Aol.

About AOL’s Consumer Analytics & Research Group

 

The AOL Consumer Analytics & Research team (CA&R) is a centralized insights team infusing the voice of the consumer throughout AOL. They drive new insights through innovation in techniques, methodologies and analysis and provide the resulting data and insights to sales, product teams and brands across AOL’s various business units. This includes measuring the effectiveness and ROI of media for clients, developing and packaging high- value data and insights for clients and agencies, and generating unique insights into how people engage with its brands, content, advertising and each other.

 

The Challenge

 

AOL, like many companies today, is facing a number of research and consumer insights challenges. It operates in a rapidly changing industry in which research teams must operate under faster cycle times. They must incorporate big data, manage channel fragmentation and incorporate always-on solutions, all with with fewer people and shrinking budgets.

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In addition to industry changes, AOL’s CA&R is also working in a complex company. It is a centralized group, serving as a center of excellence for the entire company. CA&R services seven core consumer-facing brands, such as The Huffington Post, Engadget and TechCrunch, operates in nine global markets, and includes a mix of legacy and growing brands at different points in their life cycles. In addition, AOL has a separate B2B business with its own set of products such as “One by AOL,” which is a full programmatic ad stack.

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As a result, the small CA&R group needs to cover a wide range of consumer audiences, marketer client partners, agency partners, etc., across different geographies. There are also many different internal teams it supports, including advertising tech product developers, ad format innovation teams, consumer brand managers, publisher teams, B2B marketing, consumer marketing, etc.

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Beyond this, a few years ago the CEO mandated that account execs couldn’t go to external meetings without having data to back up their recommendations, because he wanted advertising clients to make defensible buying decisions based upon proof points. In other words, today’s clients want to know with confidence that when they spend money with AOL, they will achieve results.
 

The Solution

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According to Vicki Draper, director of AOL’s Consumer Analytics & Research Group, “Being a small team, we couldn’t respond in a matter of hours for every client meeting -- so we were a bottleneck. AOL makes a huge investment in primary research, but the ability to configure, cut and distribute the deliverables was limited due to capacity constraints. We needed a system to accomplish this, so we built an HTML5 web app that worked across all devices. The content powering the app was a massive analysis of all the ad impressions running across our network.”

This system worked well for normative proof points. But CA&R realized that it still needed to build a tool to address its other areas, including research, analysis and insights.

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To do this, CA&R partnered with Dapresy to create its AOL Insights Center dashboard tool. Dapresy transforms data into market and customer intelligence so that organizations can quickly take action. It was able to offer an easy-to-use, visual and engaging business intelligence system for use with all data – minimizing learning curves and the training burden. In addition, it proved easy to use for non-analysts.

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According to Draper, “Our dashboard tool needed to be intuitive and visual, so anybody could use it with minimal to no training. This is difficult since most BI tools are built for technical analysts to configure primary research data. These BI tools are challenging to learn and difficult to use, especially if you don’t have statistics knowledge, and they also do not work well with survey data. Dapresy provided an easy-to-use, visually engaging way to deliver both survey and non-survey data to our internal stakeholders.”

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Once implemented, CA&R found the new Dapresy-powered tool to be scalable to all the relevant teams. And it could be configured to be useful for a variety of use cases. The tool was able to meet different objectives for different stakeholders, including tactical AND inspirational needs.

 

For example, it could meet tactical objectives for stakeholders like center and account managers who needed data points for highly transactional functions, such as answering RFPs. Meanwhile, it could also meet inspirational objectives for stakeholders such as “Partner Studio by AOL,” which needs inspiration for designing content marketing programs that are backed by defendable insights.

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Outcomes Achieved

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• Extended critical research access to non-analysts.

• Put actionable data directly into the hands of decision makers.

• Removed bottlenecks, decreasing research cycle times.

• Shifted the organization to configurable insights.

• Unlocked latent value of research -- a force multiplier.

• Allowed the research team to focus on what it does best vs. endlessly cutting data in analyst tools.