NOVUS NEXT Analyzes Unlimited Custom Geographies for Media Planning with Rapid Speed Using Alteryx

With three divisions specializing in local media planning and buying across the United States and Canada, NOVUS Media is always looking for creative ways to drive incremental sales and traffic for their clients. NOVUS NEXT, the most recently formed division of NOVUS, focuses on multimedia planning and digital strategy using data and analytics custom tailored to their clients’ specific needs based on their local geography.

“Our core purpose in analytics is to help our clients make better marketing decisions. We’re on the front lines of NOVUS’s push to add analytics rigor to media planning,” says Daniel Zeleznik, senior analyst at NOVUS NEXT. “Last I counted, our team is analyzing over 50,000 syndicated datapoints on top of our clients’ data and KPIs to help our people make informed decisions quickly.”

“NOVUS has been using Alteryx for over ten years and when I started working at NOVUS four years ago, my manager at the time told me that I would be learning it right off the bat. I found that the Alteryx Analytic Process Automation Platform™ could help me complete complicated tasks in a matter of minutes instead of the hours it would take by hand. Building in Alteryx was like a boot-camp for me. I went from an apprehensive to avid user in just a month and since then it’s really become my canvas.”

“Before NOVUS launched the NEXT division, we spent more time just setting up everything to prepare for work, instead of getting work done. I was inundated with time consuming ad hoc requests so I knew in order to make my job sustainable and scalable, I really needed a way to automate the way we were doing things.”

“Today we’re building a reusable framework that ties ZIP codes, client data, and consumer datapoints together to create meaningful local context — who/what/where — to assist our media strategists in determining the why and how essential to good media plans,” Zeleznik says. “Whether a client has 30 locations in 10 markets or 3,000 locations in 210 markets, we can apply the same local analytics lens to the plan more sustainably. We’re able to prioritize the best geographies for investing media by applying all this data to a client’s physical location and trade area, and we can do this at scale without coding because of Alteryx. And then we can visualize all of it in Tableau thanks to the easy integration between platforms.”

Daniel Zeleznik
Senior Analyst
Novus Next

Zeleznik believes the ability to leverage data and analytics were crucial elements in NOVUS NEXT getting on its feet as the newest division of the organization. “We exist as a cohesive unit now instead of being siloed,” Zeleznik says. “We are gaining time-savings, greater efficiency, deeper understanding at scale of third-party data, and the ability to adapt fluidly to evolving data strategies.”

“One of our goals is to drive our analytics practice to a point where it can be both an internal resource for advancing our analytics culture and a stand-alone offering in addition to our planning and buying services.”

Zeleznik says that more and more team members across the NOVUS organization are upskilling themselves by taking advantage of the analytical resources at their disposal. “Together with some of our other power users, we have started a training and mentorship program. Personally, I constantly encourage people to get licenses—especially if I hear them struggling with doing things over and over in excel,” Zeleznik says. “I’m one of the people beginners come to when they have questions about Alteryx and over time I’ve watched people who started off asking me questions building their own advanced apps and workflows and it is so encouraging to watch them grow in their practice.”

So what’s next? Zeleznik says NOVUS NEXT will continue to push data-driven decision-making to inform their clients on the best ways to maximize media spend and drive traffic. “We’re focused on getting more tools out, and continuing to drive results for our customers,” Zeleznik says. “Our team is prioritizing growth in our technical skills because we have to be speedy and self-reliant, so for us to be able to harmonize and synthesize data on the fly will continue to be a big deal.”

“I envision that processes and tools that we build will get to a state where each iteration is increasingly repeatable, less time-consuming, and more user-friendly. We want to build a framework where we can be responsive to constantly changing client priorities, where we are able to produce trusted results without starting from scratch every time.”