Leveraging Alteryx Server for Media Optimization

[DanielleR]

Author:

Aaron Harter

Role:

Media Ops Manager

Company:

Quigley-Simpson

Leveraging Alteryx Server for Media Optimization

Originally Published: 2016 Excellence Awards Entry 

Overview of Use Case:  

We leverage our Alteryx Server to design and implement custom apps that allow for any team member at the Agency to benefit from the power of Alteryx, without the programming knowledge necessary to construct a solution on their own. Analytic apps allow for all employees at Q-S to leverage the capabilities of Alteryx in a fun and easy to use interface.

Describe the problem you needed to solve:

Any company can own, buy or hold data. Finding creative applications to use data to drive informed decision making and find opportunities in a market is what separates the wheat from the chaff, regardless of industry.

Quigley-Simpson is an advertising agency in the highly fragmented media industry and the unique problems include managing rapidly changing marketplaces with dozens of disparate data sets and supporting many teams with varying reporting needs. The Media Operations team has been tasked to implement custom solutions to improve efficiency and make sense out of the big data coming in the agency.

Media measurement is highly reliant on quality data sourcing, blending and modeling, and we have been able to use Alteryx as a centralized environment for handling and processing all of this data across many formats. We have worked closely with key stakeholders in each department to automate away all of their "pain points" relating to data and reporting and interacting with our media buying system.

Describe the working solution:

Some of our apps join our media buy, audience delivery history with our client's first party data and the related third party audience measurement data from Nielsen. Other third party data sources we leverage include Digital and Social Media metrics, GfK MRI demographic and psychographic market research, TIVO TRA set-top box data combined with shopper loyalty data, MediaTools authorizations and strategic planning on the brand level, AdTricity digital feedback on pre-, mid-, and post- roll online video campaigns, and comScore digital metrics for website activity.

Expediting the processing, summarizing, cross-tabbing and formatting of these data sets has added an element of standardization to our reporting which did not exist previously while improving the speed and accuracy. An app we built for the one of our teams produces over 50 reports, ready for distribution, in less than 3 min, replacing a process that used to take a full day to accomplish.

Additionally, we are using spatial tools to analyze delivery and performance of pilot Programmatic Television test, which aggregates local market TV inventory to represent a national footprint. Several of our workflows blend and prep data for visualization on our in-house "Data Intelligence Platform" which is powered by Tableau. This is then used by our media planners and buyers to optimize campaigns to meet goals and exceed client expectations.

The flexibility to build out apps or dashboards, depending on the needs statement of the end user, has been phenomenal and very well received at the Agency.

Describe the benefits you have achieved:

Now that we are an Alteryx organization, we are replacing all of our outdated processes and procedures with gracefully simple workflows that are propelling the Agency to the forefront of technology and automation. Our report generating apps have improved the accuracy, reliability, and transparency of our reporting. The log processing apps have saved thousands of hours of manual data entry. Now that our workforce has been liberated from these time consuming, monotonous tasks, we are wholly focused on growing our clients' business while better understanding marketplace conditions.

Streamlining the workflow processes has allowed for drastically reduced on-boarding times while maintaining data integrity and improving accuracy. It has been a primary goal to give all employees the tools to increase their knowledge base and grow their careers by improving the access to data they use for daily decision making, a goal we are achieving thanks in large part to our Alteryx Server.

2016 Alteryx Server app totals (as of 4/22/16):

• Teams using apps = 7
• Number of apps = 44
• 2016 app run count = 1,794
• 2016 time savings = 4,227 hours