Karthic Bala
Chief Data Officer
Condé Nast
Zeroing in on the Right Audience
As the Chief Data Officer at Condé Nast, Karthic Bala has created and supported one of the most advanced data teams in the industry. With the help of this team, Karthic launched Condé Nast Spire.
Spire is Condé Nast’s proprietary data platform that uses a combination of machine learning and big data techniques to find the right audience, optimize a marketing campaign for performance, and provide actionable consumer insights. Spire combines Condé Nast’s extensive first-party contextual and behavioral data—adding more than one trillion new data points every month—with proprietary second- and third-party data and machine learning to execute campaigns based on correlations between consumers’ actions and receptivity to an advertising campaign.
And this July, Condé Nast launched Spire for Health to offer this same level of targeting and optimization for pharma clients. Condé Nast Spire uses the world’s largest set of healthcare information to allow its partners to execute audience-based campaigns and continually optimize and refine to drive KPIs.
Across all categories, Condé Nast has served more than one billion impressions through Spire—demonstrating ROI as high as 3:1 with an average 30% lift in sales. In the pharmaceutical category specifically, Spire drove 2x audience quality to a sponsored breast cancer center on Self.com, and was able to find verified breast cancer patients across the Condé Nast portfolio (including completely non-endemic sites such as GQ) at 2x the national condition prevalence—driving engagement and allowing the advertiser to efficiently reach the target.
Karthic’s 20 years of experience in creating data assets has benefited more than Condé Nast and their clients. Previously, Karthic was the President at Everyday Health heading the Precision Health Data Institute, which enabled the company’s biggest assets, people, and data to work together to gain a competitive advantage and provide customers with the most effective solutions. And prior to joining Everyday Health, Karthic led the BI team at Viacom for 10 years, supporting 27 television stations, 250 websites, and a movie studio generating more than $5 billion in revenue.
