Data visualisation is a uniquely powerful technology for communicating information and statistics to an audience. It can also be an effective means of persuading customers on the validity and benefits of a potentially complex business offering.
Digital tools such as dashboards and visual workspaces allow people to explore data in more direct and impactful ways than traditional tables and spreadsheets allow. Charts and graphs help viewers understand and compare relative values instantly. Patterns and trends can be identified and highlighted more easily. Location-related data can be displayed on a geographic map, making real-world conditions clear.
Bringing interactivity to data visualisation takes the possibilities to a higher level. By introducing different datasets or adding new layers, users can reveal unseen relationships and insights in their data. People can experiment with hypothetical scenarios and see the likely outcomes immediately – creating a data sandbox where they can try and refine options to create optimum solutions.
Creating a world-class interactive data-driven platform
Elsewhen has been helping a client explore and realise the advantages of interactive data visualisation, creating a new digital platform to improve customer experience and clarify the value of their offering.
Our client Finecast is a leading player in “addressable TV” advertising. Finecast is part of GroupM, the media investment group of WPP.
They provide advertising buyers with a single point of access through which to micro-segment and target TV audiences. Their offering is a game-changer for TV and advertisers.
Finecast needed a partner to help them organise and create the tools and a seamless UI to enable streamlined and easy access to the addressable TV advertising ecosystem they had created. Over a multi-year engagement, Elsewhen has worked with Finecast on a range of internal tools and systems, as well as its wider cloud data infrastructure – to help them realise their ambitions.
Enabling efficiency and scalability without compromising on UX
Finecast knows that, in a world of digital acceleration and personalisation, authentic consumer connections have never been more important to TV advertisers. Identifying the viewing audience without cookies or stable device IDs is challenging, and requires a new approach to the way targeted advertising is delivered.
The considerable fragmentation that exists across TV platforms and broadcaster services makes holistic audience planning that much more difficult. Finecast’s technology offers a solution to this – that works across the addressable TV ecosystem, across all channels, screens and devices.
However, Finecast’s legacy tools for campaign planning, pricing and reporting did not match up to the cutting-edge nature of its core offering. Finecast asked Elsewhen to integrate campaign planning, pricing and reporting activities into a single world-class platform – and scale this out across multiple teams and global territories.
Understanding people, processes and tools for a seamless experience
Elsewhen collaborated closely with the Finecast team on the project, using Agile ways of working. We had to dive-in and quickly understand the company’s workflows in great detail, to gain context on how the new platform would be used.
Our team took a bottom-up approach, mapping out the internal workflow, considering people, processes and tools. This enabled us to understand tasks and data flow across the organisation. We also identified pains and gains for Finecast’s team and customers.
This approach helped us quickly productise many of Finecast’s core operations into intuitive and functional user experiences. Elsewhen delivered the entire platform – everything from product design to front and back end, to cloud infrastructure. At the time of writing it has been rolled out seamlessly across more than 16 international markets.
Delivering a digital campaign pricing platform at scale
The Elsewhen team created a powerful platform for Finecast. It enables high-precision campaign audience planning, pricing and reporting – delivered in an efficient, repeatable and scalable fashion.
With the new platform, Finecast can easily build ad campaigns that target highly specific audiences. It integrates a wide range of data-sets, such as audience identifiers and demographics. The platform applies machine learning (ML) on multiple data streams to analyse and optimise campaign performance.
Using scenario mapping and planning, users see how their campaign can maximise reach and impact – adapting dynamically to fit the available budget – and then visualise the geographical distribution of the audience on an interactive map. This enables Finecast to intelligently plan, schedule and price a campaign for their clients.
Supporting a vision of data-enabled service optimisation
The new Finecast Audience Planner platform delivers the trust and reach of TV, supercharged with the accuracy and accountability of digital, giving advertisers advanced consumer segmentation, scenario planning and pricing capabilities across the addressable TV marketplace. Now brands are able to plan and manage advertising campaigns within a single platform with global scale.
Brands can now reach an exact target audience while viewers are enjoying their favourite TV shows, regardless of the platform or device. This is made possible by a unique privacy-compliant targeting approach that enables advertisers to create precision targeted audience segments that incorporate multiple consumer attributes, including life-stage, purchase behaviour, and demographics, down to the household level.
Finecast Audience Planner is also customisable, enabling brands to bring their own data and integrate with agency planning systems. The Reach & Frequency module also enables budget-based scenario planning, so brands can fine-tune campaigns to ensure optimal reach. Now brands can connect with their target audiences, regardless of where, when and how they choose to watch their most-loved TV shows.
Explore our case study to learn more
Find out more about how Elsewhen helped advertising technology innovator Finecast build an interactive data-driven platform.
