Why Tatari is Building TV Ad Infrastructure

We are now approaching Tatari’s seventh year as a company. The first phase of our product development was focused on building a self-serve platform infused with data science for advertisers to buy and measure ads across linear and streaming TV. What we learned along the way is that our partners want, and need, more. Clever workflow automation, data science, and machine learning for TV advertising were not enough. Every layer we peel back reveals the need for modern infrastructure.

To use another industry’s history as an example, electronic high-frequency trading of stocks once was a race built around information. Companies wanted to build the best dashboards with proprietary algorithms. A select few realized that in order to transmit stock market information in milliseconds, the infrastructure would require literally digging trenches in the ground and laying fiber cable across the country. In a way, this describes Tatari’s next phase and why we’re now focused on building the infrastructure for the future of TV advertising.

Building data infrastructure for brands and agencies

We use an absurd amount of data for measuring TV ad performance. To date, we’re the only TV ad tech company that licenses the triad of ACR data. Simply put, that’s more than any other company and requires our platform to be powerful and fast. We are currently rolling out the 3rd generation of our data processing platform, designed to efficiently process multiple terabytes of data every day. Based on Databricks Spark, this platform is designed to support 100x scale as we continue to grow our client base and deliver an increasing suite of proprietary metrics. We are unifying our post-hoc analytics and ML predictive analytics platforms to support faster innovation and agility.

We also have a lot of first-party data. On a daily basis, the Tatari platform ingests just over 100 million events across all of our brand and agency clients. We had to build the entire infrastructure (from scratch) to support this. We simply couldn’t rely solely on third-party instrumentation for our clients like Google Analytics or MMPs. This meant we had to build tech for pixel integrations, server-to-server integrations, and platform integrations.

There are many device graphs that exist, many of which we have worked with. However, most of them come from the digital world (not TV) and are used for retargeting- not measurement. For TV, our clients need a solution that has precision, covering every household in the United States. Without a solution being commercially available we had to build this ourselves.

Building tech for publishers to transact more efficiently with buyers

As a buyer, Tatari started just like everyone else in the industry; sending insertion orders, excel spreadsheets, and PDFs back and forth over email. As we exceeded hundreds of brands buying through our platform, we had to build Cloud I.O.’s to efficiently process those orders with publishers. But this simple gain in efficiency wasn’t enough, especially with the rise in ad-supported streaming publishers. We acquired TheViewPoint (TVP), which connects CTV publishers directly to buyers (agencies, DSPs) to run direct-sold and programmatic campaigns. Over the past year, the team has built out TVP Direct, which enables buyers to bypass exchanges and purchase premium CTV inventory via private marketplace (PMP), open marketplace, or programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals.

A clear way forward

As TV and digital advertising converge it is imperative that brands, agencies, platforms, and publishers all have the underlying technology to transact efficiently, share data in a privacy-safe way, and measure & optimize campaign performance. Our vision is to build intelligent infrastructure that connects supply and demand partners, giving them unprecedented automation, control, and transparency.  To underline all the above, Tatari recently restructured as a holding company (we’re happy with the domain name Infra.tv, but if anyone wants to sell Infra.com, let us know).  Infra currently holds our Tatari demand-side platform and TheViewPoint’s supply-side technology.  Stay tuned for something new to be announced in the next few months (hint: think even more data).