Innovating at Scale – Practices from Within Nexxen Engineering (Part 2)
At Nexxen, the stability of our platform is core to our engineering team’s mission, ensuring that our customers have a seamless experience while we continue to innovate at a fast pace. To achieve this, we rely on our ability to make small, incremental changes, push them to our production systems quickly, and immediately see the impact those changes have on the overall health of our platform. In my previous post, we discussed why and how we test in production. In this article, we’ll dive into our observability platform and our culture of ownership. Observability-Driven Development In a highly concurrent, low-latency system like Nexxen’s, validating a change requires us to examine the production environment holistically. This is where our observability platform, Atlas, comes into play. Atlas is an internally white-labeled, self-hosted Grafana LGTM stack maintained by our infrastructure team. It provides us with real-time visibility into the health and performance of our production systems, enabling us to quickly detect and diagnose issues. With Atlas, every engineer has access to a wealth of telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces, which they can use to gain insights into how their changes are affecting the system. At Nexxen, some of the first questions we ask when developing a new feature or making changes to our system are: How will we know if this change is working as intended when it’s released to production? How will we be alerted if the change is not performing as expected? These questions are at the heart of our observability-driven development approach. By defining clear metrics upfront and ensuring that we have the necessary telemetry in place to track those metrics, we can quickly assess the impact of our changes once they’re deployed to production. This proactive approach to observability helps us catch potential setbacks early to avoid negative impacts on our customers. Observability-driven development not only helps us identify and resolve issues more efficiently, but also enables us to continuously optimize our systems. By analyzing the telemetry data collected by Atlas, we can identify performance bottlenecks, resource inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. We proactively make optimizations and architectural changes that enhance the overall reliability and scalability of our platform. A Culture of Ownership Perhaps most importantly, Nexxen has a culture of ownership where every engineer is given the knowledge, tools, responsibility, and trust they need to own their work end-to-end. We all know how our systems work, and nothing is “thrown over the wall” for another team to run or monitor in production. To support this mindset, we have invested heavily in production-related tooling and practices. Engineers are encouraged to actively engage with production systems daily, as that is where our users interact with our code and infrastructure. We have built robust guardrails and safety nets that enable us to confidently make changes. By fostering a culture of trust, ownership, and continuous improvement, we are able to deliver exceptional value to our customers while maintaining a stable and reliable platform. Conclusion At Nexxen, we pride ourselves on our platform’s stability and our ability to continue to improve our technology while we grow. Through realistic testing in production environments, how we track success metrics and analyze our performance data, and fostering a culture of ownership throughout our engineering teams, Nexxen’s platform delivers both innovation and stability. Read Next
Nexxen Launches Nexxen U, a First-of-its-Kind Education Program for Linear, Connected TV and Digital Convergence
Linkedin Icon-xtwitterlogo-black Courses taught by programmatic experts from KINESSO, LG Ad Solutions, Tinuiti, Philo and H/L, among others The program’s Honors Council brings together rising industry thought leaders for collaboration and value creation across the supply chain New York, January 6, 2025 – Nexxen, a global, flexible advertising technology platform with deep expertise in data and advanced TV, today announced the launch of Nexxen U, a first-of-its-kind, global education program for linear, Connected TV (“CTV”) and digital convergence, taught by buy- and sell-side industry experts from KINESSO, LG Ad Solutions, Tinuiti, Philo and H/L, among others. An additional component of the program is an Honors Council comprised of rising industry thought leaders spanning agencies, brands, publishers, platforms and broadcasters including KINESSO, Tinuiti, Assembly, Philo and H/L. The council aims to forge cross-marketplace connections and shape Nexxen’s product roadmap to create unique value for clients throughout the company’s end-to-end platform. In 2024, Nexxen surveyed CTV and digital buyers and found that, despite being increasingly tasked with planning programmatic holistically across linear, CTV and digital, 56% of buyers feel they have little-to-no knowledge of the programmatic linear component, inclusive of addressable and data-driven linear. Only 37% feel “very comfortable” in putting together a programmatic linear, CTV and digital video plan. Strikingly, 48% say they are able to devote only