Technology has disrupted the publishing industry. Operational data from multiple monetization and systems partners has exploded. What was once a neatly integrated BI environment has become a disparate data ecosystem in a state of constant flux and growth.

 

Harnessing this raw information – to drill down into which ad categories are performing best, or how to effectively optimize prices across different properties and regions – has never been more challenging. Dotdash Meredith, a media powerhouse with an audience of 150 million and deep relationships with major brand advertisers, was built upon a culture of data-driven decision-making. They found their solution by using automation to unify data at scale to drive revenue growth.

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The challenges of scale

Dotdash Meredith’s Monetization Strategy team, led by VP Rich Zeroth, needs to unlock real-time ad revenue insights across all 40 of Dotdash Meredith’s digital brands synchronously. However, with two billion rows of disparate revenue, delivery, and bidding data coming in daily, the complexity and velocity of that data were becoming overwhelming.

 

Zeroth’s Revenue Analytics team supports several business functions, from granular guidance for Media Planning and Sales Operations, to timely reports for the C-Suite. Each new data integration makes a manual reporting process more complicated, time-consuming, and increasingly at risk of human error. In the past, the team spent more time gathering data than performing and sharing analysis -- with the rise of programmatic adding to the pressure. Multiple challenges included:

 

Disparate data from proprietary APIs, FTP sites, and raw CSVs delivered by email.

 

Inconsistency across partner metrics requiring extensive normalization, mapping, and business logic to obtain a holistic picture.

 

Data quality and reliability from glitches across one or more partners at any time. This creates an operational burden to constantly detect, triage, and fix errors so the data can be trusted.

 

Manual mappings between revenue and order data to understand revenue by advertiser. 

 

A well-known departmental reporting solution was unable to keep up with the size and complexity of the incoming raw data, let alone the custom transformations needed to support specific business requirements. Operational hiccups and data quality surprises led to a loss of faith in the accuracy of reports. 

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Quick and scalable solution

Dotdash Meredith partnered with Switchboard, the leading SaaS platform for enterprise data unification. Switchboard’s proven solution was up and running in weeks and easily handled Dotdash Meredith’s most complex and massive datasets. Switchboard’s Customer Success team provided data science expertise that enabled the Revenue Strategy team to release a new analytics suite covering the entire business. Before Switchboard, such a project would have taken a dedicated engineering team more than six months to develop. Now, Dotdash Meredith’s four-strong Revenue Analytics team can routinely roll out a fully automated and thoroughly validated set of holistic dashboards without writing a single line of code. Today, the team can:

 

Create foundational datasets with trusted revenue and delivery data extracted from Dotdash Meredith's entire ecosystem of ad servers, SSP partners, order management, and direct sales systems.

 

Normalize and map disparate partner data using customizable data "recipes" according to Dotdash Meredith's unique business rules.

 

Consolidate business logic from previously disparate spreadsheets and tools.

 

Enable continuous data warehouse integration, making “finished” data automatically available within the existing EDW.

 

Rely on end-to-end reliability and quality governance with standard alerts to monitor partner feeds for anomalies, outages, or inadvertent data corruption.

 

Backfill months of data to correct partner outages or errors with the click of a button. 

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Real-time results

Using Switchboard to connect hundreds of daily data streams and automate over a hundred revenue recognition and advertiser mapping rules, Dotdash Meredith can power a suite of fully automated executive dashboards fed by real-time data. 

 

Control over the data ecosystem leads to new capabilities: Instead of becoming distracted by risky custom development, Zeroth’s team can focus directly on business results. A new capability is making brand-specific editorial and product recommendations to maximize upsell and cross-sell opportunities in each of Dotdash Meredith’s distinct verticals. 

 

Granularity drives rapid insight: The team can dig deeper into page-level and impression-level data, enabling them to answer strategic questions in minutes, conduct A/B testing across ad categories, and monitor the mix of categories over time. 

 

Scalability supports growth: When Dotdash Meredith acquired Time Inc. – a 200% increase in the volume of data and partners – the Switchboard platform scaled seamlessly to handle the surging load without additional technical resources.

 

Scope for comparative analysis: Zeroth’s team can now perform historical analysis for instant month-on-month and year-on-year comparisons that simply would not have been possible before. 

 

By establishing a strategic data asset comprising Dotdash Meredith’s entire digital network, the team now can run ad hoc, real-time analytics that goes far beyond static reports to support teams in other parts of the business. 

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“The burning question used to be: how much did we make yesterday? Today, we can dig deeper and answer questions like: which ad products and content yield the highest ROI with which advertisers?”

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A data-driven future

As digital publishing reaches beyond ads into first-party audiences across social, marketing, e-commerce, and events, the team is already looking to leverage Switchboard’s technology in other areas: Cross-channel revenue forecasting, integrated sales processes, and proactively developing new revenue streams. With a unified data solution in place, Dotdash Meredith is set to continue driving innovation in digital media.

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