Migration to Google Cloud Platform

Digital Remedy first started using Google Cloud services in 2019, with the goal of improving efficiency by streamlining company processes and consolidating applications. Before migrating to Google Cloud, there were different communications platforms and processes in place across multiple teams within the organization. Google Cloud provided the technology that allowed Digital Remedy to unify its business to host all of the organization’s applications under one roof—eliminating the need for middleware and the hassle of having to connect multiple programs—ultimately, supporting the creation of our award-winning, in-house ad solution, Flip, using future-proofed infrastructure.

Seamless Integration into Flip Platform

As a media execution company, the real milestone was adding comprehensive attribution and measurement to the Flip platform, which is built solely on Google Cloud. Flip tracks and matches OTT/CTV impressions across premium inventory sources to conversion events, including site visits and purchases, store location visits, subscriptions, app installs, and more—providing marketers with a comprehensive look at the consumer journey to determine what’s driving desired actions in real time. In fact, Flip was named “Best New TV/Streaming Ad Sales Program/Product” in 2021 by the Digiday Video & TV Awards and was a finalist for “Best Connected TV Platform” in 2022.

“Google Cloud is exactly what we were looking for—scalable, reliable, and great performance. We were able to seamlessly scale our product from prototype, to MVP, to full launch—processing over a hundred terabytes of data daily all while maintaining impressive reliability and performance.”
– Tony Pascal, SVP, Product & Technology

During conception, the Digital Remedy Team was able to collaboratively experiment and test various processes, leveraging key learnings and insights to drive future decision making. Since its inception, Flip has run completely on Google Cloud. As part of the daily business operations on the Flip platform, billions of ad impressions and conversion events are served and measured, each of which potentially affects hundreds of downstream aggregate metrics. To enable clients to measure audience engagement and track campaign efficiency, Digital Remedy offers a variety of analytics tools and features within the Flip platform, including APIs and dashboards that can aggregate and display metrics in near-real-time.

The Digital Remedy Team is able to bridge many different media sources and data formats, including universal pixel data and first-party data directly from clients. This data is all cleaned and brought into BigQuery—Google’s serverless and highly-scalable data warehouse to support ad-hoc and batch queries—where it powers our reporting and multi-touch attribution (without the need of third-party access to data). This is also leveraged to help Digital Remedy automate the campaign optimization process, creating better outcomes and boosting performance for clients. Google Cloud has enabled Digital Remedy to simplify and centralize processes that previously required disparate products and services to accomplish the same or similar result.

Image: Flip Architecture

At a high level, Flip requires data to be ingested from multiple sources, such as demand-side platforms (DSPs), event data recorded by internal applications, and occasionally, first- (think: data collected directly by a brand from their customers) and third-party data (think: data from a data aggregator, most likely from numerous partners).

With Cloud Composer’s reliability and flexibility, the Digital Remedy team was able to do away with the many products and services previously required to properly handle the ETL pipelines responsible for loading data into BigQuery, the company’s primary data warehouse. BigQuery provides an extremely fast and scalable data warehouse solution that can easily handle working with the terabytes of data stored within it. Composer’s ability to work with the BigQuery API has not only allowed the company to automate sections of the ETL pipeline within BigQuery datasets but also the exporting of data for the purposes of reporting, visualization, and optimization of our ad campaigns.

Results

Google Cloud provides Digital Remedy with an overall, scalable tech architecture that consistently supports the company’s growing business. Performance/operations highlights include:

Looking Ahead

Google Cloud has provided Digital Remedy with the foundation and technology to significantly improve the performance and reliability of its infrastructure while future-proofing the company’s data and analytics capabilities. The automation of operations has empowered the product and development teams to focus on developing and implementing data-driven ad products and consultative solutions to significantly grow the organization’s business. Since its launch, Flip has run consistently and, thanks to Google Cloud, can continue to scale with plenty of headroom to pivot on industry evolutions and external parameters, such as legislation or data/privacy changes. Digital Remedy is excited to continue leveraging Google Cloud to advance the Flip solution, optimize its offerings, and remain competitive in the ever-changing ad tech industry.

To learn more about Flip, speak to a member of our team today.