Scaling Advertisement Analytics Platform for Real-Time Decisions at Global Scale

Business Need

When Verizon acquired AOL in 2015, it inherited a video advertising platform called Vidible, which AOL had purchased the year before. Vidible was built as an open marketplace where publishers and advertisers could manage video ads with greater transparency and control. Behind that platform stood Sigma Software, the team that had developed it for Vidible from scratch and supported it through rapid growth.

For Verizon, Vidible offered a promising foundation, but it wasn’t yet enterprise-ready at the scale they required. To power global media operations, the platform needed to handle millions of ad events per second, deliver analytics in near real time, and integrate seamlessly with Verizon’s wider digital ecosystem. Instead of bringing the work in-house, Verizon Media turned to Sigma Software (the team that knew the system best) to rework, scale, and extend the platform into a mission-critical piece of infrastructure.

Solution

Sigma Software worked closely with Verizon Media to transform the platform into an enterprise-grade system. The migration to AWS went hand in hand with a shift to a microservices architecture, supported by multiple datastores such as Redshift, RDS, DynamoDB, and Athena.

To keep pace with demand, our engineers scaled the data pipelines to handle ~2.5 million events per second and cut reporting latency from two hours to about five minutes. Analytics features were steadily extended, covering over 400 metrics with ad-hoc reports generated in under two minutes.

Performance improvements also came from a “best-fit” ad selection engine, which Sigma Software designed to combine tags with more than 100 enriched metrics. At the height of the program, more than 80 of our specialists were engaged, ensuring the platform continued to expand in step with Verizon Media’s growing business needs.

Outcome

The platform grew from a startup product into a backbone of Verizon Media’s adtech stack. It now processes up to 120 TB of data daily, supports 30,000+ companies worldwide, and powers real-time insights for a 24/7 ad-serving environment.

By keeping Sigma Software as its trusted partner, Verizon Media not only retained the expertise behind Vidible but also expanded collaboration to ensure the platform could scale, adapt, and deliver at enterprise level.