How Adweek unlocked years of siloed data, without hiring a data team

Adweek is one of the most recognized names in media, marketing, and advertising news. George Ortiz leads Audience Development, Data, and Analytics, a team responsible for making sure every group inside Adweek has the business intelligence it needs, for clients and for itself, to grow.

For years, that intelligence was trapped in disparate, siloed systems that struggled to answer the questions the business was asking. Polyform rebuilt the foundation, unlocked the data, and became a daily extension of the team, without a single internal data hire.

Adweek had known for a number of years that change was needed. Data lived across disparate sources and different systems, and it was siloed. Simply getting at the information, and giving teams the intelligence they needed for clients and for their own growth, was difficult.

The blocker wasn’t awareness, it was investment. Fixing it properly meant getting backing from senior executives and private equity to overhaul the data warehouse and build an appropriate tech stack. Adweek had also tried previous partners, and it hadn’t worked. They understood media, but the team to execute simply wasn’t there, something the company identified quickly.

The vetting was thorough. But every conversation with the Polyform team pointed in the same direction: move, and move quickly. Once the backing was in place, Adweek made the shift, drawn by a team that was not only capable but kept pace with a fast-moving data world, which George considers essential in any partner.

The change came fast. Within four to six weeks, Adweek was seeing significant differences and unlocking data that had been siloed for years. Along the way, Polyform identified redundant platforms the company could eliminate, streamlining a stack George says now runs like it’s 2026, not 2000.

The hero of that work is Audience 360, a dashboard that finally gave Adweek a single, person-level view of activity across every product and service, from webinars and events to subscriptions and website visits. It surfaces the high-level insight the team could never reach before, and it works as much for clients as it does internally.

Just as important is how Polyform works. The team functions as an extension of Adweek’s own, hand in hand on a daily basis and aware of nearly every project in motion. The support is time-zone agnostic and responsive day or night, and no matter how complex the problem, Polyform breaks it down and returns exactly what’s needed.

The gains are concrete. Redundant platforms were identified and eliminated, which George is comfortable quantifying as six figures of savings, helped by working with an external team side by side instead of making a data hire. His team now accesses information and answers questions quickly, and data that sat locked away for years is finally working. After a year and a half, it’s a partnership George recommends without hesitation.