NBCU Uses AWS to Build First-Party Data Solution within Its One Platform Technology Stack

In order to more effectively manage big data workloads, NBCU migrated 4 PB of data into its data lake on AWS. “We’ve worked with the AWS team to reformat these data pipelining activities for this big data and synthesize it into our forecasting across linear and digital to help with our planning across these holistic media plans,” says Jeff Pinard, NBCU’s senior vice president of ad technology.

One Platform relies on AWS ephemeral compute solutions such as Amazon EMR, a big data solution for petabyte-scale data processing, interactive analytics, and machine learning in the cloud. NBCU uses machine learning to tailor its 200 jobs to 8,000 servers and cost-efficiency models built around Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

To further efficiency in a pipeline that takes in 15.4 TB of interactive reporting data in near real time, NBCU uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets companies run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.

Using its data solution built on AWS, NBCU has also become more agile and reactive to business needs. Data volumes surrounding the Olympic Games, for example, increased to 7 GB for the Tokyo games in 2021. With the AWS data infrastructure in place, NBCU was able to scale and meet the needs of their customers without experiencing latency. NBCU also achieved near-real-time reporting and delivery analysis, helping the business manage or redirect buying patterns quickly and analyze its delivery day over day. “We would have incurred a huge cost to be able to get the server power to do that in any on-premises environment,” says Pinard. “We’ll do it on AWS in a very cost-effective way and provide the business near-real-time data that is exponentially increasing year over year.”