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 CASE STUDIES

VICE Leverages Switchboard to Automate and Accelerate Analytics Across $5 Billion Global Digital Publishing Network

Big Data Drives Big Decisions—Aggregating Disparate Data Sources for Rapid Analysis and Decision-Making.

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Highlights

  • Using Switchboard's cloud-based service, VICE accelerated the company's most complex big-data initiative by 6-9 months against internal company estimates for a DIY solution

  • VICE saved an estimated 9,000 person-hours by adopting Switchboard's automation and data preparation platform, allowing key developer resources to remain focused on the company's content network

  • VICE empowered business leaders with real-time decision-making based on cross-platform reports, with results powered by Google BigQuery

  • VICE enabled turnkey event-level analytics using Switchboard to automatically handle 50TB annual ad and bidding logs, without any IT overhead

Challenge

A pioneer in digital publishing, VICE operates the world's premier original online video and lifestyle destination network. With surging global growth pushing the company's most recent valuation to more than $5 billion, VICE is one of the fastest-growing digital publishing platforms in the world. But this growth triggered data operations challenges stemming from the need to analyze, in real-time, an enormous volume of operational data from a range of disparate sources.

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Solution

VICE selected Switchboard to manage the company's data operations, with a production pilot launched in under two weeks. Today, VICE relies on Switchboard's platform to automatically aggregate and normalize complex data from systems such as DFP, DBM, AdX, and YouTube, as well as Moat, Operative order management, and IndexExchange.

 

Results

Switchboard enabled VICE to quickly gain real-time insights into complex, impression-level data. Such fine-grained visibility allowed analysts to monitor targeted KPIs about which VICE business leaders care most. Switchboard's enterprise-grade platform provided VICE with the scalability necessary to automatically process up to 50TB per year of delivery, inventory, audience and viewability data. This turnkey solution saved the company an estimated 9,000 person hours over the course of the first year.

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“Things like APIs, schema, and data sizes for DFP and YouTube make understanding the performance of content and inventory across dozens of global properties really complex,” said Amanda Yang, Data Scientist at VICE. “Which is why the Switchboard solution is great, because they were able to start automating our production data in less than a week.”

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About Switchboard

Switchboard’s ready-made data unification platform turns disparate data into a single source of reliable, trustworthy information. Business stakeholders at Orangetheory Fitness, Spotify, FT, Pearson and others get a strategic data asset for customer insights and revenue operations, while their technical teams retain control without the burden of day-to-day operations. 

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