AdTech :: Real-Time Observability Imperative

I’ve worked in digital advertising for 25 years, starting from the early days of DoubleClick, and for much of that time, I felt I was at the cutting edge of not just adtech, but technology itself. The sheer scale of our audiences, the performance demands, and the pressure to generate revenue served as a foundry from which amazing technology was forged. But earlier this year, I started working with a company called Hydrolix as an advisor helping them navigate the sometimes confusing digital advertising landscape, and after making a few introductions to my peers among the executives of leading adtech companies, I quickly realized that our industry is at risk of being caught flat footed in the face of one of the biggest changes that is is sweeping the broader industry.

You can call it real-time observability or brand protection or a number of things but at its core, what is happening is that for the first time ever, leading advertisers and publishers alike are able to monitor in real-time the massive amounts of data generated when global audiences interact with their brands, and act in real time to find and fix problems BEFORE they cause an issue.

I have heard anecdote after anecdote, and seen half a dozen quotes that seem almost unbelievable in their claims – companies delivering the biggest global sporting events saying they never before were able to bring off such an event without a single problem going unresolved or companies that were able to secure their sites against black Friday cyber attacks in seconds, avoiding disaster. Hydrolix has created the technology that makes this possible. It’s a massively scalable data platform designed to vacuum up millions of log events a second from multiple vendors, combine them into a single view, and create alerts and summaries almost instantaneously, all without sacrificing the raw log data.

But the technology part of it is only a part of the story. It is able to do this and still cost a fraction of what today’s data lake platforms like Snowflake cost. Customers of Akamai’s CDN observability product TrafficPeak, powered by Hydrolix, enjoy 15 months or more of hot data retention for their raw logs by default. All this data, accessible the instant it is ingested and available for years transforms the economics of log data.

That’s incredibly important because a lot of my colleagues and friends hear “real-time” and immediately think “expensive” and “luxury” and “we’ve done batch for 25 years so why change now?”?

But it isn’t expensive. And it isn’t a luxury. It’s an imperative. I ended up joining Hydrolix because I have seen the biggest CTV content providers and the brands advertising on them are using this technology to monitor the services delivered by their CDNs, their cloud providers, and the client devices. A revolution in the way companies think about their brand is underway and it is going to change the way companies think about and monitor all their business partners to ensure a great brand experience – including their adtech partners.

And that’s why now is the perfect moment to transition from batch processing to real-time solutions. This wave is not on the horizon; it’s already here, presenting an exciting chance for adtech to evolve. By embracing change, adtech can position itself at the forefront of innovation, paving the way for a new generation of real-time savvy providers who will meet the expectations by delivering what their customers on the inventory and brand side consider table stakes.

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