About Kitara Media
Kitara Media is a leading digital media and technology company providing solutions to advertisers, digital marketers and publishers. With nearly 500 million monthly video ad views, Kitara Media delivers strong engagement for advertisers, increases revenues for publishers, as well as improves user experiences with PROPEL+, an internally developed proprietary video ad technology platform. The company is headquartered in Jersey City, NJ.
The Challenge
Online advertising has diversified with display to video and expanded ways to engage audiences with targeted editorial content that compliment ad campaigns. In addition, programmatic advertising has demanded new ways to manage an automated media buying cycle that improves ad placements. This fast evolving online advertising market requires a more complex back end data management system to track more moving parts and tie distributed systems together.
Focused on video advertising, Kitara Media integrates with the Supply and Demand sides of the advertising business and uses a wide range of technologies. Data from each of the Supply and Demand sides are fragmented and required tedious, manual processing to deliver actionable business information. It was important to understand how to choose between many supply-side traffic sources, identify potential fraudulent traffic and ensure audiences align with campaign objectives. In addition, it was critical to track the overall ad experience, audit actual video player events and choose demand side partners that optimize revenues.
Overall, Kitara Media processes hundreds of millions of transactions per day and must load a lot of data in a very short window of time. The underlying technology infrastructure must integrate data from new sources on the fly while producing actionable information
Why Amazon Web Services?
Business critical demands required Kitara Media to implement a data warehouse solution that would collect hundreds of millions of rows of data per day directly from the AWS infrastructure. The data must be quickly processed to deliver business level information that can be used to manage evolving complex online advertising operations.
Amazon Redshift proved to be the ideal data warehouse solution incorporating engineered data collection processes that bulk load and move data into cubes via ETL process. The data is then consumed through BI front-ends, web portals and API access by other systems in the enterprise.
Multi-dimensional cubes enabling data slicing, segmenting and analysis by Kitara ad trading desks were built in a matter of weeks centralizing data and allowing fact checking and dimensional analysis. Kitara Media has a unique option that offers security, expandability and an ability to integrate with other aspects of the Amazon Redshift infrastructure.
AWS Services
The Benefits
Cost efficiency:
Kitara Media avoided upfront major capital expenditures for hardware and software. Instead, Amazon Redshift allowed for an affordable development configuration effort that could scale as the business and volume grew.
Flexibility:
As data grows and complexity of the queries increase, AWS and Redshift provide the added capacity with a few clicks of a button or configuration to spin up nodes and resources dynamically
Real-time data management:
During peak times AWS and Redshift allocates new resources on the fly allowing capacity to increase as fast as the demands users and heavy traffic put on the system. As well, when the volume subsides AWS and Redshift release resources allowing Kitara Media to pay for only what they use.
Agility:
Amazon Redshift has enabled Kitara Media to perform more agile analytics while saving costs and growing the business.
Next Step
Kitara Media continues to advance ad operations best practices. As the online advertising industry continues to explode, our core technology infrastructure must adapt to the changes. Video has become a leading medium for both advertisers and content marketers. We will remain focused on ensuring our data management initiatives provide business insights needed to deliver campaign results as well as advanced ways advertisers and publishers align editorial content based on contextual placement and audience behaviors
