Welcome to the BlueConic Doer Spotlight, where we highlight the hands-on doers using BlueConic to take their data strategies to new heights.
Today, we’re thrilled to hear from Andrea Mooney, VP of Audience Platforms at Nexstar Digital. Andrea shares how she uses BlueConic to unify audience data, run personalized marketing campaigns, and boost engagement—all while empowering a small team to achieve big results.
What is your role?
As VP of Audience Platforms at Nexstar Digital, Andrea leads efforts to unify and leverage first-party data across Nexstar Digital's platforms to drive audience engagement and growth,
What are the top three things you envisioned accomplishing with the BlueConic CDP?
We had three primary objectives in mind:
Unifying known audience data inside a single system: Once we got data from several platforms funneled into BlueConic, we got our first true understanding of how our known audiences differ from source to source. It also helped us identify how much overlap we have in audiences across multiple platforms.
Sharing data between systems: Using BlueConic’s pre-built connections allowed us to include newsletter acquisition opportunities inside sweepstakes and event registrations without having to touch any of the data manually to move it between systems. The pre-built connections allowed us to do some or all of these syncs without involving our data engineering team, which was a huge time savings for both them and the audience platforms team.
Launch on-site marketing experiments within the BlueConic CDP directly: This was especially important for us since there is only me and a fantastic colleague, Torrie Hardcastle, to oversee both the creative execution and data integration of these experiences. Anything that helps lessen the integration work between multiple systems benefits small teams. Some of the Dialogues we’ve launched include:
Newsletter Acquisition
Sweepstakes Promotions
Online / In-Person Event Promotion
Special Coverage (specifically for linear use cases)
Registration Walls (small POC currently in progress)
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve done with your data using BlueConic?
Cross-Network Campaigns: We have started using BlueConic to cross-promote our national brands and features to audiences on our local O&O sites. We’ve run campaigns that helped The Hill grow subscribers to their Morning Report newsletter; NewsNation promote an on-air TV special about the border; and an audience political engagement survey ahead of the presidential debates in June and September. All these campaigns have provided significantly higher CTR or conversion rates than other tools previously used (primarily display ads or email invitations).
Visitor Loyalty Tracking: We wanted to understand the difference in visitor loyalty cohorts along the anonymous to known spectrum. Using Segments and creating an Insights dashboard, we evaluated cohorts many ways before settling on a definition for each. Once the definition was set, we then wanted to know the likelihood of a profile in a cohort having an email address attached to it. We discovered that a known profile is 165x more likely to have an email on the profile than a one-and-done visitor, and 16x more likely to have an email on the profile than an Occasional Viewer (less than 7 visits in a month). Now, we are working on applying Average Revenue per User to the cohorts, as we believe this will help show the value of focusing on audience engagement features and opportunities as a primary way to increase loyal viewers.
What kind of results have you seen since working with BlueConic so far?
Of all the different newsletter acquisition tactics we have in place today, one of our best performing acquisition tools are subscription sign-ups inside BlueConic Dialogues. These subscribers are also more engaged than other acquisition tools. For one of our national brands, 73% of newsletter subscribers who signed up within a Dialogue have opened an email in the last 7 days and are significantly less likely to unsubscribe than all other sources.
Using Dialogues as a promotional tool for Sweepstakes and other audience engagement opportunities has delivered a CTR that is 10-30x higher than display ads and has provided around a 25% lift in new subscriptions for our promotional email list, which alerts subscribers to future sweepstakes and audience engagement opportunities. Because this list frequently receives sweepstakes opportunities sponsored by our advertiser, it is an important list to ensure we are consistently adding new subscribers.
From a more human perspective, I’ve enjoyed introducing this new technology to the stations we work with and over-delivering on the results we expect their campaigns to achieve. We showed them something they didn’t know was possible, and once we over delivered on results, they’ve come back wanting to run more campaigns.
If you could give one piece of advice to a team just starting with BlueConic, what would it be?
Be patient with the learning process. It takes time to learn how to use the system and you will definitely make mistakes along the way. But one day, it will all-of-a-sudden click, and you will move farther and faster than you ever thought you would.
What’s next on your BlueConic journey?
Some of my product team colleagues are in the process of rolling out our first set of registration experiences where we will test placing site features and/or subsets of content behind a registration wall. This is a very limited test that we will use to evaluate future opportunities.
Identity Resolution tied to Data-Driven Linear that will support common audience targeting and measurement across linear, O&O digital and 3rd-party digital. This is another project that is introducing other areas of our business to the BlueConic platform, specifically our data science and ad operations teams.
Given broadcasting is the foundation of our business, we are starting to explore what CTV integration looks like within a CDP.