leader Fitch Group; Hearst Health, a group of medical information and services businesses; Hearst Transportation, which includes CAMP Systems International, a major provider of software-as-a-service solutions for managing maintenance of jets and helicopters; ownership in cable television networks such as A&E, HISTORY, Lifetime and ESPN; 35 television stations; 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers; digital services businesses; and more than 200 magazines around the world.
SoundCommerce will unify and model data for analytics and commerce activation across Hearst’s consumer publications to drive profit-and customer lifetime value-driven decisions.
About
Hearst is one of the nation’s largest global, diversified information, services and media companies. Their partnership with SoundCommerce, will enable Hearst to measure and optimize ecommerce marketing and operations for its consumer media businesses, which collectively reach millions of unique users each month, according to Comscore.
The challenge
With 165 million unique users each month according to Comscore, Hearst has the opportunity to enable digital shopping experiences for these users across its consumer media businesses. This essentially means Hearst is building a new ecommerce business for every media title in its catalog, pursuing the new business strategy with a new, shared technology platform provided by SoundCommerce, VTEX, and other commerce enablement partners.
“SoundCommerce’s composable solution reduced our time to market for robust and in-depth retail analytics, while simultaneously enabling our internal data teams to focus on integrating our proprietary data to provide a more complete picture of our audience’s interests and commerce needs.”
—Robert Gash, Chief Technology Officer of E-Commerce, Hearst
The solution
SoundCommerce provides Hearst retail-ready analytical and behavioral data models, populated by an intelligent data pipeline that promotes data visibility, transparency, and trust. The SoundCommerce platform connects both on-premise and SaaS applications like VTEX, SailThru and AfterShip with modern cloud data warehouses like Google (GCP) BigQuery to enable faster and better business decision making across commerce functions and departments. SoundCommerce is available as a native Google Cloud Platform Marketplace offering and as a fully integrated, turnkey BigQuery solution.
By selecting SoundCommerce, Hearst has reduced the time and complexity of building detailed retail analytics, enabling their operational teams to focus on data-driven operation and marketing decisions that improve the ecommerce shopper experience.
Key results
Launched
New e-commerce stores for each Hearst media title starting with Men’s Health then expanding to Women’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and more.
Gained
Key insights into ecommerce performance across brand titles, end-customer shoppers, transactional orders, digital marketing campaigns and doorstep deliveries.
Scaled
Ecommerce revenues through optimized paid media campaigns.
Profiled
Customers for better behavioral insights, segmentation and activation.
SoundCommerce helps Hearst:
- Generate granular profit and loss profiles for every order and shopper, modeled alongside order event and customer engagement data to better segment, target, engage and serve ecommerce shoppers from first click to doorstep delivery.
- Gain visibility into fine-grain customer order details including order items across the catalog item master (product assortment), order cancellations and returns, and order fulfillment status.
- Consolidate order and customer data including shoppers’ repeat purchase behaviors spanning years of order history to calculate shopper lifetime profitability.
- Track and model customer loyalty, order history, demographic, repeat purchase propensity and marketing engagement data using SoundCommerce’s expanded customer profiles.