Media tech company Avid Technology has a formidable brand reputation, which has sustained their impressive subscription growth. However, legacy marketing processes and practices made it difficult to keep up with changing market dynamics. They knew they needed to evolve their product growth practices to stay ahead.

Avid began investing in new talent and digging into their data to learn more about their customers, business operations and marketing practices. Ultimately, the team wanted to integrate attribute, event and performance data into a cohesive point of view on the business and users, and to activate this data across engagement channels to improve user experience and influence outcomes.

Avid needed a partner that could advance their vision and help them uncover new possibilities. They had worked with Adswerve on analytics since 2019 and were familiar with our advanced data science, predictive modeling and data engineering expertise. They knew that we could help streamline their tech stack, reset their data collection standards and deliver analytics solutions, so they tapped us to help.

With these insights, Avid knew they would not only advance their tech maturity and transform their workflows but also shift their organizational culture to be more quantitative and performance-oriented in approaching business opportunities.

To achieve Avid’s goal, Adswerve needed to ensure they had a solid analytics foundation. Avid had an impressive martech infrastructure in place, including Google Analytics, Google Cloud (including data warehouse BigQuery), Braze for customer engagement and Salesforce.

A website replatforming project coinciding with a shift from Google Analytics 360 to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) presented the ideal opportunity to revisit Avid’s data collection strategy and architecture to guarantee that the information they use to drive insights and make decisions would be secure, privacy-safe and accurate.

To ensure future-proof data ingestion, we developed a new GA4 data model that adheres to best practices, cleaned up and migrated the Google Tag Manager (GTM) container, and added server-side GTM (sGTM) with event tracking for GA4 and Braze (along with a Parallel Stream Validation dashboard for switching to server-side tracking). We also created a Data Dictionary and Implementation Spec for GA4 events maintenance and reference.

After ensuring accurate data collection and proper connectivity between all platforms, we iterated on Avid’s prototypes and ideas, developing sophisticated models to generate the insights they needed to make more informed decisions. We transformed Avid’s existing tech stack into a unified Customer Data Platform (CDP) in Big Query that’s integrated with Braze to drive more value from their existing investments and avoid new recurring costs.

Featured Data Models: 

Churn Propensity Modeling

We began by developing and testing a propensity model for one of Avid’s key products. To accelerate development, we used Analytics Delivered to You (AnDY), the proprietary machine learning ops solution we developed in partnership with Google Cloud.

The model identified the likelihood of a specific contract unsubscribing — or churning — within four weeks. Because we built the model on a solid analytics infrastructure, its margin of error was only 3.79% on more than 15 million predictions.

We also mapped the change in churn behavior over time so Avid can see how people are churning now compared to the past.

Forecasting ARIMA Modeling

Our Adswerve experts built an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to forecast contract and revenue data for all product lines over a rolling 12-month period. Avid’s growth team can use the model to receive weekly updates and prepare marketing, product, finance and executive stakeholders for what’s ahead so they can adapt with promotional tactics.

Mixed Media Modeling 

With the mixed media model (MMM) we built, Avid’s team can understand the most impactful advertising channels, determine how much to spend on each and build an iterative practice around directional insight and observed outcomes.

Our work together isn't complete, but Avid can now confidently use their data to activate strategies that increase acquisition and conversion rates and prevent subscriber churn.

In the last month of Q3 2024, the forecast model indicated the team was aiming lower than their desired outcome. It was too late to spin up an acquisition-focused promotion, so they explored recapturing churned users from the past four years instead.

Leveraging their updated analytics and data infrastructure, Avid was able to:

• Precisely segment users in Braze based on who had opted in or out of email within a specific pre-churn tenure, implicit lifetime value (LTV) and time since churn parameters via data in their BigQuery user table

• Capture personalization attributes in Braze via their OneTrust and Google Tag Manager integration and sync targeting, suppression and retargeting audiences to their ad platforms

• Model their audience and estimate conversion rates to achieve cross-organizational buy-in

• Quickly mobilize creative, lifecycle, paid media and e-commerce teams to activate on the strategy

Once the promotion was live, the team was able to measure first, last, multi-touch and word-of-mouth conversions using a coupon code and manually tagged campaigns. Within three weeks, the team was able to improve quarterly revenue outcomes by over 2%.

This experience set a precedent for more informed discussions about strategy and budgeting. The data is integrated from the marketing and engagement practice through the operating model, so everyone understands goals and tactics, and can rapidly observe and adapt to outcomes. The full stack implementation and preparation for future promotions now mark an organizational culture shift in how they approach user engagement and business analytics.

“The forecasting and analytics models we built with Adswerve empower us to anticipate what will happen in the future, know who to target and to evolve an experimentation practice around improving business outcomes.”

JC Haydon, Vice President of Growth Product Management

With its data seamlessly connected, the Avid growth team better understands how audiences engage with digital touchpoints. Using that information with Braze, they're building custom journeys to prevent churn and drive re-subscription and are already seeing a positive impact on retention.

The growth team can also determine how much they should spend on specific media channels as they improve and evolve their attribution model to advance their performance marketing goals.

Finally, by following best practices for privacy, consent and data quality, Avid is confident they're prepared for the future. They know the data they're collecting is accurate, so their insights, strategies and tactics are, too.

Up next? We continue to work with Avid to expand and scale the models and user tables to include more products and audiences and dive into predicted LTV.