Finecast | Elsewhen

Overview

Finecast is part of GroupM, the media investment group of WPP.

A leading player in addressable TV advertising, 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.

Highlights

Creating a new campaign planning, pricing and reporting platform to help Finecast’s team deliver a new level of value and precision to customers.
Enabling a step-change for the ad industry, with data-driven targeting, dynamic pricing and real-time planning, allowing for optimisation at an unprecedented speed and scale.

The challenge
Enabling efficiency and scalability without compromising on user experience

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.

Our strategic approach
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. Everything from product design to front and back end, to cloud infrastructure, Elsewhen delivered the entire platform. At the time of writing it has been rolled out seamlessly across more than 16 international markets.

Services provided

Design system
Technical solution architecture
Data modelling
Machine learning
Product strategy
UI & UX design
Front-end engineering
Back-end engineering
Cloud architecture

Our solution
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.

The outcomes
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, 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 they 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.

16: Markets
1TB: Audience data
8 weeks: To product definition
3 years: Strategic partnership