Customer Story

Vice

VICE automates analytics across a $5.7 billion global publishing network for more rapid analysis and decision-making.

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Highlights

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9,000

engineering person hours saved

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6-9 months

development and data preparation saved

Table of Contents

By leveraging Switchboard, VICE can aggregate disparate data sources for rapid analysis and decision-making.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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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.

AMANDA YANG, DATA SCIENTIST, VICE

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.

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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“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

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