What Digital Technologies Do Giants Like MTV, The Guardian, Sears, NFL.com & Others Use
For normal people these maps are just something they tend to not look at for more than 1 second and then quickly close the window saying ‘what the hell did I just see’, but on the other hand people like me have things like this open for days and slowly research how exactly & why is someone using that specific vendor for that specific problem.
A large site has an average of 75 digital touchpoints that they’re using to sustain their marketing ventures as well as other stuff like website performance & cloud security.
To an average user, when they type MTV.com all they see is a homepage and naively think that the technology behind it is simple. The reality is, there’s so much more than meets the eye. When talking about MTV, here’s what is actually behind it.
Looking at this highly complex map of MTVs digital touchpoints, several things can be said:
- MTV uses 33 unique vendors for various digital services
- They use 24 different ad networks (labeled in blue)
- They’re using 9 different analytics platforms (labeled in red)
- They also have 28 other technologies they’re using and among them is Cloudflare which they use for improving their website speed (this is done using a CDN)
Let’s analyze some more
To make this article more interesting, let’s try to write out what The Guardian (www.theguardian.com) is using to sustain their online presence.
Again, firstly here’s the map:
OK, let’s go from left to right.
First thing that happens when you visit The Guardian, you show up in their Google Analytics and you get a cookie from Facebook & Google Adwords so they can retarget you through ads later.
Your browsing history also gets recorded by ScorecardResearch which is a marketing research community that studies trends and reports on internet trends and behaviour.
They also use Quantcast to better understand their audience & Nielsen NetRatings International (an online audience measurement panel) which means your behaviour is also recorded here as well.
They backup all their data through Dropmysite (seen as guim.co.uk in the map above) and they use Krux to analyse data patterns (Big Data) which they then send to MediaMath for further research & use.
They use RealTime for their messages (for ex. emails) to be topical based on your recorded interests.
For ads, they’re using multiple platforms to optimize their ad-spend, here’s the list:
— DoubleClick (Google’s platform for integrated solutions for ads)
— TubeMogul (Ads measurement platform for big spenders)
— AppNexus
— OpenX (Ads bidding optimization platform)
— Criteo
Naturally, there’s some other stuff in this map, but this gives you an overview of how things might not look like as they appear at first and how much work needs to be done in order to fully grasp what your audience is doing and to reach new audiences appropriately without spending millions on thin air.
Also, one important metric appears when dealing with these systems, and that is Web Performance. Basically, when you have so much platforms connected to your websites, your websites slow down dramatically if you’re not handling this properly. Specialists like GlobalDots solve this for companies like Lufthansa, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Avast and many others.
If you or anyone you know needs help with web performance and security, let me know and I will call our specialists from GlobalDots to make this a simple process for you.
All the data in this post is gathered from Ghostery, and can be seen by following this link .
Want me to analyse more stuff from the link? Comment below.
