How VICE automates and accelerates analytics across a $5.7 bn global publishing network
By leveraging Switchboard, VICE can aggregate disparate data sources for rapid analysis and decision-making.
Highlights
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9,000 engineering person hours saved
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6-9 months development and data preparation save
Challenges
With an international network of digital channels, a TV network, TV production studio, magazine, record label, in-house creative services agency and more, VICE is one of the most comprehensive and complex digital publishing platforms in the world. But creating over 2,400 pieces of content a week in 25 languages (amid growth pushing the company to $5.7 billion) comes with three significant data challenges:
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Scale: Disparate content data across over 30 countries - combined with a sharp rise in programmatic ad buying and selling - means there is too much data from different sources to efficiently manage and prepare for an up-to-date, strategic view of business performance.
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Speed to market: With daily data reaching 50GB per day, and with complex APIs and schemas, a single data source such as GAM could take months of engineering resources to understand and automate.
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Timely insights: Data for manual reports take so much effort to massage and prepare that any insights were arriving too late to impact business performance.
What Switchboard does
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 GAM, DBM, AdX, YouTube, Moat, Operative order management, and IndexExchange.
Results
Using Switchboard's cloud-based data automation engine, 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 uses Switchboard’s turnkey event-level analytics to automatically handle 50TB annual ad and bidding logs, without any IT overhead.
“APIs, schemas, and data sizes for GAM and YouTube make understanding the performance of content and inventory across global properties and partners really complex. Onboarding data from these sources would be a huge technical challenge – which is why the Switchboard solution is great. They were able to start automating our production data in less than a week.”
– Data Scientist, VICE
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.