Gazette Media Company: building circulation, gaining advertising and speeding deliveries with Prospex

Beacon Dodsworth have been working with the Gazette Media Company to put together the most effective GIS for use in Regional Press. Based in Middlesbrough, the Evening Gazette is an integral part of Teesside. The 388,000 adults within its circulation area are 75% more likely to read the Gazette than the best read national paper. It is part of the Trinity Mirror group, which in addition to the Daily Mirror publishes over 20% of the regional press making it the largest regional press publisher.

Prospex covers the requirements of advertising, circulation and transport departments.

For advertising, the postcode sector, which contains an average of 2,500 households, is a detailed enough geography. Postcode sectors can be combined together to build circulation areas and then compared with the catchment areas of advertisers.

Circulation departments on the other hand need to plan deliveries to every address and this means being able to map every house. Previously, the data to do this has been unstructured and prohibitively expensive. New reasonably priced datasets are now available.

The other forces driving this development come from legislation. The minimum wage has made it even more important to optimise delivery rounds, while legislative changes have increased the cost of telephone canvassing and so made door to door canvassing a better option.

Transport departments need to know the precise location of newsagents as well as the location of one way streets and restricted turns, so that van routes can be optimised. Getting to a newsagent half an hour earlier can make a big difference to potential sales.

Combining the street data with a people classification means that we can profile those people who responded to an offer and then canvass those streets where the groups who responded most live. NavTech road data and PAF postcode level data are combined to provide canvassers with lists of streets to visit. Houses to avoid are filtered out using customer information systems. Areas are partitioned for teams of canvassers by Prospex avoiding lengthy meetings with A to Zs and highlighters.

All this means that one system can be used and shared between three departments, offering a cost-effective solution for all the geographical analysis that is needed within a regional press publishing centre.