How Sony overcame campaign challenges with Baresquare

Stephanie White

Senior Manager, Sony

“As an industry we’ve been talking about big data for a long time and there was a lot of expectation that we would use all this data to make wonderful optimization decisions. But the challenge that we’ve had across the whole industry is how to process that data in a timely fashion.”

It’s kind of a given: every online business wants accurate and timely performance data. It’s what enables marketing teams to see what’s performing, and what isn’t. It’s what informs new strategies and new tests. It’s what drives agility and accountability. Without dependable and timely performance data, teams are left operating—and “optimizing”—blindly. 

While these statements may seem obvious, what’s surprising is how rarely companies get accurate performance data and insights in time to drive impact. 

Most businesses average a 10-day data cycle. That’s a long cycle. And by the time they sift, sort, and make sense of the data, it’s often completely out of date, too late to do something about, or it’s a fire they need to put out ASAP to ensure they don’t waste any more marketing spend or lose any more conversion opportunities. 

‍At Sony Europe, Stephanie White, a Media & Consumer Insights Strategy & Operations Planning Senior Manager, was facing this exact challenge. She and Sony’s media team oversee multiple, complex campaigns for their consumer-facing products across 26 markets. It’s their responsibility to efficiently manage and evaluate large amounts of campaign performance data to accelerate decision-making and optimization. But the process itself was not accelerated, and this was not optimal.

The challenge

The scale of Sony media team's responsibility is massive. They run over 40 campaigns annually across 26 markets and 12 media channels, using multiple ad formats and creatives. They monitor around 30 KPIs per campaign, which can last from 10 days to a year.  Add the fact that they have 80 stakeholders across Europe who are dependent on the data being correct, and timely. 

Managing this complex structure can be quite stressful, due to the high volume of data and the pressure to deliver timely, accurate results. And the reality is that optimizing while still running a campaign seems like a long shot. 

When Stephanie first joined Sony Europe, the team operated on a 10-day data management cycle that was labor-intensive, involved merging multiple data sources, and required manual data governance tasks. This led to outdated data, limited in-campaign optimization, and the need for further reports to evaluate performance issues.

Stephanie White

Senior Manager, Sony

“The problem with the 10-day lag in processing data means that once you spot a performance issue within your campaign, you have already wasted money.”

While Sony’s media team managed to reduce the 10-day lag in performance data by using live API data feeds from an off-the-shelf product, this did not fully address their challenges. They discovered that timely data does not necessarily equate to accurate data.

The Solution: Baresquare’s Alerting System

To address these difficulties, Sony Europe's media team turned to Baresquare. Baresquare, an AI powered platform, connects daily to Sony's digital campaign data sources, e.g. Adobe Analytics, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Display data, target data and audiences data and identifies anomalies in data quality. This includes missing data, mis-implemented tracking, and landing pages that return a 404 error.

It also alerts the team about campaign optimization opportunities, such as KPIs over/under-performing compared to targets. 

The platform is designed to promote collaboration and foster a team-based approach to campaign management. The alerts are assigned to the most appropriate person—depending on the issue type—and provide a list of next actions to help with easier resolution.

Results with Baresquare

Faster action

Baresquare has impacted Sony Europe’s media team campaign optimization efforts in a big way. They’re now able to achieve time-to-insight 3 times faster, which means they can identify issues much faster, before performance data is affected. The time-to-resolution is reduced by half, as they can now take swift action on any campaign-related challenges and optimize spending while the campaign is still active. 

Stephanie White

Senior Manager, Sony

“We now have zero impactful tracking issues, nothing went unnoticed, all prevented or resolved on day 1!”

‍Productivity

Before using Baresquare, Sony’s media team had been manually logging issues in a file. All communications took place over email, leading to 2,500 emails in 6 months. Thanks to Baresquare, they have eliminated 70% of email noise, resulting in a more streamlined and efficient workflow. Baresquare smart alerts are auto-assigned only to the most relevant person to take action, which means everyone else can continue business as usual.

Governance

Baresquare enabled Sony’s media team to establish centralized monitoring, providing a historical record and classifying issues by label, which made it easier to keep track and resolve them efficiently. 

Stephanie White

Senior Manager, Sony

“Now we know how often an issue occurred, how we resolved it in the past, and if team members change roles, it's easier to refer back and maintain clearer records and better data governance.”

Scalability

Sony’s number of campaigns, channels, and markets keeps growing year on year, so they needed to find a way to scale faster.

Stephanie White

Senior Manager, Sony

“With Baresquare, the biggest benefit that we’ve seen is being able to cope with the speed of development that our business requires, get ahead of it and be able to process the data so that we can make better decisions with our investment.”

What’s Next

With data governance under control, Sony Europe's media team is now taking campaign optimization to the next level. 

Baresquare is now producing new, advanced alerts to generate more in-depth, natural language insights. This will enable the Sony media team to quickly understand why a KPI or a specific component is underperforming, the root cause behind that, and where users bounce in the user journey. Baresquare will also be generating automated campaign summaries, so that the Sony Europe teams can focus on acting on these insights, rather than trying to generate them.