4 Elements of Data Strategy from AWS re:Invent 2022

In its tenth year, the Amazon Web Services re:Invent event theme was centered on the idea that data will be the core of applications, processes, and business decisions for all organizations. CEO Adam Selipsky kicked off the keynote by citing analyst predictions that in the next five years, we will produce more than double the amount of data produced since the dawn of the digital age. Illustrating this point, Selipsky highlighted that Expedia’s 600B predictions per year are based on 70 petabytes of data, Samsungs 1.1 billion customers are generating 80,000 requests per second, and Pinterest is storing 1 exabyte of data in S3. 

The chart reflects the explosion in data that VidMob has seen over the last seven years as we’ve worked with a wide variety of brands to help them harness the value of Intelligent Creative data. We’ve analyzed over 70,000 hours of ad video content across trillions of impressions for our customers. AWS’s VP of Data and Machine Learning, Swami Sivasubramanian, spoke about the core elements of a data strategy: Build future-proof data foundations, weave connective tissues, and democratize data. For us, it’s a validation of our strategy as we continue to build the OS for Intelligent Creative. Here’s a glimpse of how we are supporting the industry’s evolution in applied data-driven creative: 

Build Future-Proof Data Foundations

VidMob’s data growth has accelerated over the last several years. Our data engineering team has done incredible work in the last year, taking that data and building this future-proof data foundation. As a result, our engineering and data science teams can deliver new value to our clients while keeping data security our priority. We’ve done this through a partnership with Databricks, on top of AWS storage solutions, creating this data foundation with a unified governance layer.

Through Creative Analytics, we’ve developed new ways for clients to discover insights about their creative through our Advanced Elements Report, Automated Creative Insights, and expanding support for platform best practices in Creative Scoring. This has been accomplished because our future-proof data foundation allows our teams to build domain-specific datasets more easily driven by the ideal customer outcome.

Weave Connective Tissues

Like Swami Sivasubramanian, here at VidMob we believe weaving the connective tissues of data across services is critical. Our Service-in-the-Loop architecture captures activities and human decisions across various services enabled by our platform, some provided by us and others by customers and agencies using our software. 

This data network effect creates those connective tissues, accelerating our data flywheels. Using those flywheels, our teams create new value to our clients, train new models, build new data products, and deliver first-in-class Intelligent Creative insights to users. 

Announcements around AWS Event Bridge Pipes and Step Functions Distributed Map will allow us to accelerate and develop new flywheels across all our data and services.  

Democratize Data

Ever since the first prototypes of our Creative Analytics solutions, we knew that democratizing data would bridge the great divide between creators and media buyers. Creators could now be given new superpowers by having performance data, insights, and creative best practices from live media campaigns at their fingertips. Likewise, media buyers can (re)discover the creative performance lever using the same data, particularly in the face of signal loss.  But democratizing data is about more than connecting creators and media decision-makers.  It’s also about taking the complex data science behind Intelligent Creative –analyzing creative attribute information across trillions of impressions– and making it accessible to non-technical personnel within a marketing organization. 

By being the OS of Intelligent Creative, we know we need to help meet clients where they are, which means continuing on our path to build a “whole solution”, but constructing it as a series of modular solutions that can fit into their existing workflow and technology stacks. As an API-first company, we have been on this path since 2015.  But we know that this is only part of the solution. 

One announcement that we were particularly excited about was AWS Clean Rooms. Clean Rooms will give our customers an easy and secure way to bring new value to their data by combining it with our creative data. We look forward to working with our customers with first-party data in AWS and providing additional insights and value to their data through AWS Clean Rooms. 

Our Path Forward is Data

Data is at the center of our innovation, technology, and AI centricity. It was a great week deepening our partnership with AWS at re:Invent and aligning on the future. We’re excited about the innovation opportunities in our technology, AI, and the core elements of our data strategy. Through all of this, we deliver increasing value to our customers through Intelligent Creative.