Building Audience Engagement with a Bespoke ID graph

By Team.Beeler

Ahead of his session at Base Camp Denver this week, we sat down with Ryan Whittington, SVP of American City Business Journals (ACBJ), to find out how they use the power of the 5×5 Universal Person graph to unlock user insights and enhance their product offering for advertisers. 

Q: Welcome Ryan. Tell us about your daily role at ACBJ – what are you responsible for making happen?

A: On a daily basis, I oversee all of our centralized revenue tools and strategies: what we’re selling, from pricing to product to the tools we’re using; from Salesforce to sales training. So it’s everything from start to finish of a campaign. Our team does a lot of the pre-marketing work, from building proposals and media plans, all the way through to the execution and delivery. 

Q: What problem were you looking to solve when you approached 5×5?

A: Our initial challenge was the need to bring together six or seven different data sources – which we did internally. But once we did that, we realized we had some big gaps in some of the data. That’s where 5×5 came in – to help us with data enrichment. 

Q: Why did you choose 5×5?

We ran a couple of comparative tests using the same 10k-person database – including match rate and accuracy. 5×5 produced a far higher match rate than competing providers, so we knew we were onto a good thing. 

Once we started to incorporate the 5×5 Universal Person graph, that’s when things got interesting. The 5×5 team explained how we could further leverage the technology to convert anonymous users through their bespoke identity resolution. For instance, being able to match users to a hashed email, and looking at who those users are as they come to our site. Industry, organization, and persona are hugely important to our business and advertisers.

Being B2B focused, it’s less about who the user is, and more about looking at the industries in which they work, and the companies they work for. Although we’re in the infancy of the profile matching process, the 5×5 Universal Person graph is already starting to inform our customer engagement strategy and we’re excited about what we’ve been able to do with it so far.

Q: How long have you been working with 5×5?

A: We started working together on the initial data enrichment project in late Q1 2024, and then built out our graph in late Q2. It’s an ongoing partnership, so the 5×5 team provides fresh data once a month, and has helped us develop a process where we can effortlessly both pull net new contacts into our ever-growing database, and enrich existing personas.

Q: What else would you say makes 5×5 a standout partner? 

So first, it’s about integrity. There are a lot of not-so-great organizations in the data space, so the fact I already trusted two industry stalwarts at the helm – I’ve known Tim and Garth for 20 years – meant I knew 5×5 was built on strong moral and ethical foundations. 

Second, it’s about customer support. With 5×5, it’s not a case of handing over our login credentials and waving goodbye. Once we had licensed a couple of the data sources, the customer success team was proactive in suggesting new approaches that we hadn’t previously considered – expertly plugging our knowledge gaps and becoming an effective solutions partner. Our dedicated 5×5 account team is not only available for any question, but also proactively comes to us with new product and revenue ideas which we’re starting to implement. 

Q: How is your partnership with 5×5 going to help you drive revenue?

A: From the outset, we’ve been able to increase addressability for our advertising clients, as well as help positively impact our programmatic campaigns. Plus our events, and audience development teams are now starting to utilize the data insights to drive their business objectives. 

Q: What results have you seen so far? 

A: The demand for leads from our clients has definitely increased, and so this is an area in which the more we know, the easier it is for us to drive those leads for them. That, in turn, results in more ROI being requested for clients. 

Another power of the 5×5 Universal Person graph is the visibility into content consumption. It’s invaluable. We run vast amounts of sponsored content across our site, so being able to confidently say ‘x number of people from this industry, organization, or persona read this content’ is really important for our clients. This insight drives both value and monetization.

Q: And what do you do with that insight?

It’s about trying to build overall intelligence on our B2B audience, for instance, identifying that 100 people read this article, and 50% of them work at a company with 100 or more employees. The 5×5 Universal Person graph ensures we’re driving the results that our brand marketers are asking for. So if they’re targeting senior-level managers, we’re not going to send them a ton of data on the college graduates reading their content. At the moment, management is the focus category for most of our advertisers, so in turn, we’re able to target both ads, and relevant content, to management-level subscribers.  

Another direct benefit from the 5×5 Universal Person graph is that we’re able to identify when multiple individuals are logging in under the same subscription. We’re able to recommend more beneficial products, such as group subscriptions for easier access across the team or organization. This deeper understanding of our subscribers is a welcome revenue opportunity for us.

We’re also seeing that the average age of our readers is increasing every year, not all of which we would necessarily attribute to people retiring later. Through the 5×5 Universal Person graph, we’ve been able to attribute this trend to other factors, such as readers who are keen to participate in online surveys, many of whom tend to be in the older age brackets. 

Q: What advice would you give publishers considering creating or bolstering their identity graph?

A: I’d say just do it – there are so many possibilities and opportunities in the identity and graph space, which will be different based on what type of publisher you are. There is so much potential and we’re only at the beginning. The next few years will be exciting for sure – for audience growth and ACBJ revenue. 

You can hear more from Ryan at Base.Camp Denver this week in his session: Driving revenue with an ID graph: Case Study & Discussion.