Customer Success Story
A Product-Centric Approach to Data Analytics
While also enhancing viewer experience for a media giant, InfoCepts enabled multimillion-dollar savings in ad revenue leakage by providing near-real-time data analytics.
Having built an automated pipeline to aggregate data from 30+ sources, InfoCepts was able to deliver insights on content distribution and digital advertisement sales data. The solution enabled multimillion-dollar savings in ad revenue leakage for the broadcaster, provided better ROI for its advertisers, and improved the viewing experience for its audience.
The Challenge
The broadcaster wanted to ensure that any scheduled advertisement is shown to the right audience at the correct time—a complicated process. It entails integrating data from ad servers, content delivery devices, targeting algorithms, and viewer demographics. Our task of integrating 30+ data sources—amounting to petabytes of data—was particularly daunting. Adding to the challenge, ad viewership data is largely unstructured, yet our customer wanted to eliminate viewer fatigue from repetitive commercials while also minimizing irrelevant ads.
The second challenge involved analyzing content viewership across consumption channels to assess show effectiveness, ad placement efficacy, and viewer behavior. Such insights inform decisions related to contract renewal, demographic-based targeting, and ad platform selection.
Prior to implementing our data product, a team of 20+ FTEs manually cleansed and unified our customer’s data from various sources, aggregated it, and prepared Excel spreadsheets. But such aggregated reports were of little help in analyzing granular data, rendering them unfit for decision support. For example, insights such as exact ad impressions within specific timeslots were unavailable.
The result was uninformed program decisions caused by fragmented metrics across teams and businesses. Lack of series- and episode-level insights led to miscalculated ad impressions, revenue leakage, and failed targeting.
The Solution
InfoCepts strategized with our customer and developed a solution that processes huge data volumes from disparate sources in near real-time. Business teams are served curated analytics.
Pulling from multiple sources—such as traditional and digital content delivery channels and ad platforms— the first layer consolidates data in a variety of formats (e.g., JSON, XML, APIs) and varying granularity into a data lake. A central engine then applies business and transformation rules and performs operations such as data standardization and classification. Curated data marts optimize it for exploration, analysis, and integration with other systems.
Catering to specific audiences, a combination of BI tools hosted in a web portal provide a seamless, self-service experience to end users. InfoCepts created three applications for this layer to:
- Provide insights on viewer consumption behavior across channels
- Analyze ad campaign effectiveness and provide decision support related to ad placement
The third app integrates information provided by the first two. It helps answer business questions that tie viewer consumption patterns with the best means to distribute and monetize related content.
By way of continuous roadshows and training sessions, InfoCepts then helped our customer with internal branding for its new data product. Articulating a clear ROI promoted faster adoption of our solution. It’s now regarded as the trusted source of curated data by internal teams and downstream applications.
The Customer
Our customer is a US mass media and entertainment conglomerate catering to a global audience. It produces and distributes entertainment, news, information products, and services.
Industry
Media
Business Functions
Sales, Finance
Solutions
Foundational Data Platforms
Technologies
Teradata, Hortonworks, Talend, Spark, MicroStrategy, Tableau
Geography
North America
Year of Deployment
2018
Our business is not only a vertical one, but also a horizontal one. Without the proper tools, it was difficult to assess performance based on our multiple product offerings. InfoCepts’ data solution provides critical delivery insights from a financial perspective that help drive scalability and our strategic decisions.”
The Result
The InfoCepts data product enables our customer to save millions of dollars in lost ad revenue. It can now effectively analyze consumption metrics across channels, monitor ad placement and performance at the most granular levels (series, episode, or break), and evaluate partner effectiveness. In addition, the broadcaster can supply advertisers with specific insights as to where, when, and how ads were served, and can identify revenue leakage by analyzing viewer behavior. Other benefits of note include:
- In one instance, analysis provided by our solution helped realize $400K in partner chargeback
- Our product has enabled a 99% reduction in offending ad views (ad repetitions) and an 85% reduction in problematic viewing sessions
- It has reduced ad load latency and repeat ads from same-industry categories (competitive separation)
- The solution has enabled reduced time to market for new services and offerings
Just as our data product continues to reveal new possibilities to our client, so our opportunity to help guide it through applying advanced data analytics increases.
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