Customer Story

Financial Times

Financial Times launched an award-winning CPH product in weeks, leveraging more granular data for precision forecasting.

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Highlights

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500 ad accounts

continuously onboarded into Snowflake

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120 engineering hours

saved each week

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From 2 quarters to 2 months

development time to build strategic data assets

Table of Contents

The Financial Times is one of the world's leading sources of news and information, with a reputation for precision and transparency.

Challenges

The FT delivers targeting solutions and market intelligence to brand customers through innovative new ad products, such as the award-winning Cost Per Hour (CPH) offering, alongside in-depth, granular reporting and analysis. This enables them to deliver increased audience attention for advertisers, while maximizing monetization opportunities via highly granular and accurate forward sell-through intelligence.

However, manually scaling up the insights needed to drive revenue quickly becomes an insoluble data challenge. On the ops side, measuring CPH performance requires ops teams to piece together large amounts of raw, real-time data coming from disparate sources. On the planning side, a site-wide inventory forecast means running almost 1,500 queries in the DFP UI, and merging the results into spreadsheets. Each forecast requires up to four-person days to create, by which time is already out of date.

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The prior method of compiling the CPH campaign reports took anything from two hours to half a working day. They can now take as little as 20 minutes.

BARRY CASSIDY, DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING DATA & BI

What Switchboard does

Switchboard's cloud-hosted solution automates critical commercial and operational data insights to drive decisions at scale. The platform automates many complex steps – from aggregating and cleaning raw media data, to applying business rules and joins, to merging the streams into a unified data warehouse.

Today, the FT has a CPH performance monitoring system, with user-friendly dashboards, powered by impression-level viewability data merged with real-time delivery data. Switchboard provides end-to-end process automation and continuous data governance monitoring, meaning no additional developer staffing is required to build and maintain expensive infrastructure.

Results

With the help of Switchboard, the FT stood up its sell-through forecast in one week and its CPH ops solution in three weeks, saving 6–9 months of risky custom development. Today, Switchboard’s platform eliminates 80% of the time required for manual CPH performance reporting, and a four-person day bottleneck in yield forecasting.

With real-time forecasting rolled out to all teams, the FT now delivers a 3x increase in reporting frequency to customers, with a 5x increase in granularity. By leveraging a battle-proven, real-time DataOps platform, the FT now has a scalable data maturity model upon which they are able to significantly iterate and improve for the long term.

About Switchboard

Switchboard connects business operations teams to the information they need to make fast revenue and marketing decisions. Our platform plugs into a huge variety and volume of digital platforms and automatically structures your data for unified reporting and deep exploration — with zero development effort from your team. Switchboard lets your team answer precise revenue questions and gives them numbers they can trust because you’re not relying on one-off integrations, tools that don’t work together, or brittle custom code.

Ready to learn more about Switchboard?

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Customer Spotlight

“If we hadn’t started working with Switchboard, given competing priorities we would still be trying to fill the engineering resource gap today. We had invested over eight months of engineering to overcome a data challenge that took Switchboard one month to solve – and now saves us 80 person-hours per month on engineering and operations overhead”.

Financial Engineering Lead

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“Switchboard enabled us to get our first data sets onboarded before new engineering resources were able to be brought in, so they could hit the ground running.”

Ameen Kazerouni, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Orangetheory Fitness

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