Switchboard, a provider of advertising data and analytics software for large content providers, has revealed the results of its Financial Times implementation.
Since deploying its solution last year for the Financial Times, Switchboard says it was able to accelerate the release of the FT's award-winning “Cost-per-Hour” ad product by six to nine months. In addition, FT customers now benefit from 80% faster analytics for advertising campaign performance.
The Financial Times, one of the world's leading sources of news and information, with a reputation for precision and transparency, is now a majority digital content business. In order to maintain its competitive advantage, the FT needed to provide advertisers with a new level of insight in the form of increased audience attention.
The FT partnered with Switchboard to access more granular data, such as event-level viewability and sell-through intelligence. Working with Switchboard's Data Operations platform, the FT was able to easily unify critical data streams to deliver real-time business insights while keeping costs in check.
Barry Cassidy, head of advertising operations at the Financial Times, says: “FT needed to automate existing manual data processes. “We implemented Switchboard's platform to eliminate the cost and uncertainty of building complex data automation.
“Switchboard's Data Operations domain expertise allowed us to focus on what we do best, delivering great digital media and award-winning ad products.” The results of FT's Switchboard implementation were significant:
- Faster business insights – FT tripled reporting frequency and increased granularity by five times.
- Real-time yield forecasting – FT eliminated a four person-day overhead per forecast across all yield, planning, and ops teams.
- Zero development overhead – FT did not add developer hours for this large-scale data automation and governance work.
- Rapid setup – FT's beta for sell-through forecasting was completed in one week. The production setup for CPH was completed in three weeks.
Ju-kay Kwek, co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, says: “Digital media businesses face unique data operations challenges because of the volume and variety of data they need to harness for advertisers. By removing the overhead of complicated and expensive data operations, Switchboard is helping FT accelerate the growth of their marketing intelligence platform and delight customers with new and constantly improving products like CPH.”
