THE BEST RUN BUSINESSES RUN SAP

SAP CUSTOMER FOCUS: FORBES

Forbes: Forbes Media properties reach nearly 40 million business decision makers each month.
Products and services: Print and online publications
Headquarters: New York City
Web site: forbes.com

Media giant Forbes provides its advertisers with information about its readership so they can make better investment decisions. To analyze its store of demographic and psychographic data and deliver reports on the variables of greatest interest to advertisers, Forbes adopted the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio. Forbes found many valuable internal uses for the solutions as well.

As a result:
- Advertisers can target audiences more effectively, heightening the appeal of Forbes publications for their ad investments
- Forbes understands its readership more clearly, helping to boost circulation and campaign success
- Forbes has visibility into many cash-saving instances of redundant equipment in its plants
- Forbes’ IT staff spends far less time generating reports

Forbes is one of the media industry’s premier names. Besides its flagship Forbes magazine, the company publishes many other print periodicals as well as the category-leading Forbes.com Web site. Forbes’ advertisers base their spending decisions on publications’ audience demographics, but the third-party demographic information that Forbes provided was not sufficiently detailed. For its clients’ sake and its own, Forbes needed to improve the visibility of readership specifics.

There was a clear need to:
- Give advertisers new levels of insight into reader demographics and psychographics
- Tap into Forbes’ extensive warehouse of customer data to provide the information visibility needed to deliver these insights

How did Forbes extract these insights and make reader demographics transparent to advertisers? By deploying SAP® BusinessObjects™ solutions and using them to analyze the data warehouse and deliver highly specific reports.

The third-party demographic information that Forbes previously relied on fell short in the level of detail and specificity that advertisers wanted to justify and target their ad investments. Therefore Forbes used SAP BusinessObjects solutions to analyze customer data and extract the specific variables that were key to these business partners – delivering a clear understanding of the types of individuals who interact with the Forbes brand.

Forbes is also benefiting from SAP BusinessObjects solutions in many internal ways. Marketing leverages the firm’s clearer understanding of customer specifics to improve circulation and campaign profitability. Infrastructure detects instances of redundant equipment to cut costs in areas such as telecommunications. IT takes advantage of the solutions’ powerful tool set and user self-service to drastically cut report preparation time and cost.

Now advertisers have a far clearer picture of the benefits of choosing Forbes publications for their advertising dollars, and Forbes can more effectively showcase the excellence of its audience demographics. Besides strengthening its advertiser base, Forbes is saving costs in many ways.