Global Telecom & Advertising Data Portal Transformation

A $2 billion ad business built in under 6 months

This media and telecom giant had a vision: a brand-new division that would make a billion dollars in the first year alone.

With guidance from Launch, they created a brand-new advertising data portal with Snowflake that provides real-time insights to advertisers and enables intelligent decision-making around advertising spend.

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Turns out, it made $2 billion in the first year. And the initial version of the advertising platform went live within a mere 5.5 months.

Here’s how they did it.

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Data, data everywhere, and not a drop to drink

This media and telecommunications conglomerate had aggregated a vast amount of viewership data from various channels. 15 petabytes worth of data, to be specific.

And they weren’t doing anything with it.

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They knew this data provided enormous potential for decision-making based on viewership trends. So they sought to leverage this huge untapped resource to create a brand-new advertising platform.

But legacy approaches weren’t up to the task.

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Why an advertising data platform?

This global telecom company was looking for transformation. They wanted to become a leader and innovator in the new direct-to-consumer advertising trend. With 70% of American households using at least one of their products, they saw a lot of opportunity to revolutionize ad delivery, curating ads down to each individual household.

Their goal was to be able to compete with Nielsen. Instead, their more accurate, targeted, and personalized data helped them blow past Nielsen—who, in fact, later subscribed to our client’s platform.

When your target competitor becomes your customer, you know your platform is good.

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Launch differentiator: A human approach to data

This company may be a global institution, but this advertising data portal was a startup. That’s why they wanted to work with Launch—in addition to our deep data and tech expertise, we shared their entrepreneurial mindset and their focus on the human impact of this new data-based tech.

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The client envisioned an experience that not only generated more revenue, but also improved their customers’ interaction with their media and their advertisers’ interaction with the ad platform.

To achieve this, we consulted with them to create a strategic user story map, initial wireframes, and final designs that would collaborate well with the existing data infrastructure, architecture, automation, and reporting - as well as with Snowflake's could data platform, which would enable the scale this company needed.

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And boy, did it pay off

"With just a few months to show value…multiple partners were brought together, and they knocked it out of the park thanks to Launch’s consulting and technical teams. Nine months later we were doing billions.​"
— Advertising VP

• 47 million new cross-platform subscribers 
• $2 billion in revenue (twice their original goal)
• 360-degree view of viewership trends based on first-party data and third-party aggregation
• API management and monetization, allowing internal and external parties to build their own applications
• Segments for ad targeting based on viewership engagement levels
• Start-to-finish record time of 5.5 months to MVP

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The intricate details (if you're into that)

Launch designed a holistic solution centered on the Snowflake cloud data warehouse that consolidated 15PB of consumption and marketing data. Key components of this solution involved building processes for improving data quality and data security, while leveraging the scalable design of Snowflake to conduct data transformation activities within the data warehouse itself (ELT pattern).

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The outcome was an intuitive, extensible, and secure data portal providing an engaging user experience, using both native and embedded capabilities from Looker for data visualization.

The Looker platform also provided the semantic modeling layer, describing petabytes of data in business terms for easy self-service consumption.

For reporting and security, this solution uses the Anodot Autonomous Business Monitoring platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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Do you see an opportunity to use your customer data to create an entirely new digital business? We can help with that. Sign up for a Future State of Data Workshop and get moving on your next data transformation.

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