Case Study: Warner Brothers achieves near-real-time audience building and sub-10-second analytics on billions of records with Elastic

How Warner Bros. is Using Elastic to Solve Entertainment and Media Problems at Scale

Warner Bros., which spans theatrical, television, games, home entertainment and consumer products, faced a marketing data challenge: Campaign Operations needed to run highly complex metadata joins and text-based audience queries over multi‑billion‑record datasets multiple times per day, but the existing MapReduce pipeline took 24–48 hours just to produce unique audience counts.

Working with Decision Lab, Warner Bros. rebuilt the stack using Kafka, HDFS/Parquet, Spark, Redshift/S3 and AWS-hosted Elasticsearch/Kibana (hot/warm/data/ingest/master nodes with X‑Pack), plus a lightweight AngularJS/node web app. The new pipeline converted multi-day batch jobs to near‑real‑time, returning cardinality counts across billions of records in under 10 seconds so Campaign Ops can build and syndicate audiences on the fly — with an additional ~50% performance gain from using murmur3 hashing.

Warner Brothers

Brian Kursar

Vice President Data Intelligence - Strategy and Architecture