Digiday awards Best Publisher Platform to Sophi.io, a suite of artificial intelligence-powered automation, optimization and prediction tools developed by The Globe and Mail
TORONTO, June 28, 2021, The Globe and Mail's artificial intelligence-based automation and prediction engine, won the 2021 Digiday Media Award for Best Publisher Platform, which recognizes technology that is most successful in helping publishers achieve their goals.
"AI is an essential technology for helping publishers add authentic value to stories - extending their measure of success beyond page views and virality. For example, Sophi is able to provide data on how much each article on The Globe and Mail contributes to subscriber retention, acquisition, registration potential and advertising dollars. Additionally, to effectively deploy machine learning, around 10% of The Globe and Mail's workforce is now data scientists and engineers, hired to develop Sophi and grow the strategy even further," Digiday said.
The awards honour companies, technologies and campaigns that have stood out throughout the media over the past year. "This year, the competition was fierce and the programs robust. Innovation and big ideas expanded the playing field for many of the winners, even in a year when quarantines limited where and how people could work - and play," according to Digiday.
Phillip Crawley, Publisher and CEO of The Globe and Mail, commented: "It's an honour to be chosen as the winner of Digiday's Media Award for Best Publisher Platform. We aren't often up against companies in both the media and marketing industries but our investments in Sophi have been driven by the understanding that our technology can directly drive performance and economic growth for companies across a large range of industries."
The other finalists in the Best Publisher Platform category were: Piano, Connatix, Insticator, Duration Media and Adapex LLC.
Sophi is an artificial-intelligence system that helps publishers identify and leverage their most valuable content. It has powerful predictive capabilities - using natural language processing, Sophi Dynamic Paywallis a fully dynamic, real-time, personalized paywall engine that analyses both content and user behaviour to determine when to ask a reader for money or an email address, and when to leave them alone.
Sophi Site Automationautonomously curates digital content to find and promote the most valuable articles. It places 99% of the content on all of The Globe and Mail's digital pages, including its homepage and section pages. Sophi has been so successful that it is now being used for print laydown as well. Sophi is available to publishers across the globe to enable their content producers to focus on creating the best content possible.
Earlier this month, Sophi won the 2021 International News Media Association (INMA) Global Media Awards for Best in Show in North America and Best Use of Data to Automate or Personalize. Sophi has also won the Online Journalism Award (OJA) for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism, handed out by the Online News Association (ONA), and both the World Digital Media Award and the North American Digital Media Award awarded by The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in the category of Best Digital News Start-up.
About Sophi.io
Sophi.io) is a suite of AI-powered optimization and prediction tools that helps content publishers make important strategic and tactical decisions. Sophi solutions range from Sophi Site Automation and Sophi for Paywalls to Sophi Analytics, a decision-support system for content publishers. Sophi is designed to improve the metrics that matter most to any business, such as subscriber retention and acquisition, engagement, recency, frequency and volume.
