Powering Convergent TV with Precision Campaign Reporting

In the fast-paced world of digital AdTech and convergent TV advertising, aggregating massive amounts of log-level data for real-time campaign analysis and optimization is a must. Crunching increasingly large datasets – quickly – is a vital component for rapid, accurate campaign reporting that drives better business outcomes for both publishers and advertisers. Time is money, and with any error or a non-optimized query, potential revenue is lost.

That’s why the integration of real-time analytics (RTA) capabilities with both extract, transform, load (ETL) and in-database transformation (ELT – extract, load and transform) processes has emerged as a transformative force in a rapidly-growing industry striving to deliver solutions across consumer devices.

Two leaders in this space, Beachfront and Ocient, have collaborated to build a unified, modern data stack that combines the strengths of RTA with native data ingestion/transformation in a single solution. These capabilities, along with a highly-configurable workload management strategy, unlock operational efficiencies and more actionable, concise insights at scale, for modern CTV media buyers and sellers.

The Supply-Side Advertising Challenge

Supply-side advertising platforms (or SSPs) serve as valuable players that connect publisher inventory with media buyers and advertisers; often in real-time via programmatic technology.  SSPs primary objective is to optimize revenue for publishers, while delivering efficient opportunities advertisers in real-time. When they succeed at scale, these platforms deliver personalized, contextually-relevant content that engages viewers and drives conversions across online video, connected TV, and even traditional broadcast and cable television. All in milliseconds.

It’s a process that necessitates the extraction of predictive, real-time insights from dynamic datasets comprised of anonymized attributes such as user behavior, historical content performance, and emerging market trends. These raw data events can also encompass ad placements, ad/bid requests, and tracking information on things like frequency, totaling tens of billions of events per day.

Beachfront’s Strive for Excellence

To Beachfront, a trailblazer in unified ad serving and programmatic monetization for CTV and video, handling this extensive data volume — in some cases analyzing over 80 dimensions and 100 metrics for a single event — is already a reality. This compute-intensive process involves billions of ad requests daily, spanning days, weeks, and months. To handle this volume of data more effectively, Beachfront and Ocient sought out to consolidate and optimize the entire stack to enhance performance for customers and business stakeholders alike.

Unlocking New Capabilities with Real-Time Analytics in Ocient

The real-time capabilities of Ocient empower supply-side ad platforms to analyze data at scale in ways that were previously not possible. While monitoring and aggregating data as it’s generated, these platforms must be able to derive immediate insights to inform analytical decision-making in critical areas such as:

• Dynamic Pricing and Inventory Management: Real-time analytics optimizes ad pricing, factoring in variables like user behavior, time of day, and ad placement. This ensures publishers receive optimal value for their inventory while advertisers reach their target audiences efficiently.
• Audience Segmentation and Targeting: Understanding user behavior in real time allows platforms to create highly specific audience segments, enabling precise targeting for increased ad relevance and conversion rates.
• Content Optimization: Real-time analytics offers immediate feedback on content performance, allowing platforms to adjust and refine content strategies in real time to better resonate with the audience.
• Fraud Detection and Prevention: Rapid data analysis aids in swiftly identifying and mitigating fraudulent activity, preserving the platform’s integrity, and maintaining trust with partners.

 The Power of Native Data Ingestion and ETL/ELT Integration

With native support for ETL and ELT, Ocient enabled Beachfront to streamline its data management stack and eliminate disparate systems. All data is integrated, transformed, and retained within a real-time analytics framework. When seamlessly integrated in this way, comprehensive data ingestion, transformation, and aggregation capabilities confer several key advantages to supply-side advertising platforms and their buyers:

• Data Harmonization: Native ETL capabilities ensure data from diverse sources, including ad impressions, user interactions, and market trends, is unified at the time of ingestion, into a standardized format, facilitating comprehensive analysis and reporting.
• Efficient Data Enrichment: In-database transformation (ELT) processing promotes the ability to refine data in-place, leveraging the efficiency and flexibility of ANSI SQL-based processing, while ensuring performance at scale.  This leads to faster and more reliable insights, reducing the risk of decisions based on latent and flawed information.
• Historical Data Integration: Enhanced data retention enables the incorporation of historical data into real-time analytics. Keeping historical data active and alongside live data in a single environment reduces storage overhead and duplicated system resources, and provides a broader context for decision making and trend analysis.
• Continuous Ingest and Transformation Workflows: Automation streamlines data ingestion and processing, alleviating the workload on human resources and ensuring timely delivery of insights.
• Scalability and Performance: Data ingest and transformation processes can be optimized alongside query workloads using comprehensive workload management configurations, promoting scalability, the ability to manage large data volumes, and ensuring platform agility even as it expands.

Beachfront and Ocient: A Success Story

Beachfront, a leading sell-side ad platform in the convergent TV and streaming space, exemplifies the power of ETL/ELT integration within its real-time analytics infrastructure. Through the implementation of a unified data ingest/transformation, and log-level aggregation processing environment with Ocient, Beachfront achieved:

• Streamlined Data Operations: Dynamic pricing based on real-time analytics insights allowed Beachfront to streamline operations and save in maintenance costs.
• Advanced Machine Learning Capabilities: ETL-powered audience segmentation and targeting enabled Beachfront to eye innovative, more advanced predictive machine learning capabilities.
• Freeing Up Resources to Innovate: Beachfront has offloaded pipeline work to a dedicated team at Ocient, receiving 24/7 monitoring and regular system updates for nearly the same cost as before.

The integration of data transformation and aggregation processes within a real-time analytics platform, such as the work being done by Beachfront and Ocient is revolutionizing the supply-side advertising industry. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, platforms embracing this technological synergy are poised to thrive in a competitive market. Real-time analytics and ETL integration are not merely tools; they represent the blueprint for success in the dynamic world of supply-side advertising.