The Banner: AI, data, and mobile solutions driving subscription growth
The Banner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning news platform with over 80,000 paying subscribers, serving Greater Baltimore and Maryland. Supporting both subscriber growth and product innovation, the company engaged AgileEngine to build AWS-based data and AI infrastructure for content analytics, as well as a fully custom mobile application. Together, these solutions provide a modern foundation for personalized user experiences and long-term growth.
Industries
Digital media, Entertainment, Subscription, Digital publishing, Nonprofit
Services
Data engineering, AI engineering, DevOps, Mobile development, UX/UI design, Architecture, QA automation, Feature development, Modernization
Solutions
Data pipeline, Data lake, Cloud, CI/CD, AI, Data visualization, Business intelligence, Mobile application, Personalization, Product architecture, Integration, Test automation, Test strategy, B2C application, Subscription billing, Audio streaming, Short-form video, Push notifications, White-label migration, Offline caching
Technologies
AWS, Bedrock, Step Functions, Lambda, S3, Glue, Athena, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 3.7, BigQuery, Apache Airflow, Arc XP, Power BI, Amazon Titan, Mistral AI, React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Zustand, SQLite, Firebase (Analytics, Crashlytics, Remote Config), Sentry, Airship, AppsFlyer, Parsely, BlueConic, Viafoura, Piano, Google Ad Manager, Figma, Jest, React Native Testing Library, Appium, WebdriverIO, Mocha, Allure, GitHub Actions, CircleCI
AI tools that powered our workflow
Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT
Outcomes
and highlights
- 3 weeks from project start to release for the AI-driven story classification system
- 70% faster AI-driven content analysis compared to human performance
- 93% accuracy achieved for content classification thanks to AI
- 6 months from ground zero to a full-tested, feature-rich iOS/Android app
- 43% lower projected subscriber churn thanks to personalization
- Zero disruption via seamless shadow migration of user sessions and preferences
- 80,000+ active paying subscribers served on a revamped mobile ecosystem
Solutions overview
AWS-based solutions enabling granular, AI-powered content analysis
Our team introduced an AWS-based data lake and optimized the company’s ETL and ELT pipelines, creating a modern cloud-native ecosystem for content analytics. Using this ecosystem, we modernized the client’s reporting capabilities and developed an AI-driven content categorization tool based on AWS Bedrock and Claude Sonnet 3.7. Developed in weeks, this AI tool uses AWS Step Functions, Lambda, S3, Glue, and Athena.
Key deliverables
- Data lake architecture based on AWS Lake Formation
- GenAI-driven content classification and analysis system
- Self-service solution enabling the analytics team and other stakeholders to create custom views, models, and dashboards with the data from the data lake
- Optimization of ETL/ELT pipelines for cost savings and maintainability
- Infrastructure setup for the orchestration and scheduling of data pipelines
- Consolidation of KPIs from multiple APIs and data warehouses for app usage reporting
- Migration of 99% of manual reports to a Power BI solution with custom workspaces, datasets, and dashboards, as well as a centralized hub with metrics and KPIs
- Disaster recovery plan and safe vault solution for the Arc XP content management environment
- CI/CD pipeline for moving ETL jobs and Airflow DAGs from GitHub to AWS using S3
Technologies
AWS, Bedrock, Step Functions, Lambda, S3, Glue, Athena, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 3.7, BigQuery, Apache Airflow, Arc XP, Power BI
AI-driven content categorization system
Our custom AI solution pushed the content analytics of Banner beyond the company’s legacy CMS capabilities. AgileEngine delivered the solution in three weeks while utilizing AWS Step Functions and Lambda to call the Bedrock Flow for document classification, as well as S3, Glue, and Athena to analyze the results.
Key deliverables
- GenAI-driven content classification and analysis system
- Automated content tagging system replacing limited CMS taxonomy with intelligent categorization
- Data lake infrastructure optimized for AI/ML workloads and model training
- ETL/ELT pipelines engineered for AI data preprocessing and feature engineering workflows
- Evaluation and testing of six different LLMs in parallel in order to find the most accurate option
- Eight iterations on GenAI prompting, refining definitions from basic two-sentence descriptions to comprehensive explanations
Technologies
AWS, Bedrock, Step Functions, Lambda, S3, Glue, Athena, Anthropic Claude Sonnet 3.7, Amazon Titan, Mistral AI
Power BI for reporting
A crucial modernization introduced by our experts covers the client’s business intelligence capabilities. AgileEngine migrated the company’s manual BI reports to a self-service solution, complete with feature-rich workspaces, custom datasets, and a centralized hub featuring key dashboards and KPIs.
Key deliverables
- Power BI analytics ecosystem with organized workspaces and datasets for enterprise-wide access
- Self-service analytics platform enabling stakeholders to create custom data views and models
- Migration of 99% of manual reports to a Power BI solution
- Centralized dashboard hub featuring the flagship executive reporting suite
- Specialized deep-dive dashboards for retention analysis with cohort segmentation capabilities
- Automated dashboard distribution system accessible by stakeholders without Power BI licenses
- Expanded KPI coverage and full automation for one of the client’s main dashboards
- Pre-calculated metrics datasets speeding up dashboard creation and analysis
Technologies
Power BI, AWS
Reimagining the mobile subscriber experience
To eliminate the UX/UI constraints and rigid product roadmap of a legacy white-label app, our dedicated team of 7 experts built a sovereign mobile ecosystem from scratch over a six-month timeline. The new architecture features dedicated audio and video tabs, robust offline support, and advanced personalization.
Key deliverables
- Bespoke cross-platform mobile application for iOS and Android built from the ground up
- “Watch” tab featuring an ultra-low-latency short-form vertical video feed
- “Listen” tab with advanced audio streaming, upgraded natural voices, and playlists
- “For You” personalization framework utilizing localized regional filtering and automated topic/author tracking
- Offline caching database layer allowing offline article access and streamlined bookmarking
- Enterprise integrations across subscription management, profile syncing, commenting, ad serving, and analytics
- Nightly automated E2E testing pipeline to prevent regressions during high-traffic news cycles
- In-house design system in Figma with full light/dark mode support
- Seamless shadow migration protocol transferring active user sessions and settings with zero subscriber disruption
Technologies
React Native, Expo, TypeScript, Zustand, SQLite, Firebase (Analytics, Crashlytics, Remote Config), Sentry, Airship, AppsFlyer, Parsely, BlueConic, Viafoura, Piano, Google Ad Manager, Figma, Jest, React Native Testing Library, Appium, WebdriverIO, Mocha, Allure, GitHub Actions, CircleCI
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