Customer Stories / Media & Entertainment
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VGI Drives Ad Revenues Across Digital Signage Network with Customer Data Platform on AWS
VGI is transforming the effectiveness of its out-of-home digital signage network in Bangkok using a customer data platform built on an AWS data lake architecture, lowering costs and admin time while maximizing processing speeds.
20%
Faster insight graph generation
30%
Lower platform operating costs
40%
Less administrative time
30%
Faster performance than off-the-shelf CDP
Protects data
Meets security and compliance objectives
Overview
VGI operates one of the largest digital signage networks for out-of-home (OOH) advertising in Bangkok. To help its advertisers target ad campaigns more effectively, the company built a customer data platform (CDP) on AWS.
The CDP uses a combination of Amazon Redshift, Elasticsearch, and Amazon RDS for its data warehouse, with AWS Glue and AWS Step Functions to orchestrate extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. The platform also uses Amazon Cognito for authentication and compliance, and AWS Lambda for easy scaling and simplified management. With its new CDP, VGI expects to expand its product portfolio and establish itself as a key data expert in the advertising and marketing technology sectors.
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Opportunity | Improving Targeting of OOH Campaigns in Bangkok
Headquartered in Bangkok, VGI is a prominent subsidiary of Thailand’s BTS Group, specializing in rail transport, logistics, financial services, and advertising. As one of the leading providers of out-of-home (OOH) advertising solutions in Thailand, VGI's extensive signage network in Bangkok includes digital billboards on office buildings, street-level panels, and numerous display screens seamlessly integrated within Bangkok’s mass transport system.
VGI hoped to grow business across its network by offering advertisers a service to target campaigns more effectively. Such a service would offer campaign planners data on audience demographics for each network location so they could ensure their ads appeared in the most relevant spots. The data would come from across the BTS Group, whose products feature a stored-value card used by millions of people in Bangkok every day to buy goods in shops and pay for travel on the BTS Skytrain and Bus Rapid Transit system.
To unify the data, VGI needed to build a customer data platform (CDP). During this process, the team conducted a proof of concept (POC) with various off-the-shelf solutions. However, POC results revealed several issues, the most notable being slow application performance. Auttapong Budhsombatwarakul (Teen), head of platform development at VGI, says, “We also saw that customization work was needed to align the solution with our business objectives and that the cost of the work was going to be high.”
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Personalized omnichannel campaigns require comprehensive customer views with large amounts of data, and AWS gives us the scalability, performance, and storage services we need to manage that data.”
Auttapong Budhsombatwarakul
Head of Platform Development at VGI
Solution | Building a Secure CDP 30% More Cost Effectively on AWS
VGI turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS), whose cloud computing services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), already supported many BTS Group companies. To establish an optimal production environment for VGI’s CDP, the local AWS team recommended DailiTech, an AWS Partner with proven expertise and experience in developing POCs for CDPs. "We ran a POC on several cloud platforms and chose AWS because of its cost-effectiveness, comprehensive local support, and capability for native cloud development,” says Teen.
In addition, data protection and privacy controls using services like Amazon Cognito for user identification meant that its CDP would be secure and compliant with Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA).
In just six months, VGI and DailiTech had developed a production-ready minimal viable product of the CDP. A key reason for the accelerated development timeframe was AWS Lambda serverless functions, which provided highly scalable processing capacity and eliminated the need to deploy dedicated virtual servers.
Teen and his team created an agile and scalable data lake architecture to collect information from millions of daily transactions by customers on Rabbit and other companies across the BTS Group. Its IT architecture features AWS Glue and AWS Step Functions, which transforms the incoming data before it’s housed in an Amazon Redshift data warehouse for querying. The solution also includes Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to manage a persistent catalog of organizational datasheets, and Elasticsearch to help generate insight graphs 20 percent faster.
By building its CDP on AWS, VGI saved 30 percent on operational costs compared to a similar on-premises architecture. Furthermore, by constructing the solution on AWS and using serverless functions, the organization reduced platform administration time by 40 percent, which has freed up significant resources for innovation. VGI has also improved the performance of its former off-the-shelf solution, providing queries to the data warehouse 30 percent faster.
Notably, VGI also achieved peace of mind that its platform is PDPA compliant. Comments Teen, “Our goal is to continually evolve our CDP, and because it's aligned with PDPA, we can minimize time spent on routine security tasks and focus on development.”
Outcome | Growing Revenues with Highly Targeted, Omnichannel Ad Services
With its CDP on AWS, VGI anticipates an increase in advertising revenues as brands invest in data to maximize the performance of their OOH campaigns. This data will empower advertisers to strategically select physical display locations within VGI's signage network and maximize audience engagement throughout the day.
VGI can also use its CDP to offer brands omnichannel solutions for targeting and timing messages across its signage network, websites, apps, social media, and email. Says Teen, “Personalized omnichannel campaigns require comprehensive customer views with large amounts of data, and AWS gives us the scalability, performance, and storage services we need to manage that data.”
Teen expects the CDP to start supporting campaigns when it goes live by the end of 2023. In the meantime, BTS Group companies are using the solution for their own communications. “Working with DailiTech has been a fulfilling experience,” Teen states. “They’ve helped us build a CDP from scratch, which is something I wanted us to do all along, and they’ve given us a services roadmap that we can use for continued development.” Looking ahead, VGI plans to develop a new feature which uses Amazon Redshift Serverless as a data warehouse for faster and more scalable performance.
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About VGI
Established in 1998, VGI PLC distinguishes itself with exclusive access to behavioral data spanning advertising, digital services, and distribution. VGI converts data into actionable insights for offline-to-online (O2O) marketing solutions, ensuring brands guide customers seamlessly through the purchasing process for an enhanced experience.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Cognito
Implement secure, frictionless customer identity and access management that scales.
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AWS Lambda
Run code without thinking about servers or clusters.
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AWS Glue
Discover, prepare, and integrate all your data at any scale.
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Amazon Redshift
Power data driven decisions with the best price-performance cloud data warehouse.
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