Customers of 4th Screen Advertising, a global mobile advertising network, can now see and improve how well their mobile ad campaigns perform by divining massive amounts of campaign data in near real time, thanks to the help of the ultra-fast Vertica Analytic Database.

4th Screen helps mobile operators and mobile publishers monetize traffic to their portals through mobile advertising. Mpression, 4th Screen's proprietary mobile ad server provides a single point of contact for media agencies and brands wishing to buy advertising across a range of mobile Internet sites.

The company had previously relied on a Microsoft SQL Server 2005-based data warehouse for its data needs. But due to the skyrocketing volume of data the company was amassing daily, combined with growing demands from clients for more sophisticated, granular and timely campaign analysis capabilities, the data warehouse's performance quickly hit the wall. 4th Screen currently aggregates more than a half billion ad requests each month, and the volume continues to rise.

"Mobile advertisers can no longer afford to wait days for reports or rely on stale data to make critical business decisions about their ad campaigns. Vertica is enabling us to expose huge volumes of data directly to clients with which they can gain insight about their ad buying efficacy within seconds. Clients love having this kind of business intelligence power in their own hands," said Jason Cooper, product director for 4th Screen Advertising.

Using Vertica, 4th Screen has developed a set of online analytic tools for brands and mobile publishers such as Virgin Mobile, Shazam, The Guardian and Meteor to deliver more effective and ROI-driven mobile advertising campaigns. A new Global Ad Planner tool provides a customer-facing portal that allows brands and agencies to dig deeply into campaign data so they can better plan ad campaigns that fit their target audience. The tool lets them quickly drill down into data aggregated across mobile networks using a variety of consumer usage parameters such as country, region, time of day, handset type, Wi-Fi traffic versus mobile operator traffic and more.

Another tool provides ad publishers a Web-based dashboard for determining revenue projections of ad campaigns, as well as how consumers are interacting with each ad. And a new campaign optimization tool lets users see how current campaigns are performing in near-real-time so they can instantly fine-tune their campaigns in response to unexpected changes or events.

For example, 4th Screen customer Shazam, the world's leading mobile music discovery provider, is using the analytics portal for targeting ads to top European customers. Combining music tagging data with mobile targeting parameters such as handset type and time of day, advertisers can target consumers based on their music tastes, for example by artist name or by individual track names.

After evaluating a number of alternative database approaches, the company selected Vertica when it realized no traditional row-based RDBMS could scale and support its long-term growth with sufficient query performance, Cooper added.

Vertica is a true MPP, column-oriented database built to handle massive analytic workloads such as those experienced by 4th Screen. With its aggressive data compression and columnar storage, the Vertica Analytic Database enables 4th Screen clients to analyze much larger volumes of campaign data and run queries orders of magnitude faster than conventional relational databases. The Vertica-powered data warehouse currently houses 5 TB of data across a three-node cluster and it provides a 10X performance improvement over the previous SQL Server system.

"4th Screen carries more premium mobile display advertising in Europe than any other competing system. With Vertica, the company's clients can now improve the ROI of their ad spend by pinpointing their exact customers, right down to the time of day, gender, age, behavior, operator and handset. This important win extends Vertica's growing market share in the fast-paced mobile marketing industry," said Jerry Held, executive chairman of Vertica.

SOURCE: 4th Screen Selects Vertica’s Real-Time Analytics