PEI Media

Growth through Investment in Enterprise E-commerce

CMS, New builds, WooCommerce

PEI Media is an international financial media group that produces editorial, data, event, and advertising products for alternative asset classes within the private equity market. The company has a portfolio of brands that it sells to private equity business customers. Typically, each brand is available as a hard copy magazine, website, paid-only newsletter, and a range of on- and offline research and analytics data products.

The Challenge

The challenge was to redevelop the company’s multi-brand portfolio, comprising eight websites. The company’s specialist business intelligence premium products were to be provided via self-service e-commerce, while the platforms needed to offer best-of-breed editorial tools and a great-looking front end.

With some of the wealthiest and most influential people and organisations in the world as clients, this was a critical programme. We were set on producing a system that delivers intelligent and elegant syntheses of PEI Media’s editorial, data, event and advertising products.

An Elegant Solution

We built intuitive interfaces to ease adoption by the editorial teams and to allow them to manage content production and presentation themselves, with no technical input whatsoever.

We also combined the e-commerce content with editorial and other web content and integrated it with Blaize, an identity and access management platform. Blaize provides a proxy that sits in front of the WordPress site and manipulates the pages it serves as they are requested. Identity and access modules restrict content access only to those that should have it.

The full architecture that we implemented is complex and incorporated a number of other aspects. One reason Blaize was used is because it presents the right access to Googlebot so it can index and appropriately rank PEI Media’s sites, which influences organic search. Research and analytics data is input into Elasticsearch, and the REACT app was embedded into the WordPress pages so that data is pulled through into tables and graphical forms.

Enterprise e-commerce
for growth

 We produced a system that delivers intelligent and elegant syntheses of PEI Media’s editorial, data, event, and advertising products. PEI Media now has a modern-looking set of responsive websites that have sophisticated editorial features and can connect to a number of integrated systems, including e-commerce. We used WooCommerce to marry WordPress with external identity management to create a scalable and smart enterprise e-commerce solution, and with all eight websites now live, PEI Media has been able to start to assess the results.

A new personalisation customer experience has driven audience engagement, and increased the number of sessions, session times, page views and repeat visits. The company has also benefitted from enriched, contextual tagging of content and data. Internally, there have also been benefits as PEI Media’s editors and journalists are now happier and more empowered to create and manage content themselves.

If you’re facing challenges similar to those at PEI Media, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Angry Creative. We’re ready to guide you through, starting with a meeting with our expert, Amy Slade. Book a meeting today!