Condé Nast is an international publisher that offers iconic brands such as Wired, Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ.
Marco Viganò, CTO of Condé Nast Italy, and his team take charge of all digital. Its team takes care of everything from an infrastructure and development perspective that determines the delivery of content to its users. It develops tools intended to help its brands and to provide innovative and quality services and content to its readers. She therefore follows all the developments of the Condé Nast brands, and takes care of the technical implementation of websites and applications. As a digital team, she bridges the gap between production and marketing, and more broadly, between all parts of the business, working with advertisers, digital and product marketing teams. Together, they decide on publishing strategies and tools that can help their brands.
Improve your Time To Market and reduce costs, thanks to the AWS cloud
Conde Nast had been using an on-premise architecture for several years and decided to migrate to the public cloud. Its objective was to meet 30 million visitors and 250 million page views each month, but also to offer innovative and quality content to its users. The publisher chose the AWS cloud primarily because it has an infinite system in terms of possibilities.
AWS Cloud not only allows us to accelerate our time to market, but also to achieve very important economic optimisation. In fact, AWS Cloud reduces infrastructure costs while allowing us to always be at the forefront of innovation and new technologies.
Marco Vigano
CTO Conde Nast.
AI and Machine Learning to create an exceptional user experience
Conde Nast also wanted to offer its customers an even more personalised experience of using the sites. Content was no longer to be provided passively, but instead offered in a dedicated manner and based on the individual browsing style.
The publisher has therefore set up Genius, its Artificial Intelligence system. Genius is a machine learning engine that analyses user navigation and delivers it in a different way. It offers content that is not only the results of the user's browsing, but which is notably calibrated on the basis of his past browsing.
Genius is built around 3 components:
- The first is a Machine Learning engine that analyses navigation and offers it in a personalised way. This component makes it possible to offer content, not based on past navigation, but on the basis of similar navigation carried out by other users.
- The second component of Genius analyzes the images from Condé Nast's catalog. We are talking about more than 10 million images that were not "tagged" correctly. Thanks to Genius, Conde Nast can recognise objects and people in images, and is therefore able to offer images and galleries in a personalised and even more precise way, according to the habits and preferences of users.
- The third component of Genius is that which analyses the semantic content of the text and offers similar content based on the "mood".
Thus, Genius began to analyse the content and the journey of users, to analyse images, texts ... and to offer more and more personalised and advanced navigation for the end user.
Genius is constantly evolving and has made it possible to develop an even more effective and targeted advertising model, while offering an increasingly advanced user experience to its customers.
Marco Vigano employees have become Machine Learning evangelists within the company. They provide marketing and product teams with important information on how to develop the site, and provide new browsing opportunities to their users.
With Genius, Conde Nast uses the best of new technologies made available to it by the cloud. The idea for Genius was born with the possibility of constantly monitoring the evolution of the cloud infrastructure.
The more the Digital IT team deepened their knowledge, the more they went into detail, and the closer they got to meeting their needs. From there was born the idea of Genius and an engine allowing the user an alternative navigation.
We chose AWS because it allowed us to change our infrastructure quickly and always be on the cutting edge. With AWS and its services, we can quickly implement our ideas.
Marco Vigano
CTO Conde Nast.
Claranet, innovation partner on the AWS cloud
Conde Nast wanted to be supported in its migration project to AWS cloud by Claranet. Indeed, the publisher was looking for a partner who had demonstrated its operational excellence. Claranet experts ensure that its operations deliver and comply with processes and workflows in accordance with AWS best practices. Conde Nast also wanted it's partner's teams to be as technical as theirs, speak the same language as them and be able to bridge the gap with the development teams.
Claranet knows AWS well and helps us develop and experiment with the new services we want to implement on our sites. Its experts also suggest innovative ways to implement AWS services.
Marco Vigano.