Bringing AI to the Publisher Behind Rolling Stone and Variety
Jake Goldman on
When Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the publisher behind iconic brands like Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard, wanted to incorporate generative AI into their stack in 2023, they came to us seeking a close knit collaboration that would use our existing open source AI toolkit for WordPress, ClassifAI, as the starting point. Working hand-in-hand, we iteratively and rapidly tested, integrated, and deployed AI features with a focus on improving editorial workflow productivity, improving visitor engagement, and driving SEO.
ClassifAI and its existing architecture gave us a huge head start. A project that started with Machine Learning applications in 2018, it already had AI-powered capabilities like smart content tagging, SEO-optimized title recommendations, image generation and automatic image descriptions. ClassifAI’s service-agnostic architecture gave PMC the ability to immediately integrate their existing and trusted cloud services provider, Microsoft, using Azure’s OpenAI service.
Collectively, our teams rapidly prototyped and deployed enhancements to existing AI-powered features in ClassifAI and built out entirely new features. Experiments and notable improvements that made their way back into the open source plugin included:
- Smart 404 pages that use URL paths to suggest relevant content, reducing bounce rates by 15%;
- Role and user based feature controls that facilitate change management in the newsroom by enabling site owners to slowly deploy new features as they build buy-in.
- New user experiences for evaluating AI recommendations, making it easy to review AI recommendations carefully before incorporating them;
- Advanced category and tag cleanup features that improve taxonomy hygiene and SEO performance.
“[ClassifAI] allowed our team to explore AI solutions quickly and in a cost-effective manner. We appreciated the collaborative process … which helped us understand how to integrate AI more effectively into our publishing workflow. This partnership has been crucial in helping us better understand and utilize generative AI.”
Gabriel Koen, PMC Senior Vice President of Technology
Read the full case study detailing our AI collaboration with PMC to learn more. Ready to drive engagement with efficiency and AI for your content? Let’s talk.