Challenges

Dotdash Meredith is a media powerhouse with an audience of 150 million, and deep relationships with major brand advertisers. Having the ability to drill down into best-performing ad categories, or optimize prices across properties and regions, is crucial. But with operational and partner data exploding in recent years, what was once a neatly integrated BI environment has become a disparate data ecosystem in a state of constant flux. For Dotdash Meredith’s Revenue Analytics team, each new data integration makes a manual reporting process more complicated, time-consuming, and increasingly at risk of human error.

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What Switchboard does

By using Switchboard’s turnkey automation platform, Dotdash Meredith can unify data at scale for more accurate reporting. Specifically, Switchboard creates foundational datasets with trusted revenue and delivery data extracted from Dotdash Meredith's ecosystem of ad servers, SSP partners, order management, and direct sales systems. Switchboard normalizes and maps disparate partner data using customizable data "recipes" according to the team’s unique business rules. Switchboard also enables continuous data warehouse integration, making “finished” data automatically available within the existing EDW. 

 

By partnering with Switchboard, Dotdash Meredith enjoys end-to-end reliability and quality governance with standard alerts to monitor partner feeds for anomalies, outages, or inadvertent data corruption. And they can also backfill months of missing or faulty data at the click of a button. 

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Results

Switchboard’s quick and scalable solution was up and running in weeks, and easily handled Dotdash Meredith’s most complex and massive datasets - even after the company’s acquisition of Time Inc brought a 200% increase in data volume. 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. 

Now, Dotdash Meredith’s four-strong Revenue Analytics team can harness two billion rows of daily data and has one source of truth for revenue reporting across 40 brands without writing a single line of code. As the publishing ecosystem extends beyond ads to reach first-party audiences across social, marketing, e-commerce, and events, the team is already looking to leverage Switchboard for cross-channel revenue forecasting, integrated sales processes, and developing new revenue streams.

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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?”
– Rich Zeroth, VP Programmatic Monetization, Dotdash Meredith

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