Publishers must emulate retailers and create “single customer views”, says Immediate Media CEO Tom Bureau

Part of this has centred on extracting value from its data sets to create a single customer view of readers, which it can then use to mould future transactional activity.

“We want to think more like a retailer and having the right database environment to underpin this is important. It’s about engaging our customers and developing a relationship with them, creating a rich, scaled single customer view,” he said.

“Our ambition is to change our centre of gravity from print towards being a content platform and services business, which means putting brands at the centre of our strategic development and looking at the business models beyond print,” he added.

Immediate Media, which owns former BBC magazine titles including Radio Times, has been working with CACI to create a single view of its customers across multiple brands to help it better understand their behaviours and preferences with the view to creating integrated, personally relevant experiences it can commercialise.

It has applied the single customer view method to its Radio Times travel brand, which remains one of its most popular print titles, selling an average of 900,000 copies a week, according to Bureau.

“Once we understood the customer profile most likely to transact with us using the CACI methodology we focused on getting the right products from the right partners. That’s more than just an affiliate cut – it’s about finding a partner you can work closely with and share the customer data around a transaction - you can negotiate a deal in which you co-manage the customer data," said Bureau.

Once it had picked a technology partner it ran an integrated campaign across offline and digital platforms to drive people to the Radio Times travel brand. This involved encouraging deeper integration between its editorial, brand and transactional teams to provide offers to readers which had a strong content theme to drive people to the offer - for example, providing visits to location of the ITV drama Broadchurch within the platform. It is now eyeing ways to extend this method to other titles, according to Bureau.

“The key now is to further develop for our consumers more targeted offers which we can then cross and up sell against and understanding more about what our customers want to buy. By doing this we are on road to creating substantial revenue. We think we will generate £5m for RT travel and that will only grow further,” he added.

Immediate Media bought BBC Magazines in 2011.