A+E’s ad-ops team needed to migrate programmatic demand to FreeWheel’s newer ad serving modules without losing visibility into ad errors. They used Watching That to analyse log-level VAST errors at platform and demand-source level, and reduced ad errors by 70%.
“Without the Watching That platform’s technology, the A+E team would not have had the ability to easily review the data trends we wanted to analyze.”
Before A+E could move programmatic demand into FreeWheel’s newer ad serving modules, three problems had to be solved — getting at the log-level errors, holding the supply chain accountable across the demand migration, and pacing FAST operations against their own report cadence.
On most broadcaster ad-ops teams, the IAB VAST error data that explains what’s actually breaking sits inside ad-server log files that nobody can read without engineering help. By the time the patterns surface in the dashboards, the campaign has already missed.
When a broadcaster moves programmatic demand from one ad serving module to another, partner-side errors look identical pre- and post-migration unless someone can analyse the supply chain on both sides. Without that, the migration’s revenue impact is invisible until reconciliation.
FAST channels move differently than linear or VOD. A pacing dashboard pointed at the rest of the portfolio misses the FAST-specific patterns. A+E needed daily, weekly, and monthly cadences pointed at FAST behaviour to surface the changes that mattered.
What changed when Analysis, Report, and Anomaly Monitors went live →
The team migrated programmatic demand into FreeWheel’s newer modules with the supply chain visible on both sides — VAST errors analysed at platform and demand-source level, three report cadences pointed at FAST behaviour, and Anomaly Monitors flagging the channel fluctuations that mattered.
The Analysis module surfaced VAST error patterns across platform and demand-source dimensions — the analysis A+E couldn’t run from their ad-server alone. The 70% reduction in ad errors came from that visibility, not from a rule-firing alert.
A+E runs a Daily Report as their first line of defence for FAST channel fluctuations, a FAST Report for top-channel performance, and a Monthly Recap surfacing month-over-month performance — all drawn from the same live data layer.
A+E’s Anomaly Monitors flag substantial channel fluctuations the moment they happen — so the team knows whether the Monday meeting starts with a problem or a status update.
