Adstream uses Exasol to power industry consumer behaviour dashboards

Exasol, the high-performance analytics database, and Adstream, the leading global provider of digital asset management and analytics solutions to the ad industry, have announced the launch of Adstream’s Public Advertising Insights Portal, powered by Exasol. The dashboards, which are available to the public, provide insight into advertising spends, activities and content formats by industry sector. The first dashboard to be published, Covid-19 Advertising Impact, shows industry insights and trends throughout the COVID pandemic, which in turn offer strong benchmarks around consumer behaviours. 

“Throughout the pandemic, at Adstream we have helped our clients answer questions such as ‘Has the market recovered yet?’, ‘Is there a noticeable impact of Covid-19 on advertising?’, or ‘Is now a good time to advertise in my industry?’. Adstream’s global data has provided much-needed visibility and re-assurance to our clients, and we thought that this visibility would be welcomed by the rest of the industry,” said Andrew Blake, Analytics & Machine Learning Principal at Adstream. 

Adstream embarked on this project to create a Public Advertising Insights Portal as a branch of the wider One Analytics platform that Adstream provides to its clients. The first Covid-19 Advertising Impact analysis is now available online. 

The insights shared through the portal have been made possible because Adstream delivers advertising assets for clients into over 140 countries, totalling hundreds of millions of files, and petabytes of data. Adstream is in a unique position to analyse global advertising activity and uncover the global and local industry trends and insights. However, there are significant engineering concerns when working with such large data volumes, especially when considering the high user concurrency requirements of publicly interactive dashboards. In addition, Adstream also had to ensure the portal could support thousands of ad-hoc analytics queries coming from One Analytics every day.

“We chose Exasol as our analytics database after an intensive vendor analysis. Exasol was the best database to handle the volumes of data, the high concurrency of users, and the unpredictability of the queries, whilst performing exceptionally fast, consistently, and also remaining cost efficient,” added Blake. “Exasol is 100x faster than our previous database, with most queries sub-second, and it helps me sleep better every night knowing it won’t let us down.”