Flashtalking, a leading independent global ad server, processes 1 trillion monthly ad impressions for its clients in real-time every month. Each ad generates significant data – campaign details, devices used, clicks, and more – all aggregated from each server’s log. Detailed reports are then created and presented to clients.

The challenge

Every ad our client serves up generates a significant amount of data, and across the internet ads are being served up constantly. All of that data needs to be seamlessly aggregated from the logs generated in each server. From that data, they generate reports that they present to their advertising agency clients.

Prior to its acquisition by Medioaocean, Flashtalking’s engineering team was looking for a robust platform capable of addressing automatic corrections. They sought to improve their workflow with greater data transparency, and scale their business with state-of-the-art industry tools.

The solution

Data & Cloud Analytics Strategy

We worked to understand their existing tech. Of vital importance was protecting and transferring current data alongside the flow of new data.

After discovery and exploration, we decided to build a parallel platform and after two months of verifying the quality of its results, we transitioned to a new system.

This parallel approach allowed us to trial the new platform and perform QA testing to guarantee the same results as the legacy system. We simplified their tech stack while keeping their business running at full speed.

Data Platform Modernization & Migration

The Flashtalking team was using a variety of tools, some homegrown, and running various types of open-source MySQL scripts, which are more transactional than analytical. Second, they needed greater visibility into their data, which resulted in their engineering team needing to be on call 24/7 to ensure top-quality customer service.

Lastly, their legacy technology was difficult to maintain and scale.  We set them up with Airflow and Snowflake. Airflow gathers data from servers, centralizes it, and brings it into Snowflake’s cloud data warehousing environment. We optimized Snowflake to give them a scalable platform housing legacy and newly generated data in a single, reliable place.

How did it turn out?

With its new, simplified data analytics platform, Flashtalking now has excellent visibility into every detail of its pipeline, fewer vendors to deal with, and a much easier system to manage.

Most importantly, the new platform allows the company to grow its operations and better serve its customers as it integrates with the Mediaocean stack.

Retail businesses increase ad spend during the holidays and ad servers often hit operational capacity. Flashtalking’s CTO said they were now processing data “flawlessly” and better able to support large volumes.