Case Study: Toronto Star achieves analytics independence and faster, data-driven audience targeting with Alteryx

Toronto Star - Customer Case Study

The Toronto Star, led by Matthew Cole, Manager of Business Geomatics, faced a complex data challenge: supporting advertising targeting, subscriber analytics, acquisition campaigns, distribution planning and data-driven journalism — all while avoiding costly errors (including past libel exposure). Their data lived in a tangle of legacy tools (Access, MapInfo, Tableau, MAPublisher) and required precise spatial and subscriber-weighted analysis across multiple file types and sources.

Adopting Alteryx Designer (integrated with Environics Analytics, MapInfo and Tableau) let the team build reproducible spatial workflows to create subscriber-weighted demographics, streamline distribution and acquisition targeting, and produce cleaner visual outputs for editorial use. The result was faster, more flexible analytics, easier Tableau integration, stronger targeting for Star & Metro (illustrated by distance-based distribution analyses), and reduced risk from manual, error-prone processes.

Toronto Star

Matthew Cole

Manager of Business Geomatics