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Kate Hand

  • Executive Vice President
  • Gardner Business Media
Kate Hand

GROW Performance with AI Integration

  • A Unified Audience Database: To consolidate all audience data, Gardner started with the Omeda platform and layered in its tech stack (using SQL and C#) to create a custom data warehouse. This solved the “painfully manual” process of connecting disparate data sources and ensures all information is in one place.
  • Customer-Facing Analytics Dashboard: Clients and internal sales teams have direct access to a dynamic dashboard that provides real-time reporting. Key features include a Company Activity Report, a customizable “show the boss” Impact Report, and a Competitor Report for anonymized benchmarking.
  • AI-Powered Sales Assistance: Sales assistance that allows sales representatives to conduct deep research on companies directly within the system.
  • Custom, Granular Reporting: GROW Performance provides clients with specific demographics, plant sizes, job functions, and company lists for the audience that has interacted with their specific content or ads.
  • A Strategic Shift to Combat Market Changes: By focusing on its first-party “known audience,” Gardner is building a more resilient and monetizable foundation based on direct relationships.
  • Commitment to Internal Adoption and Trust: A significant challenge was ensuring the internal sales team adopted the new tool and felt comfortable with its level of transparency. Success was achieved by demonstrating its value in saving time and enabling more consultative client conversations. Maintaining data integrity across multiple sources remains a constant focus to preserve client trust.
  • AI Integration: How Gardner has integrated AI into the GROW Performance platform

Bio


Kate Hand is a B-to-B media strategist with expertise in web development strategy, publishing, project management, AI, SEO, and process optimization.

As part of Gardner Business Media’s executive team, she leads a talented programming team to conceive and develop best-in-class tools, including DASH, Gardner’s proprietary content management system, and more recently, GROW Performance, a customer-facing marketing analytics platform.

Kate started her career writing long-form feature and news editorial for arts publications and B-to-B business journals, then attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, concentrating on the business of magazine publishing. From there, she worked in custom publishing in Chicago and then landed, back in her hometown of Cincinnati, at Gardner Business Media – the premier voice of the manufacturing industry.

At Gardner, in addition to working with the Development team, she oversees the Advertising, Production and Human Resources departments.

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