Case Study: New York Post
Watching That provides the leading US publisher with powerful video diagnostics protecting millions of video ad impressions a day
The Background
The New York Post, owned by News Corp, is one of the most established, provocative and impactful news brands in the US. Along with its flagship digital website NYPost.com, the New York Post’s portfolio includes Decider.com and Page Six, generating more than 100million unique visitors, 670million page views and 200million video views a month.
The Challenge
Like all premium news publishers, video is a key medium for the New York Post to tell their stories and derive meaningful business returns.
Given the increasingly fragmented and always on nature of the digital news landscape, the NY Post turns to its best in class Revenue Operations team to ensure every video view is monetised to the fullest extent possible.
To do so the team requires the right information about every video view, at the right time to take the appropriate action at a moment’s notice. This not only requires a single source of truth to unify every corner of the technology stack but also the right tools that give the team immediate awareness of any problems as they arise, with the ability to fix issues immediately the first time they occur.
The New York Post Revenue Operations team turned to Watching That to provide them with exactly what they need to ensure continuous peak performance levels and returns from their video advertising efforts.
The Solution
By deploying the Watching That, via a lightweight video player plugin, the New York Post established a `single source of truth` that covered their entire video technology stack.
Watching That collects and correlates over 6 dimensions of video data sets covering over 50 individual data metrics, from technology components as far apart in the ‘stack’ as the online video platform, the ad server and New York Post’s SSP partners.
From this new real time data lake, the New York Post instantly gained deep new insights into their inventory dynamics leading to the identification of new growth opportunities and, more importantly, gaining full understanding of every failed ad request.
Furthermore, Watching That’s reporting suite provides the NY Post leadership team with management grade weekly and monthly reporting, ensuring that all stakeholders are getting everything they need to know they are making the best decisions possible.
The Results
With Watching That, the New York Post has been able to:
- Find the needle in the Line Item haystack: With the extreme granularity of the data and the real time alerting functionality, Watching That enabled New Post to spot and fix one misconfigured line item amongst the thousands in their ad server
- Improve viewability performance: With over 6 degrees of data, NY Post was able to zero in on one particular video player’s viewability performance crossed by one popular browser vendor, to apply the fine tuning necessary to ensure top quality levels.
- Align stakeholders to one business view of video, a single source of truth; Watching That’s business grade reporting framework allows the VP of RevOps to ensure everyone across the organisation is fully up to date and in the know with how video is performing, taking away any guesswork and interdepartmental unease.
“Watching That has given us full control of our video advertising.. Their diagnostics and troubleshooting tools have helped us find, fix and solve revenue impacting issues much more quickly and easily than before. And their rich business grade reporting means everyone is always in the know about where we are, what needs to be done and how to go about it.”