one hour or less a week to learning. Nexxen U’s designed outcomes for students range from a confident ability in building cross-channel media plans that address identity, media waste and measurement challenges to an intermediate-level understanding of the industry’s current state, including challenges, opportunities and solutions for advertisers, as well as the sell-side perspective. The courses are complemented by exclusive research reports, playbooks, SME interviews and webinars. “Finding the right resources to learn about converged linear, streaming and digital is as fragmented as the media space itself. With so many of our buyers focused on linear and CTV, we saw the opportunity to build an accessible, centralized digital destination that empowers buyers to master converged media for their campaigns,” said Kara Puccinelli, Chief Customer Officer, Nexxen. “Holistic campaigns are critical for scalable, audience-centric reach customized to viewer behavior, but this comes with inherent complexities,” said Peter Parisi, VP of Addressable Strategy & Activation, KINESSO. “KINESSO is committed to simplifying and unifying our clients’ media, data and measurement — and having an education-focused partner like Nexxen enables us to do just that while moving the industry forward.” About Nexxen Nexxen empowers advertisers, agencies, publishers and broadcasters around the world to utilize data and advanced TV in the ways that are most meaningful to them. Our flexible and unified technology stack comprises a demand-side platform (“DSP”) and supply-side platform (“SSP”), with the Nexxen Data Platform at its core. With streaming in our DNA, Nexxen’s robust capabilities span discovery, planning, activation, monetization, measurement and optimization – available individually or in combination – all designed to enable our partners to achieve their goals, no matter how far-reaching or hyper niche they may be. Nexxen is headquartered in Israel and maintains offices throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and is traded on the London Stock Exchange (AIM: NEXN) and NASDAQ (NEXN). For more information, visit www.nexxen.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Forward-looking statements are identified by words such as “anticipates,” “believes,” “expects,” “intends,” “may,” “can,” “will,” “estimates,” and other similar expressions. However, these words are not the only way Nexxen identifies forward-looking statements. All statements contained in this press release that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including without limitation statements regarding the Nexxen and Nexxen U and any benefits or insights associated with Nexxen U as well as any benefits associated with any of Nexxen’s products and platforms including the Nexxen Marketplaces, Discovery Tool, cross-screen measurement tools, Data Platform and CTV offering. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that may cause Nexxen’s actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from its expectations expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, the following: negative global economic conditions; global conflicts and war, including the current terrorist attacks by Hamas, and the war and hostilities between Israel and Hamas and Israel and Hezbollah, and how those conditions may adversely impact Nexxen’s business, customers, and the markets in which Nexxen competes. Nexxen cautions you not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of these factors, and other factors that could cause actual results to vary materially, interested parties should review the risk factors listed in the Company’s most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov) on March 6, 2024. Any forward-looking statements made by Nexxen in this press release speak only as of the date of this press release, and Nexxen does not intend to update these forward-looking statements after the date of this press release, except as required by law. Read Next Connect With Us Learn how you can effectively and meaningfully leverage today’s video and CTV opportunities with our end-to-end platform, data and insights. Contact Us
Innovating at Scale – Practices from Within Nexxen Engineering (Part 1)
At Nexxen, the stability of our platform is core to our engineering team’s mission, ensuring that our customers have a seamless experience while we continue to innovate at a fast pace. To achieve this, we rely on our ability to make incremental changes, push them to our production systems quickly, and immediately see the impact those changes have on the overall health of our platform. I will highlight a few practices the Nexxen engineering team uses to innovate quickly at scale, while minimizing change risk, and keeping our production systems stable. Specifically in this article, we’ll discuss why and how we test in production rather than stage environments. Testing in Production When done with the right safeguards and observability in place, testing in production enables engineers to gain immediate confidence in their changes and ship quicker than otherwise possible. It is also, arguably, safer than traditional “staging environment” testing, which doesn’t capture the full complexity of real-world conditions, making it less reliable as a predictor of production