How Sparklore’s Cloud-based Dashboard Unlocked The Lost Potential Of A Digital Media Platform’s Data Reporting System

Problem Statement: Digitally consolidating the company’s Multi-market campaign tracking systems into a single, user-level customizable dashboard

Stakeholders: A Digital Media Platform and Sparklore

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Client

A digital media platform that specializes in delivering industry-leading digital campaigns across verticals and industries. Headquartered in New York, USA, it serves 3,000+ clients in 47 countries across, Asia, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America.

Approach

The Client is renowned internationally for its data-packed programmatic media solutions that link leading advertising brands to a real-time audience. They are on the forefront of emerging technologies, by delivering laser-edge insights, intersecting business & technology, and decoding win-win marketing opportunities in real-time.

By leveraging proprietary advertising and cutting-edge technologies, the company provides advertisers with unmatched media access across multiple channels.

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Consolidation through Customization

Business Challenge

After expanding their footprint across countries, the client’s offices operated independently based on their geographic location. Inevitably, they adopted divergent reporting practices and operating procedures by depending on multiple data sources.

As a result, the company was confronted with unacceptable variations in campaign performance reports. In addition, the following problems were encountered:

Usage of tedious excel sheets by many markets
Lack of a consolidated visibility of performance in different markets
Error-prone report generation
Difficulty in prioritizing and streamlining reporting needs due to the sheer number of market with its specific nuances
Varied data sources, that were difficult to identify
Complications in linking delivery data to planning data
Lack of an automated system to streamline the processes

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Intuitiveness + Automated Integration = Accelerated Success

Business Solution

In order to optimize their scattered data reporting processes and deliver real-time visibility into campaign performance through data-driven consolidation, the client reposed their faith in Sparklore’s future-ready data visualization solutions to surmount challenges that were starting to threaten their efficiency and performance.

Numerous meetings were held with the primary stakeholders of each region to better understand their existing procedures, priorities and limitations. Inputs and feedbacks were taken from all the concerned markets to determine the most effective means of positioning the dashboard as a single-window solution for their challenges.

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Dashboards ‘Show’ the Way

Strategy

Since the need of the hour was to provide relevant data to all markets that delivered tailored solutions without diluting the consistency between markets, a concerted decision was taken to leverage only those data sources that could impart maximum benefits across all markets.

A strategy was devised to develop two standard reporting dashboards in Datorama and make it region-specific (APAC and EMEA) to resolve the challenges of all markets under these regions.

Considering the tight deadline of this project, it was decided that a dashboard be created that not only intersected multiple markets in a time-bound manner, but could also be fully functional across markets and advertisers.

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From Information-Driven to Insights-Driven

Core Insights

The proposed solution was to integrate collated data from multiple sources and markets into Datorama accurately. To that end, Sparklore’s team worked closely with Datorama’s support team to ascertain the most effective solution.

Several tests were performed to ensure the logic & formula to yield accurate results and remain consistent in all scenarios
A sample market was selected from each region as a POC
The APIs for extracting data were further developed by Datorama to meet the market requirements in entirety

Since each market was intrinsically unique, the project was divided into two phases.

Phase I

The first phase focused on developing an automated reporting system that would identify and combine common elements between region-specific markets. This phase also paid attention on the items that were required urgently by those markets.

After detailed requirement gathering, a wireframe was created and shared with the executives of each region.

Phase II

In the second phase, Sparklore focused on enabling tailored solutions in individual markets and introducing value-add features. The emphasis was also on obtaining feedback from all markets and streamlining the extracted data through a well-calibrated approach. On the basis of this feedback, multiple iterations were made.

The front and back end of the dashboards were created using a template approach to deploy them speedily across markets with minimal errors. Simultaneously, markets were informed about the importance of following standard protocols when entering data into the planning systems.

Since all end-users would access a common interactive dashboard, user privileges and data access was decided upon to restrict the data access to areas pertaining to a specific market/need.

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Marrying Data and Visualization to Drive Results

Business Outcomes

The first phase was completed 3 months ahead of deadline and deployed across 20 markets

Seamless data optimization, resulting in lower costs and heightened dashboard speeds
Automated reporting system that detected and prevented data errors
360 degree, real-time visibility into performance in all markets
Actionable intelligence on critical metrics and dimensions
Enabled drilling-down of data to facilitate meaningful comparisons

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Future Prospects

In the next few phases, the dashboard would be enriched by more features, functionalities and data sources. Additional features by Datorama are also expected to be integrated in the Phase 1 of dashboards.