Centaur, which publishes titles including Marketing Week, The Lawyer and Money Marketing, chose ADvance as part of a strategic shift towards a high margin, digital first strategy.
The move involved the replacement of two in-house systems – a circulation and fulfilment system and a central marketing database. As part of the project, the marketing and subscription department was restructured to enable the Centaur team to take maximum advantage of the features and benefits offered by ADvance.
ADvance is a ground-breaking cloud platform (BPaaS) that combines the core functions of a traditional subscription/membership and circulation fulfilment system with end-to-end product management (definition, e-commerce set-up, customer self-service, access control and gatekeeping and business intelligence for comprehensive response metrics).
Its fully integrated audience database provides a complete customer view allowing detailed analysis and segmentation of the target audience. By combining these functions into a single web-based platform, ADvance is able to support a truly data-driven product development cycle where real-time metrics captured from online and offline customer transactions – including those from third party systems such as email marketing platforms, CRM systems or web analytics – can be fed directly into the development process.
This allows highly targeted products and services, rapid development and deployment of new offers and the optimisation of renewal and acquisition campaigns. ADvance can be rapidly deployed within any organisation as it has been specifically designed to integrate seamlessly with existing business platforms including finance/SOP, CRM and content management systems.
Implementation of ADvance will help Centaur to rapidly develop a new range of highly targeted, subscription-based online products.
“The relationship with Abacus is a fundamental component of Centaur’s digital strategy. They have people who really understand our business and the way we operate – many of them with deep publishing roots. This means they really ‘get’ what we are trying to achieve and come up with innovative approaches and technology to meet these goals. ADvance is a great example of this approach in practice – it’s something the sector’s been seeking for years.”
Tim Potter, Managing Director of Business Publishing at Centaur
“This was a highly complex project involving the complete replacement of legacy systems central to operations at Centaur. It was essential that this took place without any disruption to the high levels of service Centaur’s customers expect. Thanks to some very hard work from both teams we were able to meet this objective and the entire subscription and marketing functions at Centaur are now running on the ADvance platform.”
Ian Eckert, Head of Audience Development at Abacus
“Now migration has been successfully achieved, we can start using ADvance to help drive our business forward. We’ve already got a range of exciting new initiatives in the pipeline and we are confident that ADvance will help us to rapidly develop many more.”
Richard Cook, Operations Director at Centaur
