As advertisers seek greater precision and cross-channel reach, connected TV has emerged as the go-to space for innovation and measurable results. Valued at over $32 billion, the programmatic CTV market delivers the scale of television with the precision and measurability of digital advertising.
But while the opportunity is massive, the barrier to entry isn’t creativity – it’s infrastructure!
To succeed in the programmatic CTV space, you need more than inventory. You need a custom RTB Solution for CTV that is capable of:
- Processing millions of real-time bids
- Supporting multiple currencies and time zones
- Ensuring data integrity, security, and compliance
- Delivering transparent reporting and fraud protection
The Challenge: Infrastructure Gaps Are Costing You Performance
Legacy systems are built for linear or basic digital buys. They fail to support real-time auctions, multi-market delivery, and dynamic campaign optimization. Advertisers and publishers alike face challenges like:
- Limited automation that drives up costs
- Poor targeting accuracy and siloed insights
- Latency issues during peak demand
- Inadequate fraud prevention and compliance readiness
- Underutilized inventory leading to lost revenue
To sum it up, even the best creatives fall flat if your tech stack can’t keep up.
The Solution: Custom CTV Ad Exchange Platform Development
Revolutionizing programmatic ad-buying with real-time automation and enhanced transparency
A leading global supply-side platform operating across 25+ publishers approached us with a bold ask:
“Build a fully programmatic exchange to maximize transparency, efficiency, and revenue from CTV inventory.”
Their goal was to reinvent how advertisers transact in the digital out-of-home (OOH) and connected TV (CTV) space by automating everything from bid responses to proof-of-play tracking without compromising on security, measurement, or performance.
This wasn’t just about meeting expectations. It was about reshaping them. The collaboration aimed to develop a scalable, efficient, and transparent CTV ad exchange platform built for programmatic advertising. It would enable advertisers to access previously untapped CTV audiences with greater control over their ad placements for more informed decisions and better ROI.
Capability: Industry: Country:
Software Product Engineering AdTech Global
Key Features
We developed a custom CTV Ad exchange platform for programmatic ad buying featuring integrated microservices and event-driven architecture. The solution was designed to offer greater control, better targeting, and real-time reporting. Key features of the platform included:
Efficient Inventory Management
The solution integrates an inventory adapter to streamline inventory retrieval and processing from multiple publishers. This infrastructure ensures accurate inventory handling, supports Programmatic Guaranteed and Preferred Deals and enables optimized ad placements across premium and open-market inventory.
Intelligent Auction Engine
Backed by OpenRTB standards, the platform supports multiple auction models, including open auctions, private marketplaces, and programmatic guaranteed ad placements. This feature enables advertisers to automatically bid for available ad space on CTV platforms, thereby optimizing ad spend and minimizing the need for manual intervention.
Centralized Entity Management
A master entity management interface supports unified control over critical elements, including DSPs, publishers, deals, and users. This ensures transparency and efficiency across the ecosystem.
Real-Time Data Reporting and Insights
Integrated Kafka-based reporting ensures that both media owners and demand-side platforms can access real-time data on ad impressions, bids, wins, and performance. This enhances decision-making with a comprehensive view of ad placement and inventory usage.
Ad Tracking and Fraud Detection
The platform incorporates multiple layers of fraud prevention, including IP address validation and device fingerprinting, to protect against malicious activity. The AdTracking module utilizes cookies, device identifiers, and IP address matching for precise targeting while prioritizing user privacy.
Programmatic Ad Buying
Advertisers benefit from a fully automated, programmatic approach to ad buying. This feature eliminates human error, reduces overhead costs, and accelerates the ad-buying process. With instant decision-making, advertisers can secure optimal ad space in a fraction of the time.
Advanced Audience Targeting
The platform utilizes device identifiers, cookies, and IP addresses to deliver highly targeted ad placements, thereby enhancing ad relevance and engagement. Advertisers can reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and viewing patterns.
Seamless Integration with DSPs and SSPs
The platform enables efficient ad exchanges by supporting easy integration with DSPs and SSPs. These integrations ensure smooth data flows for bidding, reporting, and ad placements.
Monitoring Dashboards
Two powerful dashboards ensure operational visibility and real-time monitoring of the platform’s performance:
- Quicksight Dashboard: Ensures hourly monitoring of live programmatic deals and alerts clients in real time in case of reporting issues or irregularities.
- Grafana Dashboard: Tracks trading cycles within each hour to ensure that the platform runs smoothly and any issues are flagged for immediate resolution.
Challenges
Real-Time Auction Complexity
Managing real-time ad auctions across multiple time zones and currencies requires auction data to be processed instantly for timely bid placement and decision-making. Any delay resulted in lost opportunities for advertisers or mismatched ad placements.
Massive Data Sets & Performance Management
The platform had to process enormous volumes of data from multiple SSPs, including impressions, bids, sales data, and performance metrics, in real-time. Ensuring data integrity while minimizing latency was critical for maintaining the platform’s performance, especially during peak trading periods.
Fraud Prevention & Ad Quality
One of the most pressing issues was mitigating fraudulent ad requests, which could drastically reduce the quality of ads and adversely impact campaign performance due to bot traffic and invalid impressions.
Global Scalability and Multi-Region Operations
The platform needed to handle ad-buying processes for global advertisers across multiple regions with different currencies, time zones, and regulations. Integrating these regions into one unified platform without creating bottlenecks was a significant challenge.
