Express Newspapers Case Study
The digital publishing arm of Express Newspapers produces best-in-class ad-funded digital content experiences for UK national titles the Express, Daily Star and OK! Magazine.
The Challenge
Always trying to innovate and scale their business, Express Newspapers challenged themselves to further drive up the fill rates and yields of their video advertising efforts, the lifeblood of their commercial activities.
Investigations to identify the keys to the next level of growth bore no significant leads since the data available from their ad server and online video platform didn’t offer a cohesive, coherent and granular view into what was going on.
Express Newspapers needed a new, unified and multidimensional view of all their video advertising data to gain the level of understanding and control necessary to take everything to the next level.
The Solution
By deploying the Watching That video intelligence platform Express Newspapers gained a single dashboard with 360-degree vision of their video advertising operations, in real time.
For the first time, Express Newspapers could visualise and inspect their performance across a unified, multi-dimensional and discrepancy-free view of all their video ad sessions.
Watching That ensures that the teams at Express Newspapers have all the key data points from their the ad server, online video platform and page at their fingertips whenever they need it. As well, Watching That brings new data to the table by going much deeper than their existing systems can and driving new levels of understanding and insights.
Armed with this newfound intelligence, they quickly identified the areas of highest potential improvements in fill rates and quickly developed an informed and attainable action plan to unlock this trapped value.
Results
Over a 3-month period Express Newspapers have seen fill rate performance increase by 108% across key markets and devices.
Impact
Express Newspapers is now better informed across their entire video ad performance, with Watching That dashboards up on main screens in the office ensuring early detection of any issues.
Furthermore, having a great understanding of the dynamics of their technology setup, Express Newspapers can release versions of the ad funded video players more frequently with great confidence that they will be continuing improving performance and user experience.
This has now lead to a solid core platform of success that is freeing up Express Newspapers to innovate even more in emerging areas such as video header bidding and supply path optimisations leading to even great efficiencies, higher returns and better user experiences.
“Watching That has allowed us to dig into the details of our video ad activity like never before. Certain metrics like breakdown by geographies, domains and devices has really helped us understand our overall performance like never before. We have been able to identify new opportunities, which we are monetising, increasing overall revenues with little extra effort.”