Customer data gives teeth to b-to-b media

April 24, 2012 - At ABM’s Annual Conference next week, Peter Westerman, chief audience officer at Summit Business Media (the first role of its kind at Summit), will offer a drill down into the data points essential for understanding and marketing to your audience.

It’s an approach Westerman refined as senior vice president of audience marketing at Ziff Davis Enterprise, and gives the media company the ability to identify opportunities with individual customers and drive them through the product and marketing pipelines. While the scramble into the digital marketplace may or may not yield the dollars that investors expect, it’s the data assets that so many b-to-b publishers are sitting on that can give those companies teeth. 

“Summit is a company that is a little bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Westerman said in a recent Q&A with FOLIO:. “From the outside, it looks like a very traditional trade publishing shop; but because it has such deep assets in its data division, in many ways it’s an information company. There’s tremendous opportunity to bring the branded media assets with the data products and do some interesting things.” 

Those “interesting things” will be the focus of Westerman’s presentation at ABM. At Summit, Westerman is looking to create aggregations in key audience markets across brands while boosting value for both marketing efforts and the original data points themselves. 

For more on ABM’s Annual Conference next week, including registration, click here.

By Matt Kinsman