Madden Media Delivers Near-Real-Time Insights on Local Events Using AWS and PredictHQ

Full-service destination marketing agency Madden Media accelerated its speed to value and reduced turnaround times for generating insights by using AWS Data Exchange. The company wanted to streamline its pipeline for ingesting and processing third-party data to provide forecasting services to customers. To avoid the cumbersome maintenance involved in pulling data from some sources, it began using AWS Data Exchange to procure data from PredictHQ, an AWS Partner and demand intelligence company. Now, Madden Media can offer its customers near-real-time access to event data, and its customers can see and act on its data in ways they couldn’t before.

Destination marketing agency Madden Media had a goal to provide the best possible insights for travel and tourism organizations to understand how local events impact their communities economically and help them better prepare for future demand. But to accomplish this, the agency needed a simpler way to access and ingest third-party data while normalizing and analyzing it. The company’s end goal was to provide data-driven insights for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) through its customer-facing business intelligence solution, Voyage.

The key to achieving this goal was using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Madden Media began working with PredictHQ, an AWS Partner and demand intelligence company that provides enriched data on real-world events. PredictHQ’s data is available on AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it simple for AWS customers to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. This helped Madden Media make the data available to its customers in near real time. As a result, Madden Media has enriched its demand forecasting and analytics while accelerating its time to insights for its customers.

Madden Media is a full-service destination marketing agency that offers strategic omnichannel solutions to DMOs. With Voyage, DMOs can analyze and visualize data and report on the impact of specific local events or forecast future demand—important features for many publicly funded organizations.

Voyage integrates up-to-date information such as popular locations, repeat visits, opportunity markets, and more. Madden Media previously managed the complete data workflow, from data ingestion and processing to transformation and warehousing, using custom tools and its data partners’ storage on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. However, some third-party data sources required cumbersome extract, transform, load (ETL) work.

Madden Media had been using its data partners’ Amazon S3 buckets for about 2 years when, in 2021, it began bringing in significantly more third-party data. The company wanted a faster way to feed data to customers’ dashboards, so it began subscribing to and using data from PredictHQ through AWS Data Exchange. “PredictHQ gives its customers the ability to better understand events in and around their neighborhoods, from the Super Bowl to the local farmers market,” says Ryan Lipson, customer success manager at PredictHQ. Now, this data powers the event-measurement features of Voyage, which organizations can use to analyze attendance, track top venues, and more.

“With PredictHQ, it’s the first time the market has deep, granular, and accurate insights into all sorts of events and happenings in a community,” says Matt Clement, managing partner at Madden Media. “It drives the data-informed decisions that are central to everything that DMOs do.” The ability to use AWS is just as valuable for PredictHQ. Typically, a data provider would have to build pipelines for each new customer. Using AWS Data Exchange, PredictHQ simply imports its data into an Amazon S3 bucket that customers can subscribe to through AWS management services and load directly into their preferred Amazon S3 bucket. “Our ability to use AWS to connect to customers like Madden Media is seamless and quick,” says Lipson.

Madden Media can access data from PredictHQ nearly instantaneously. “Using AWS Data Exchange is pretty turnkey,” says Carl Cox, vice president of systems and research at Madden Media. “We use the AWS Data Exchange console to see when PredictHQ tells us the data is up, and we simply hit subscribe. There’s nothing more technical to it than that.”

After Madden subscribes to a dataset and loads it into one of the company’s Amazon S3 buckets, the team normalizes, cleans, and readies the data for analysis using AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service. This makes it simpler to discover, prepare, and move data from multiple sources.

The company then queries the data using Amazon Athena, a serverless, interactive analytics and querying service built on open-source frameworks. Using AWS Data Exchange, all data is centralized in one location. Now, when the company gets a new client, it can access the new data in near real time and load it into the client’s dashboard within 1 day. “Using AWS Data Exchange, we have saved hours of time that we used to spend moving data from one location to another,” says Cox. “Additionally, having all our data in one place has significantly simplified our data security and governance practices, so we can better focus our time.”

Having quick access to such granular data is extremely valuable to Madden Media’s customers. In the past, trying to show whether an event brought value to the local economy by attracting visitors was a slow and complex process. “Using PredictHQ and AWS, our clients can see and act on the data in ways they couldn’t before,” says Clement. “It’s extraordinarily impactful and game changing.”

With fast access to PredictHQ’s data, Madden Media has accelerated its time to value and increased productivity. “We can start generating local event insights for clients within 1 day using AWS Data Exchange,” says Cox. “And some processes are six times faster on AWS.” Madden Media’s customers can then use Voyage to quickly understand the impact of an event on hotel room availability and pricing, how to adjust marketing, which events draw visitors, and more. Voyage also provides visitor profiles, spend information, and other valuable event-measurement data. “AWS Data Exchange has outperformed expectations as far as our ability to take trillions of rows of data and quickly preprocess it before we put it into Voyage,” says Clement.

Madden Media has also simplified billing by using AWS Data Exchange. Because it receives a separate bill for each project, linking specific information to a client is simple. Strong security and governance are two additional benefits of having all the data in one place—on AWS—throughout the pipeline. Now, Madden Media is better positioned to provide demand forecasting services to its customers using predictive and historical event data from PredictHQ along with its own historical data, travel trends, and other economic indicators. “PredictHQ has virtually no peers in the event-data space,” says Clement.

Madden Media plans to continue to use AWS solutions so that it can better scale to meet demand. The company’s ultimate goal is to empower organizations with a better path toward attributing the actions they take to the results their communities see.

“With the data from PredictHQ and its partnership with AWS, our customers don’t have to wait for months or a year to see the impact of an event,” says Clement. “The fact that the data is coming in near real time is vitally important for the modern digital marketing organization.”