Solutions
To address the complexities of programmatic ad buying for CTV, we have engineered a scalable and resilient platform that utilizes advanced technologies and OpenRTB standards. Below are the key solution components that complement the platform’s feature set:
1. System Architecture Design
- OpenRTB-Based Microservices
The system was based on a microservices architecture aligned with OpenRTB specifications. This enabled modular development, independent scaling, and seamless integration with third-party systems.
2. Core Component Implementation
- Ad Decision Server (Ads) Integration
- Acts as the data processing hub, consuming inventory data and optimizing it using behavioral signals before initiating auctions.
- Integrates tightly with Kafka to manage high-throughput, real-time data flow between services.
- Ad Exchange Logic
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- Manages real-time bid requests, executes auctions, determines winners, and updates the Ads with auction outcomes.
- Ensures high concurrency and low latency during high-volume bidding windows.
3. Data Flow Architecture
- Kafka Event Bus
- Serves as the core event-driven backbone for system-wide data exchange. It drives decoupled communication across inventory, bidding, reporting, and fraud prevention layers.
- Reporting Pipeline Design
- Raw events from bid request, response along with DSP, publisher and deal details are transformed and stored in Avro format on S3 to support structured queries and historical insights.
4. Performance Optimization and Scalability
- Latency Minimization
- Used InfluxDB for time-series data storage to enable rapid performance tuning and low-latency transaction tracking, especially during peak trading hours.
- Used Redis server for distributed caching to accelerate data retrieval, reduce backend load, and maintain responsiveness at scale.
- Disaster Recovery Mechanisms
- The system includes automated failover strategies, regular data backups, and infrastructure redundancy to ensure high availability and business continuity.
5. Backend and Workflow Automation
- Automated Workflows
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- Spring Integration orchestrates automation for inventory ingestion, auction execution, and report generation. This minimizes manual input and maximizes operational speed.
- API-Driven Backend
- Built using Spring Boot microservices architecture for robust API communication. Supports integration across SSPs, DSPs, and internal modules with high reliability.
6. Proprietary Intelligence Layer
- Smart Bidding Algorithms
- Custom-built algorithms perform real-time campaign evaluation, bid verification, and preference matching to make quick, accurate auction decisions.
7. Global Operability
- Multi-Region Support
- The system uses AWS services (EC2, CloudWatch, DynamoDB) for region-aware scaling, time zone adaptation, and multi-currency support, essential for global ad transactions.
- Financial Integration
- Enabled secure, real-time financial interactions for campaign billing, regulatory compliance, and creative optimization in international markets.
Business Benefits Delivered
- 40% Reduction in Ad Trading Time through automated auction workflows.
- 50% Increase in Inventory Utilization by optimizing supply through real-time data.
- 35% Operational Cost Savings via reduced manual intervention and process automation.
- 60% Faster Campaign Optimization enabled by real-time performance reporting.
- 2x Improvement in Budget Efficiency due to better targeting and fraud mitigation.
- 99.9% Platform Uptime ensured uninterrupted ad delivery even during peak hours.
Tools and Technologies Used
Backend Development: Java 21, Spring Boot 3.x, Gradle
Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (K8s), AWS EKS with karpenter
Monitoring & Logging: Prometheus, Influx, Grafana, EFK Stack (Elasticsearch, Fluentd, Kibana), Datadog
Authentication & Authorization: Auth0, Keycloak
Database & Storage: AWS DynamoDB, Redis (for distributed caching)
Messaging & Streaming: Apache Kafka
Code Quality & Testing: SonarQube, JUnit
CI/CD Pipeline: CodeFresh, Git
Cloud Infrastructure (AWS):
- Compute & Networking: EC2, ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)
- Container Registry: ECR
- Monitoring: CloudWatch (CW)
- Security: AWS KMS (Key Management Service), AWS AIM
Analytics That Drive Better Decisions
Real-time bidding is only as powerful as the insights behind it. That’s why this exchange integrates advanced analytics to support:
- Predictive audience modeling
- Real-time campaign health dashboards
- Fraud alerts and trading anomalies
- Multi-market attribution and reporting
This mirrors the insights explored in our blog on advanced programmatic CTV analytics. Give it a quick read to know how it helps you turn data into smarter decisions, faster.
Custom Build vs. Off-the-Shelf?
One of the first strategic decisions is whether to buy an existing platform or build a purpose-fit one. The answer depends on:
- Off-the-shelf = speed to market, but limited flexibility
- Custom-built = complete control, deep integration, future-readiness
Our case study proves that a custom platform isn’t just feasible; it’s superior for those who want to differentiate and scale.
If you’re weighing the same decision, you can explore our build vs. buy programmatic CTV platform guide.
Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Programmatic CTV?
This transformation worked because the foundation was right. Is yours?
Key infrastructure traits required to scale in CTV:
- Modular, microservices-based architecture
- Interoperable identity resolution (no reliance on cookies)
- Real-time logging and feedback loops
- Compliance with GDPR, CCPA, COPPA
- Scalable SSAI and creative delivery tools
- If you’re unsure where your current setup stands, use our programmatic CTV infrastructure readiness checklist to find out.
Key Takeaways: Real Results, Real Value
This CTV exchange didn’t just function; it delivered:
- Increased audience reach and engagement
- Faster media monetization with optimized inventory usage
- Scalable automation built for future ad ecosystems
- Full-cycle transparency that advertisers demand
Let’s Build Your Programmatic CTV Future Together
Programmatic CTV is moving fast. If your infrastructure isn’t keeping up, your revenue, targeting, and brand performance are already falling behind.
At Rishabh Software, we specialize in designing, building, and optimizing scalable AdTech software and solutions tailored to your exact needs, just like we did for this global SSP. We’ll assess your current stack and recommend actionable next steps based on the proven architecture behind this case study.
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