A+E Networks resolved high ad failure rates and boosted ad revenue
A+E Networks® is a global media and entertainment company that includes iconic brands such as A&E, HISTORY, Lifetime, FYI, and VICE TV. With content available in over 200 territories and 40 languages, A+E Networks reaches 335 million viewers worldwide. By integrating MediaMelon’s advanced analytics, A+E Networks gained deeper insights into video performance and ad delivery, optimizing viewer experience and significantly boosting advertising revenue across multiple platforms.
Impact scale at a glance
Worldwide viewers reached
Global streaming brands
Employees across multiple territories
The Challenge
Maintaining a high quality of experience is crucial for A+E as it impacts both their viewer experience and advertising revenues. By offering a consistent, reliable and high-quality experience, viewers are more likely to stay engaged with content and in-turn consume more ads and therefore increase monetization.
Delivering a Flawless Playback Experience
A+E needs to ensure that engagement across all of their brands is maximized and to be able to rapidly resolve anything that interrupts that engagement. They need to understand the quality of experience in the video playback itself, and not just in the overall application as
video is where most time is spent.
It was therefore imperative that A+E’s video operations team had the ability to measure and analyze their video experience in real-time with reliable and consistent metrics. The video operations team was relying on an internal solution to obtain a limited range of metrics, however they “needed to partner with a vendor that captured the full range of Quality of Experience and Performance metrics across Content and Ads so that we can identify and resolve issues as they arose,” said John Cool, Vice President of Digital Media Technologies at A+E Networks.
Increasing Ad Revenue
In addition, A+E Networks needed the ability to measure programmatic advertising with Client-Side Ad Insertion and Server-Side Ad Insertion from a single tool across their many applications running on over eight different platforms.
John characterizing his challenge, said, “A+E is perhaps unusual in our industry in that we make heavy use of programmatic advertising using both client and server side ad insertion. The environment for us is quite different than just delivering content, we’re working with scores of sources of advertising that can be populated into our video experiences and so it is critical to be able to understand where any problems are occurring – if it is in the content or, if it is dvertising, exactly what is the cause of those problems among all the different ad sources that we deal with, regardless of the type of ad insertion in use”
These challenges led John to search for a solution that provided performance and quality of experience intelligence, with real-time alerting to identify the root cause of an issue across both content and ads. John and his team ran a thorough evaluation of all key vendors of Streaming QoE solutions that included MediaMelon.
Selecting an Analytics Partner MediaMelon SmartSight & SmartSight Ads
John and his team found a solution with MediaMelon SmartSight and SmartSight for Ads. “The ability to gain granular insight across both content and ads was an imperative, however, so was the ability to analyze them jointly as well as separately from within a single solution”.
Data Accuracy
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Ease of Integration
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Richness of Features
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An Active Partnership
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The Results
How MediaMelon’s Solution is Contributing to the Success of A+E
Selecting a vendor, “was based on many factors including accuracy, innovative approaches, domain expertise as well as customer centricity. That promise has held up with MediaMelon”.
For example, A+E identified a previously unknown issue with an advertising platform that was creating a very high ad failure rate for that platform. Using MediaMelon’s automated Alerting capabilities, availability of deep session level and advertising data, they were able to rapidly determine the root cause, that led A+E’s ad operations teams to resolve the issue. To quote John, “MediaMelon provided invaluable insight into our ads to help identify and resolve ad errors. A particularly large problem was completely obscure before the integration with MediaMelon”.
John also went on to mention other areas where MediaMelon have assisted, including understanding whether the same Ad was being played from different ad sources, to understand ad frequency, and providing invaluable insight into increasing ad fill rate, by identifying sources of the issues that would be inhibiting ad revenue through frequency caps and ad repeats.
The Future
Decisions with Dependable, Trusted and Accurate Intelligence
A+E continue to extend their use of MediaMelon’s solutions. MediaMelon has enabled A+E to act on trusted and accurate insight immediately with a depth of analysis that was previously not possible. Going forward, the team will continue to use MediaMelon’s solutions to its full advantage, enabling real-time actionable insight with root cause analysis to rapidly identify and improve experiences to ensure that A+E continues to offer the compelling viewing experiences on every screen.
Our testimonial speaks for itself
MediaMelon provided invaluable insight into our ads to help identify and resolve ad errors and helped us deliver an exceptional streaming experience to our viewers. A particularly large problem was completely obscure before the integration with MediaMelon.
Vice President, A+E Networks
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