Annex Business Media is Canada’s largest B2B media company, operating more than 58 industry brands. That’s a lot of content. A lot of audience data. And, historically, a gap between the two.
The team knew their readers were engaged — actively clicking, reading, and returning across dozens of specialized publications. But translating that behavioral signal into something an advertiser could buy? That was harder. Most media companies in their position were selling placements: a banner on a page, a spot in a newsletter. Annex wanted to sell something more valuable — a conversation.
That insight became the foundation for Own the Topic, a fully Omeda-powered program that transforms editorial engagement into targeted, advertiser-ready audience campaigns.
The Challenge: Fragmented Data, Untapped Value
B2B advertising is shifting. Buyers research earlier, across more channels, and increasingly on their own terms. Advertisers want to show up where those buyers are already learning — not just where a publication happens to have inventory.
Annex had the data to make that possible. But with 58+ brands running disparate installs of WordPress and no standardized taxonomy, they couldn’t consistently tag content across their portfolio. The most valuable signals — the actual topics that were driving real engagement across horizontal themes like workplace safety, water management, or decarbonization — lived in the content, not in their firmographic or demographic data. And without a reliable way to surface them, they couldn’t build audience segments around them.
Annex needed a fast, consistent way to surface these signals and turn them into something their sales team could actually sell.
“We needed to transform content engagement into actionable audience intelligence — and revenue,” said Stacy Bradshaw, VP of Data & Technology at Annex Business Media.
Before the Product, the Proof
Once Omeda’s AI content tagging was in place, Annex didn’t rush straight to market. First, they wanted to pressure-test how much value lived in the engagement data alone.
They implemented what they call AI Think Tanks — internal sessions where sales and editorial teams sat down together, powered by a custom AI agent fed with Omeda’s topic tag data. The agent served as a kind of data expert in the room: when an editor pitched a virtual event around decarbonization in the biomass sector and a sales rep wasn’t sure how to monetize it, the team could go to the data to find which companies would want to align with that content.
The programs that came out of those sessions weren’t new tactics — webinars, themed newsletters, virtual events. The goal was to sell more of what Annex already did well, but use the data to make those decisions smarter. The think tanks also had a secondary benefit: by bringing brand teams into the taxonomy-building process early — helping define which terms should be merged, which meant different things across industries — Annex built trust in the data before asking anyone to sell with it.
“If they don’t trust the data, they won’t use the data,” Bradshaw said. The brand teams most involved early on consistently saw better outcomes.
The Solution: A Five-Step, Omeda-Powered Workflow
Rather than building a one-off campaign tool, Annex designed Own the Topic as a repeatable, end-to-end system. Every step runs through Omeda.
Step 1: Discover what’s driving engagement. Using Omeda’s Audience Insights tool — powered by AI content tagging — the team identifies which editorial topics are generating the most audience activity across their content ecosystem. This isn’t a guess or an editorial hunch. It’s a data-backed starting point that shows which conversations are already happening at scale.
Step 2: Build the audience. Once a high-value topic is identified, Omeda’s Audience Builder creates a precise segment of readers who have actively engaged with that content. The key here is the horizontal reach: because Omeda’s AI content tagging works consistently across all Annex brands, Own the Topic campaigns can surface audiences interested in a topic like workplace safety across manufacturing, construction, and public safety brands simultaneously — cutting across industries in a way that firmographic data alone never could. The team layers in additional targeting — job title, company size, geography — to produce a highly qualified final audience.
Step 3: Activate with email. Omeda’s Email Builder deploys themed eNews campaigns delivering curated editorial and sponsored content tied directly to the selected topic. Messaging is contextually relevant to both the reader and the advertiser’s goals.
Step 4: Extend on-site. The same audience segment receives personalized native ad experiences across Annex brand websites via Omeda’s core platform and personalization tools — reinforcing the message beyond the inbox and across multiple brand touchpoints.
Step 5: Amplify further. Clients can onboard the targeted list for social or programmatic campaigns, building lookalike audiences and layering additional reach onto a highly qualified core.
The result is a closed-loop system that takes a topic from discovery to full multi-channel activation — without the team having to stitch together separate platforms or rebuild the workflow from scratch each time.
Why It Worked: Simplicity Sells
One thing Annex got right early: they productized Own the Topic rather than trying to educate the sales team on audience targeting mechanics. Packaging it as a named program — with a clear client entry point, a defined set of deliverables, and a familiar transactional structure — made it something sales could pick up and sell without needing to understand every layer of the data beneath it.
That, combined with having all the tools — tagging, audience building, activation, personalization — living in one ecosystem, meant the program could scale without adding operational complexity.
The Results: A Repeatable Revenue Product
Own the Topic has quickly become one of Annex Business Media’s most successful data-driven advertising initiatives. Sales adoption has been strong — one client has renewed the program three times — and campaigns consistently deliver high engagement across channels. The think tank process has continued to generate new cross-market program ideas, and the model is already expanding: Audience Extension campaigns targeted by topic are now part of Annex’s broader contextual advertising approach.
Beyond the revenue impact, the program has changed how three teams inside Annex operate. Editorial, audience, and sales are now aligned around a shared data layer — one built on trust, because those teams helped shape it.
“The tools matter. Having the tagging, the audience builder, and the activation through personalization all in one ecosystem with Omeda certainly made the program a lot more scalable and efficient.” — Stacy Bradshaw, VP of Data & Technology, Annex Business Media
For media companies sitting on rich engagement data and wondering how to unlock its value for advertisers, this is the playbook. Want to learn more about how Annex leverages Omeda? Book a demo.