readiness. While staging environments serve a purpose, they are often unable to fully mimic the complexity of live systems, especially at scale. No amount of preparation and testing in a development or staging environment is the same as running your code on a production machine. The hardware is not the same, the network is not the same, the data is not the same, nor are the patterns and behaviors of interactions between different system components. At Nexxen, we shorten the feedback loop and test directly in production through canary deployments, leveraging the power of Kubernetes to make this process seamless. Canary deployments involve rolling out changes to one or two production servers, limiting exposure to a small percentage of traffic, and closely monitoring the performance and behavior of the canaries before releasing the changes more broadly. Operating at scale both enables and requires us to do this. For example, Nexxen’s DSP serves millions of requests per second across four datacenters, with an average latency under 80 milliseconds. This, of course, requires a substantial amount of hardware. We’re able to target a subset to test new changes, but also requires a substantial amount of precision – just a small increase in garbage collection time or ten milliseconds of additional latency could be detrimental to overall system performance. Testing anywhere but production doesn’t inspire confidence. We still follow thorough SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) procedures, such as passing unit and integration tests, undergoing code reviews, utilizing feature flags to manage new functionality, and proper approvals before any change is applied to production. However, Nexxen has invested heavily in modernizing our CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that we can rapidly and safely deploy, as well as roll back changes across every part of our production system. This modernization enables us to deliver features faster without compromising the stability of our platform. Testing in production is the ultimate quality control checkpoint, ensuring that our changes work as intended in the real-world environment where they will ultimately run. In the next article, we’ll explain further by exploring our observability platform and our culture of ownership. Read Next
Life at Nexxen with Erin Frey
For the latest edition in the series, we talked with Erin Frey, a Senior Account Executive based out of our Chicago office. Erin shares advice for building relationships in sales, how to deal with setbacks, and her current favorite restaurants in Chicago.
Nexxen Taps Carine Spitz to Lead Sales and Client Services for the West Coast
Nexxen announced significant growth in CTV revenue across EMEA, as well as the enhancement of its business development and regional sales teams in the U.K.
Creative Optimization in the Age of CTV and Digital Video: A Q&A with Les Seifer, SVP, Global Creative
The demand for highly effective, personalized creative has never been greater – particularly across CTV and digital video. But while the advertising industry leverages data in almost every aspect of digital media planning, one area where we’re lagging is creative optimization. So, how can brands leverage data to increase the relevance of their campaigns to consumers, particularly across these growing channels? This is exactly what we aimed to demystify in a proprietary study with MAGNA: The Intersection of Audience Data + Creative Optimization: How to Drive Action on Streaming TV. On the heels of this report’s release, Les Seifer, Nexxen’s Senior Vice President, Global Creative, further unpacks the gaps in creative strategies so that advertisers can create more engaging and impactful ads. Here’s what he had to say. Where do you see gaps in how advertisers approach their creative for CTV & digital video? From my perspective, there is one major gap: many creative teams are not producing content that’s fully optimized for different screens or tailored to specific audiences, particularly in the realms of CTV and digital video. And honestly, it’s not entirely their fault. A big part of the problem is bandwidth—creative teams are stretched thin and often lack the resources to create multiple versions of an ad for every audience or screen. Another challenge is visibility. These teams don’t always have complete insight into how their ads will be distributed across multichannel platforms, nor how specific audiences will respond to their creative. Lastly, many of these teams have limited access to actionable insights, often relying solely on post-campaign brand lift reports that provide little more than surface-level data and lack the nuance needed to make real improvements. What opportunities are there for advertisers to address those gaps? The advertising industry excels at leveraging data in almost every aspect of digital media planning. Yet, ironically, one area where it’s lagging is creative optimization. And I say “ironically” because, at the end of the day, it’s the creative—the ad—that drives consumer response. Significant investments can be made in reaching the right audience, but if the content isn’t informed by data, all of that effort risks falling flat. We hear a lot about making creative relevant to audiences, but