Company Overview E.W Scripps is among the nation’s oldest and largest Media houses. It has been a pioneer, path breaker and trendsetter in the News publishing industry with an interesting history spanning more than a century and a quarter. Founded in 1878 in Cleveland, Scripps has grown to become the 9th largest newspaper in the country with a presence spread over diverse geographical locations comprising the rocky mountains of Colorado to Sunny California. It operates papers in 20 markets spreading from Bremerton, Washington to Stuart, Florida and has a reach of 1.4 million subscribers, which adds to 1.7 million on Sundays. Scripps is credited for bringing newspaper reading to the masses, Penny press it’s low priced daily targeted the large population of urban workers in Cleveland and became an instant hit in a segment where newspaper reading was yet to become a habit.Encouraged by the overwhelming response it went on to launch similar dailies in dozens of other cities. Scripps is among the few media houses in the country that has a presence in the entire gamut of communication activity comprising Newspaper publishing, Broadcast TV station, Cable and satellite TV programming network, television retailing and syndicated columns.

Before Interactive: Scripps realized that the most effective way to communicate to its vast readership base both to retain and increase its own circulation would be through customized communication with them through Email, it also realized the potential of Email in generating additional advertising revenues from its existing advertisers if positioned as a powerful communication medium. Scripps had a vast and scattered read base resulting in a huge volume of inbound Email that contained their views and perceptions, which needed to be scientifically stored, managed and retrieved. It was looking for a strategic tie-up with an E- Mail management agency with core competence in leveraging the power of Email as a communication medium and zeroed on Interactive.

The Interactive Deployment: Interactive studied the client’s needs and recommended the use of Interactive® Direct Marketing™ (DM), its powerful direct marketing tool and Interactive® Data warehousing™ (DW), its well-researched data storage and retrieval tool. DW helped in consolidating the reader data of all the 14 Newspapers in the Scripps group by categorizing them according to multiple parameters. It helped to slice and dice this data and take complex reports, which could be retrieved with ease. Once these lists were ready DM was used to send some highly customized and targeted campaigns to a base of 31,000 opted in customers.

After Interactive: Interactive helped Scripps discover the power and reach of electronic communication. Data Warehouse enabled Scripps to organize its huge database in a scientific manner; an analysis of this data provided a valuable insight into its vast and spread out readership on multiple parameters such as income group, age group, gender break up etc. and also their perceptions of Scripps as a newspaper. DW also helped in preparing complex reports on multiple parameters based on this database. This information was leveraged to send some highly customized communication through DM Interactive’s powerful direct marketing tool to its large and scattered audience. These highly customized and targeted campaigns helped Scripps in its readership drive efforts; they also helped external companies to reach their products and services to a well-defined target audience. Interactive helped Scripps to tailor its paper according to popular taste and maintain a good relationship with its reader base. Scripps was also able to generate additional revenues by offering Email as an effective advertising medium to its clients.