Condé Nast Sees More Advertisers Using Its Data

Condé Nast has long distinguished itself for having the right context to buy ads against. But these days, it’s also focusing on helping advertisers reach new audiences when they buy ads alongside its content with its Spire platform.

Condé Nast allows advertisers to use its own data signals to build lookalike audiences and reach more target customers through Spire, which is a data management platform (DMP) with machine-learning capabilities and unique data integrations.

Condé Nast will also share the types of content a marketer’s customers read and how they answer surveys conducted by Condé. The surveys generate hundreds of thousands of responses a year, noted Evan Adlman, Condé Nast’s EVP of enterprise sales.

“We are using the data to find the consumer, not going where the marketer thinks the consumer is,” Adlman said.

For example, a tech hardware company learned through Spire that its customer base was more likely to be music enthusiasts, not tech geeks, which meant that Condé Nast targeted the company’s ads on Pitchfork, not Wired.

Condé Nast is making the case that its marriage of context and audience, via Spire, drives better ROI for marketers, giving it a path to compete with the dollars flowing to the duopoly.

“Marketers today are very focused on search and social and focus on those two platforms when they are looking for as much ROI as possible,” Adlman said. “We have been able to prove that when marketers focus on [search and social], they miss the first half of the movie, or who told the consumer to search for the product.”

For instance, a beauty company using Spire saw a 33% increase in awareness for its beauty product using the Spire data set. A retail client saw a $1.86 return on ad spend and a 46% increase in household purchasing. And a travel client saw intent to visit a specific destination increase 45%.

Last year, Condé Nast served more than 1 billion impressions across 80 campaigns on Spire. During Q1 of this year, it’s tripled the number of campaigns compared to last year. Revenue from Spire-fueled campaigns has gone up sevenfold.

The publisher has also strengthened the platform with greater machine-learning capabilities and new data sets, including Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) data. Starting this quarter, marketers can target, optimize and measure campaigns based on purchase data.

Spire was originally created with baked-in credit card data from its acquisition of 1010data. The publisher further bolstered Spire’s data integrations with assets from CitizenNet, which it acquired last February.

Audiences from Spire can be activated on social media using CitizenNet, and Spire is marrying its data with CitizenNet’s learnings from its years of being a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer.

“With NCS and the acquisition of CitizenNet, this puts us in the position to capture budgets we didn’t have before and to be thought of not just at the top of the funnel, but across the entire purchase funnel from intent down to the decision,” Adlman said.


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