how do you make that actionable? To make creative genuinely relevant, going beyond surface-level data and digging into actionable insights is essential. This means understanding audience behavior and preferences as well as how consumers interact with content across different devices. One of the most effective ways to gather these insights is through pre-flight testing. By sharing creative assets with real consumers—who self-report their interests and demographics—advertisers can gather both voluntary feedback (like surveys) and involuntary feedback (such as facial coding, active attention and emotional reactions). This combination of data helps reveal who’s engaging with the content and how it resonates, providing a clearer picture of how the campaign might perform. With these insights in hand, advertisers gain a deeper understanding of audience response before committing to paid impressions. If issues like low purchase intent or weak brand recall surface, they can be addressed early in the process. For example, strong purchase intent might suggest adding interactive elements—especially in CTV ads—while low brand recall could be improved with simple tweaks, like incorporating a logo or branded frame. To make creative genuinely relevant, going beyond surface-level data and digging into actionable insights is essential. This means understanding audience behavior and preferences as well as how consumers interact with content across different devices. To make creative genuinely relevant, going beyond surface-level data and digging into actionable insights is essential. This means understanding audience behavior and preferences as well as how consumers interact with content across different devices. How does Nexxen approach solving these challenges? At Nexxen, we take a holistic approach to creative testing. We begin by recruiting panels of real consumers to watch ads. As these panels watch the ads, we collect voluntary and involuntary data and feedback, as mentioned. The real value of this approach is the 360-degree view it provides, capturing both conscious feedback and subconscious reactions. Because we conduct this testing before the campaign goes live, we can make quick, cost-effective adjustments to the creative, improving performance before launch. Tackling insights and optimizations early delivers more value than relying on post-campaign results, which often come too late to execute. Additionally, Nexxen offers “Creative Engaged Audience” data, identifying viewers who are not just watching the ad, but also showing greater attention, better brand recall and stronger purchase intent. Ignoring this segment means missing a key opportunity to connect with the most engaged part of an audience. What’s interesting is that this highly engaged group may not always align with the intended target audience. For example, a campaign aimed at parents might find that younger professionals are more engaged with the ad. Once these engaged groups are identified, we leverage tools like Nexxen Discovery to understand their interests and content consumption further, enabling the creation of more refined audience or contextual segments for the campaign. The key takeaway? These highly engaged viewers are more likely to take action—they click more, buy more and interact with the brand more than others. By targeting them with the creative that resonates most, based on pre-flight testing, a stronger connection is built between the ad and the audience, leading to better campaign performance. And finally, what’s next for creative optimization in digital video? What has you excited? Current solutions are only scratching the surface. As more advanced tools like AI and machine learning come into play, we’re already seeing creative optimization become even more sophisticated. We’re working on ways to better predict what will resonate with different audience segments and enable more dynamic, personalized creative messaging in real time. The true game-changer will come as advertisers start to not only optimize their creative before launching, but also adjust it dynamically as the campaign unfolds. With the right data from pre-flight testing and mid-flight performance, we can continually optimize throughout the campaign, ensuring
Nexxen Reports CTV Growth in EMEA, Further Expands U.K. Teams
Nexxen announced significant growth in CTV revenue across EMEA, as well as the enhancement of its business development and regional sales teams in the U.K.
Future of TV Briefing: How focus groups and media mix models can help incrementality-seeking CTV advertisers
Nexxen and MAGNA Report Finds Using Audience Data to Inform CTV Creative Optimization Increases Lower Funnel Impact
MAGNA and Nexxen announced the release of a proprietary report – The Intersection of Audience Data + Creative Optimization: How to Drive Action on Streaming TV – that explored how audience data can make ads more relevant and inspire action. The research tested content from brand advertisers across multiple industry verticals including ecommerce, apparel and entertainment.
Life at Nexxen with Chris Wieland
In this installment of Life at Nexxen, Engineering Manager Chris Wieland shares what he enjoys most about his work, his favorite music venue in New York, and how curiosity led him to adtech.