How Trusted Media Brands increased RFP win-rate by 31%

The company

TMB (Trusted Media Brands) is the world’s leading community-driven entertainment company. TMB’s portfolio of leading brands, which includes FailArmy, Family Handyman, People Are Awesome, Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home, The Healthy, and The Pet Collective, is powered by content that’s inspired and created by its fans. Engaging more than 200 million consumers worldwide, TMB’s content—available across streaming TV, social media, web, and print.

The challenge

TMB required an ethical data partner to scale its audience.

When creating their data strategy, TMB were experiencing issues with scale and reaching users on their first visit across all browsers. In addition, TMB’s newsletter base is a valuable part of their business, but they were unable to customise the segmentation of this audience.

Strong data ethics were also a consideration for TMB, as they were conscious of industry shifts around responsible advertising, consent and protecting user privacy. TMB sought a partner to support internal teams to help them with a holistic data strategy for both direct and programmatic.

“Being able to understand audiences across all browsers and on the first visit was a really important factor to us.”

Stephanie Mazzamaro, VP, Data Product & Operations at TMB

The solution

Permutive enabled TMB to understand audiences across all browsers, especially in cookie-blocked environments such as Safari. TMB collected granular event data about their users, and they could use that data to customise their cohorts.

Permutive supports TMB to sell more effectively through first-party data. TMB can now proactively bring their advertising partners insights about their audience and provide detailed mid- and post-campaign wrap-ups.

These insights have provided ways to increase campaign scale by finding audiences that may have fallen outside of the defined campaign targeting. By using TMB, advertisers can now not only reach audiences at scale but can get a deeper understanding of what their audiences are interested in.

Trusted Intelligence 360

Working with Permutive, TMB were able to launch TI360, an idea they had previously theorised but weren’t able to execute. With a taxonomy structure and collecting on all environments, working with Permutive drove the product’s launch and gave TMB insights pre, mid and post-sale. “With Permutive, we can define the properties and the events that we’re collecting,” says Stephanie Mazzamaro, VP, Data Product & Operations at TMB.

Cohort and revenue insights

Most of TMB’s teams use Permutive Insights for wrap-up reports and optimisations. Revenue insights are also used to find prospects, deep dive into audience cards for specific advertisers, and find data points for outreach.

Driving authentication

Permutive has also been the driving force for TMB’s authentication plan, working on a roadmap to overhaul their email process. “It was an initiative of mine from a data strategy standpoint to future-proof our business,” says Mazzamaro. “I didn’t expect that Permutive would help drive that.”

Additional value

Outside of sales and programmatic, TMB is trialling the use of Permutive for editorial purposes, e-commerce, and affiliates. One example is the consumer marketing team, which sells subscriptions, books, and products, have used Permutive to overhaul its process to start segmenting its audience for email campaigns.

140%

increase in revenue from deals using first-party data
31%

increase in RFP win-rate when data is on an IO
2x

increase in deal size when data is present on an IO vs no data
94%

of direct-sold campaigns use first-party data

Results

On switching to Permutive, TMB saw up to a 22X increase in audience size depending on the cohort, which has helped TMB increase the number of direct sales, resulting in having more scale and more granularity of segments. For example, the team can create cohorts within Permutive for every tag level down to pizza recipes, breakfast pizzas, or veggie pizzas.

This has resulted in revenue from deals using data increasing 140% in 1HFY22 vs FY21, and TMB is projecting to finish FY22 at 250%+ over last year. TMB’s win rate using data has increased 10% from deals that do not include data (62% vs 52%), and the deal size for 1HFY22 is 2x when data is present on an IO vs no data.

TMB ended FY22Q2 delivering direct-sold campaigns 94% of the time using first-party data. The 6% of campaigns delivered using third-party data represent the areas that TMB are looking to build out their first-party data, for example, pharma.

Revenue Insights

TMB is using revenue insights to find additional revenue opportunities. “You’re able to have an educational conversation with buyers about how they should be buying and the first-party cohorts that we could provide them if they were to run a PMP with us,” says Mazzamaro.

Revenue insights showed Microsoft that they were overspending almost 65% for some of the audiences, and they are recommending TMB for their next planning cycle. Target is using their current data strategy but asked TMB to send more audience cards and revenue insights as they begin to transition into publisher first-party data for consideration.

Walgreens reached out to TMB to get a Debit Card deal activated. In the meeting, TMB included audience cards and sent over ‘Health Nut’ and ‘Wellness Seeker’ cards as a follow up that resulted in activating an additional Credit Card deal. For Tyson, TMB sent over audience cards as a follow up to stay top of mind, which led to setting up ‘always on’ deals for FY22.

Next steps

Next for TMB is launching their e-commerce offering, which will provide them with shopper data and zero-party data, and they will continue with their authentication project. With the acquisition of Jukin Media, which is a leading streaming TV-programmer that receives more than 11 million monthly hours of streaming viewership, TMB is working on creating a holistic data story for CTV and launching new streaming channels for their brands.

Why Trusted Media Brands partnered with Permutive

“Switching to Permutive, we saw up to a 22x increase in segment size, helping with direct sales as a result of having more scale and more granularity of segments. ”