Total Media Cuts Costs and Time-to-Insights by Half with Rivery

About

Total Media is a behavioral and media planning UK agency. They offer award-winning strategic solutions – using behavioral data science and analytics to help their clients pinpoint and reach their ideal customers and target audiences.

Rivery makes my life easier. It does exactly what I want it to do. I don’t have to worry about data connectors anymore. Being able to get work done much faster is a big deal
Romilly Hills, Data Engineer Team Lead at Total Media

Challenge

Total Media is based in the UK. So when it comes to pulling ad and consumer data from various sources into their data warehouse – AWS, BigQuery, or Snowflake – qualifying processors and storers to comply with GDPR regulations is top of mind. The agency’s data team was seeking to maintain control over their data infrastructure and manage data governance in-house as much as possible.

They tried out traditional ETL software and a few Python-based tools. The pain and price of outsourcing developers to build pipelines, coupled with the daily grind of switching between multiple tools to manage ETL processes and build new connectors – was too heavy.

A lot of the tools out there just didn’t match our criteria

Solution

Ultimately Total Media’s Chief Strategy Officer and Data Engineer Team Lead narrowed down the decision-making process. It all boiled down to scaling efficiently while maintaining control and flexibility over their entire data operations.

We have our own business logic. We want to be in control of our own business logic. Rivery offers that. The Orchestration and Logic Rivers were a turning point for us.

For Total Media’s data team, implementing Rivery’s complete SaaS ELT platform was a no-brainer. With Rivery’s total governance, security, and flexibility over user access and permissions, Total Media no longer has to worry about data security issues, data connectors or jump through infinite hoops to keep up with our industry’s unpredictable policy changes.

The process prior to using Rivery was needlessly complex. Rivery makes my life easier. I don’t have to worry about data connectors anymore. Rivery handles the ‘business as usual’ ETL process perfectly well. It lets us focus on larger scale operational efficiencies and our behavioral offering.

With Rivery’s intuitive platform and zero-hassle ETL maintenance, Total Media naturally chose to grow their team of analysts.

With more analysts on board, they can focus less on pipelines and speed up responsiveness. They now produce more dashboards for clients, providing more value. They’ve also managed to dramatically save on costs thanks to Rivery’s RPU based pricing model.

Before Rivery, it would take us two weeks to build a new connector and have it tested. Now, we can do it in half a day. Being able to get work done much faster is a big deal. We’re now paying less than half of what we did before. Renewal is higher praise than any words can give. And as a business, money speaks louder than words.