CTV advertising may be 'young' to some, but it is already undergoing a major phase in its evolution, and its wake a wave of pioneering and audacious CTV advertising solutions are making their way onto the scene. Those solutions need support they can trust - and nowhere will you find a better example of this than in this case study written by our trusted partners at DigitalOcean.
THE CASE STUDY
Origin is a creative technology company whose first-to-market native connected TV advertising and dynamic, creative ad formats are reshaping how brands engage and activate consumers in the living room. The company delivers attention-grabbing, dynamic advertisements to consumers watching connected television.
Founded in 2019, the company works with agencies, brands and platforms to deliver effective, relevant CTV ads to consumers. Initially, Origin worked with a large hyperscaler but found that the costs became prohibitive as Origin’s growth accelerated. The company found that the hyperscaler had little interest in negotiating prices or brainstorming creative solutions to accommodate the needs of the growing business. Origin needed a cloud provider that would come alongside them as partners, building relationships and supporting their growing and changing needs.
As a business dependent on streaming and data, Origin needed a cloud provider that offered reliable service, low pricing, a commitment to supporting small businesses, and a strong uptime SLA. Origin found DigitalOcean to be the reliable and trusted partner they were looking for and migrated their platform in 2021.
High bandwidth at a reasonable price
Competition is fierce in Origin’s industry, and the margins for many businesses can be thin. Paying high costs for compute bandwidth can eat into revenue margins for businesses — especially high-bandwidth users in the streaming industry. DigitalOcean’s reasonable compute pricing provides an alternative to the high costs of hyperscalers and does so without requiring contracts or commitments from customers.
Origin found DigitalOcean to be as performant as their previous hyperscaler at significantly lower prices, allowing them, and businesses like them, to thrive and grow by removing cost as a barrier to rapid scale. Origin cut 2/3 of their infrastructure costs when they migrated from their previous hyperscaler.
“An organization like ours, which is dependent on streaming and data and heavy on bandwidth, benefits greatly from deducting bandwidth costs and making leaner software on smaller servers to get additional bandwidth benefits.” —DevOps Manager, Origin
Maintaining resiliency with DigitalOcean's strong uptime SLA
Origin delivers dynamic advertisements through connected devices in real-time, so it’s critical that their cloud provider is reliable and offers 99.99% SLA on Droplets (VMs). Origin’s platform needs to be able to receive advertisement requests, process partner data to determine the most relevant advertisement, pick a winning bid response from partners, and then supply the appropriate ad back to the original requester—all within seconds.
“The prerequisite for any cloud provider is availability. If your platform isn’t reliable and functioning at peak performance, it doesn’t matter if your support is great or your prices are low. I’m confident in DigitalOcean’s infrastructure, service level, and scale, and I’m willing to vouch for that.” —DevOps Manager, Origin
DigitalOcean as a supportive partner
Soon after Origin migrated their services to DigitalOcean, they found an issue with their load balancer that they couldn’t solve. Having a partner willing to pick up the phone and work through a problem is imperative to Origin. Every minute an issue isn’t solved means a potential loss of revenue.
Through this initial issue, they discovered that DigitalOcean is the kind of partner that they can count on. Origin contacted the support team on a Friday evening and received immediate help from the DigitalOcean Support Team. The DigitalOcean team worked through the weekend to assist Origin, ultimately resolving the issue quickly.
“When you have a serious problem, you need to have a partner that’s willing to pick up the phone, even on a Friday afternoon, and work with the team until a solution is found. DigitalOcean worked through the weekend with us in order to fix issues we were having, and we were able to work together to find a solution without a back and forth blame game.” —DevOps Manager, Origin
Simplified scaling with DigitalOcean
As Origin expands to different locations across the globe, they can easily replicate this architecture in other territories. Since it’s primarily stateless, they can replicate the configuration in various data centers, simply adding a geo-load balancer. Origin plans to continue its rapid growth and do so with DigitalOcean as a key partner.
When they have to add Droplets, it can be done with the click of a button. Origin was able to simply create Droplets, name them, add them to the Ansible host list and run the Ansible playbook. The DigitalOcean Load Balancer immediately added the new Droplets to the cluster. Origin houses everything in GitHub and uses GitHub Actions. Every commit creates a different version of the server, meaning they can deploy a specific version or roll back if needed.
“In terms of deployment, using Ansible with DigitalOcean is easy. I was able to add ten servers with the click of a button. It was a breeze.” — CTO, Origin
You can read the original case study from Digital Ocean here: https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/origin
ABOUT ORIGIN
Origin is a creative technology company whose pioneering Native CTV advertising solutions are reshaping the way brands engage and activate consumers on the largest screen in the home.
Fusing dynamic content animation with proprietary ad serving technology, Origin's Native CTV ad formats elevate attention, recall, consideration and outcomes for brands who want to amplify their presence on Connected TV.
Origin was founded by media veterans Fred Godfrey and Stephen Strong whose careers have been shaped by their relentless commitment to enraging the status quo. Learn more at www.originmedia.tv.