Comcast Spotlight

Comcast's cable advertising division empowers their 1,500 associate sales force with an Alteryx intranet market analysis and advertising support application

SpotKnowledge generates measurable improvement in sales force productivity and advertiser satisfaction

Comcast is the nation's largest provider of cable and broadband services. Comcast's Spotlight division is the cable industry's premier organization for offering targeted advertising services for advertisers. The Comcast Spotlight mission is to help advertisers realize greater value for their advertising dollars by providing decision support and fact based target market statistics including geographies, demographics and media research.

Covering more than 70 of the nation's 210 Designated Marketing Areas (DMAs), including 22 of the top 25 television markets, Comcast Spotlight's mounting success is derived from its use of the advanced technologies and applications to service the advertiser. Headquartered in New York City, the sales division has 1,500 geographically dispersed field sales professionals across the U.S. producing more than one billion dollars annually in targeted local, regional and national spot cable advertising revenues.

The Situation

"Like in all sales professions, success relies on the ability to present a compelling value proposition and to close business," said Lucette Mercer, Vice President, Sales Research, Comcast Spotlight ."We want to send our professionals into the field armed and ready to discuss the micro-market nuances, including demographics, without the associated complexity of hours of research. But even more importantly, we want to send our sales team out with the confidence of a targeted advertising campaign that reaches and influences the advertiser's sales prospects."

Prior to using Alteryx-enabled SpotKnowledge, Comcast Spotlight had been using a stand-alone, desktop-based, demographic profiling system in ten of its 70 markets. The previous system's complexity and decentralized implementation constrained the Comcast Spotlight sales team's ability to access relevant research and targeted information in a timely manner, causing a loss in sales opportunities. Within these installed offices, dedicated research analysts faced steep learning curves and required hours of training before becoming a productive resource. Based on its merger with AT&T Broadband, Comcast had an even greater need for delivering timely market research reports to Comcast Spotlight's sales team. The delivery of these custom reports and presentations to the cable advertising division is critical to the success of closing time-sensi-tive advertising sales.

Deploying additional desktop systems across all of Comcast Cable's markets was determined to be too costly and would not address the corporate growth mission and objectives to have a web-based solution in all 70 offices. To meet the cable advertising division's growing market information needs for handling multiple geographies, media and market statistics, it was decided a new solution would be required to meet immediate and future needs, including:

• Web-based Format - for an economical roll out across all Comcast cable markets.
• Data-independent - to handle large volumes of data from a multiple sources, in a time-sensitive manner providing comprehensive market intelligence.
• Centralized System Management - a consolidated framework to reduce and control outsourced IT costs.
• Easy-to-Learn - an intuitive easy-to-learn graphical user interface that does not require a trained database and research analyst and puts the emphasis back on an "empowered" sales force.
• Robust & Responsive - to enhance reporting, mapping and expedited proposal generation.

"We wanted to deploy a targeted sales and advertising support solution that would provide greater operational efficiencies and in return positively impact the financial bottom line," said Mercer.

What Alteryx technology really allowed us to do was spend more time doing the analytics of the data rather than creating the data.

- Lucette Mercer, (former) VP Sales Research at Comcast Spotlight

The Solution

Comcast Spotlight approached Alteryx to develop a new market intelligence application that was easy-to-use and would empower its sales professionals to generate their own reports without the requirement of a trained research analyst. Additionally, Comcast Spotlight requested Alteryx host the sales tool application and provide the ongoing management, maintenance and support to create a centralized system management framework.

SpotKnowledge was built on the Alteryx web capabilities. This Geographic Business Intelligence® solution leverages a library of components specifically created for target marketing. The design can handle any number of data sources, including Nielson ratings, automotive data, census information, etc., which provides SpotKnowledge's core intelligence. Sophisticated software algorithms are then used to flowchart and analyze thousands of data points with customized targeting and segmentation capabilities for profiling a market opportunity geographically, demographically and psycho-graphically.

The implementation of SpotKnowledge improved speed to market, efficiency and productivity in an intuitive web-based platform.

In early June 2004, the first release was completed and implemented within 30 business days to Comcast Spotlight, giving each office nationwide access to web-based SpotKnowledge. Unlike other solutions that take hours or days to process this kind of data, the sales team is able to filter, analyze, report and map a potential advertiser's market opportunities in minutes. In addition, SpotKnowledge is capable of analyzing targeted market statis-tics within a single DMA, isolating micro-markets within any geography including cable zones, Interconnects, radii and drive times.

The application uses a host of key data sources including those from:

• National Cable Communication's CableTrack©
• Polk Automotive
• Audit Bureau of Circulation
• D&B Data
• Experian/AGS Demographics
• MOSAIC™ segmentation

Accurate and up-to-date cable zone defini-tions are critical to the success of Comcast Spotlight's business. To more accurately define these zones, Alteryx has developed a special feature to update national cable data nightly from the National Cable Communication's CableTrack database. With the latest information on cable sales zones, the utility of this process benefits both the advertising community and the entire cable industry.

The Result

"Alteryx technology allows you to take dis-parate bits of data and bring them together and create context, said Mercer. "We take advantage of the fact that the technology really isn't tied to one thing. There are bits of data that we depend on that we didn't initially think we would want to have as a part of this resource. Being able to open our minds to these possibilities, these opportunities, has been key, I think, to coming up with a custom solution that does the job better than we had imagined."

Comcast Spotlight saved over one million dollars in selecting a scalable web-based platform from Alteryx. During the selection process, Comcast Spotlight also opted for Alterlyx to host, manage and maintain SpotKnowledge, eliminating the burden of IT support costs.

Today, there are more than 250 SpotKnowledge user sites, significantly reducing reporting and mapping time delays of the old desktop system. The implementation of SpotKnowledge is helping Comcast Spotlight respond to and close advertising deals more quickly leading to greater staff productivity. The ease-of-use and the intuitive interface is empowering field sales professionals to generate their own profiling analyses and reports leading to improved workflow efficiencies.

"With SpotKnowledge, our cable advertising division is helping clients better understand their own customers and prospects as well as identify which targeted advertising strategies work best for converting qualified prospects into closed sales," said Mercer. "Looking ahead, we predict that Aleryx applications will have an untold amount of potential within the Comcast organization and we will be looking to expand beyond the advertising division to increase the potential of our business."