Smartclip analyzes digital ads with Oracle Cloud
Smartclip works all facets of digital advertising and uses Autonomous Database and Oracle Analytics Cloud to generate insights from across its business.
“Our children don't know what life without a mobile phone is like, they think it's wonderful and can't imagine it any other way. That’s the way I feel about Autonomous Data Warehouse. Many more will probably feel this way in the future.”
Business challenges
Smartclip helps its customers plan, create, target, and analyze digital advertising on platforms such as news sites, blogs, social platforms, and even smart TVs.
The company uses its network of relationships to gather and analyze socio-demographic and behavior data of consumers. But Smartclip had been storing that data, as well as the performance data from campaigns, on many different and siloed platforms, which meant the data couldn’t easily be analyzed as a whole. Plus, using spreadsheets made work slow and risked having multiple versions of the truth. Smartclip analysts knew that if they could combine all data from different sources and quickly analyze it, they would gain new understanding and find new business opportunities.
As a company, we have always been dedicated to digital advertising, so we have expertise, we have relationships, and we have data. Now we have the data framework to innovate and become a knowledge base for the whole industry.
Why Smartclip Chose Oracle
Smartclip looked at many business visualization tools such as Qlik and Tableau, plus data warehousing options from Azure and Amazon. But only Oracle provided the simplicity of a scalable Autonomous Data Warehouse integrated with a powerful self-service analytics service in Oracle Analytics Cloud. Plus, Oracle’s complete, simpler solution came backed by a highly responsive consulting team that gave people in Smartclip ‘s business operations and IT groups peace of mind that this approach would quickly deliver results.
Results
Smartclip’s Oracle solution let it combine data from more than 20 disparate sources into Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse—allowing the company to drive secure collaboration around a single source of truth. And analysts can swiftly turn data into insights and actions with Oracle Analytics Cloud. This provided benefits in three broad areas.
First is improved information granularity about profitability. Smartclip has gone from seeing profitability and operating margin at a business unit level to having it by product line. That means going from seeing profitability in five areas to a breakdown along 700 product lines. In addition to profitability by product, it also has new visibility into customer and supplier analysis.
Second is much faster report performance. Smartclip now runs daily report updates on all advertising campaigns in about 15 minutes, compared with at least an hour before. This allows Smartclip to have daily updated data instead of weekly updating when it was done manually. Having fresh information lets Smartclip react more quickly to optimize campaigns.
Third is in maintenance savings. In addition to improved reliability, Smartclip no longer needs an IT staffer to supervise and maintain the architecture, because Oracle Autonomous Database, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, manages itself. The solution also freed Smartclip analysts from manual work with spreadsheets and opened up a new level of self-service analytics—so business users now can access, prepare, collaborate on, analyze, and share data and insights for much faster service to customers.
The simplicity, capabilities, and scalability of Smartclip’s Oracle solution has also given its leaders enough confidence in the company’s analytics platform to envision new data-driven revenue opportunities.