Modernizing AdTech with Real-Time Data: What If Media Group’s Kafka Evolution
We pride ourselves on pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in AdTech at What If Media Group. Whether it’s accelerating product development, improving campaign performance, or enhancing the user experience, our infrastructure decisions are rooted in a single goal: to deliver better outcomes for our partners and customers.
To support that mission, we recently overhauled how we interact with real-time data, rethinking the way our teams access and explore Kafka across our platform.
From CLI to GUI to SQL: Reimagining Kafka for Innovation
Apache Kafka has long been the backbone of our event-driven architecture. However, like many engineering teams, we initially relied on command-line interfaces (CLI) to work with Kafka clusters. This limited discoverability and slowed down innovation. Engineers had to rely on tribal knowledge or piece together data insights manually—hardly ideal in a high-speed environment.
To unlock the full potential of real-time data, we deployed Lenses.io, a platform that bridges the gap between infrastructure and human interaction. With Lenses, our teams moved from a command-line-based workflow to intuitive graphical interfaces and, most importantly, to SQL-based Kafka queries.
This transformation allowed our engineers to explore streaming data in ways that simply weren’t possible before.
“The more applications we can modernize to process real-time data, the better our offering becomes for customers,” said Ryan Anguiano, Staff Architect at What If Media Group.
Empowering Engineers, Fueling Collaboration
By standardizing on tools like Lenses that offer SQL for Kafka, we’ve empowered teams across the company, not just those deeply familiar with Kafka internals, to explore and utilize real-time data. That’s opened the door to more collaborative, cross-functional innovation.
“If you’re able to discover & explore real-time data you didn’t know existed, from another team,” Anguiano noted, “then you can introduce a culture of innovation, creating amazing applications that otherwise would never have been possible.”
This shift has improved productivity, reduced bottlenecks, and created new feedback loops between engineering, data science, and product teams.
Part of a Larger Strategy
Our adoption of Lenses wasn’t an isolated decision—it fits into a broader strategy to equip our engineering teams with tools that let them move faster and smarter. From adopting AI-powered development tools to streamlining observability stacks, we’re investing in platforms that align with a high-performance, real-time-first mindset.
“Lenses aligns perfectly with our strategy of empowering engineers with high productivity tools that accelerate development,” added Anguiano. “Just like our adoption of AI-powered engineering tools, Lenses helps our teams work smarter, not harder, across our Kafka ecosystem.”
CTO John Pershing echoed the sentiment:
“This is exactly the kind of solution that helps us scale without slowing down. It’s about making real-time data truly accessible and actionable.”
Looking Ahead
As we continue to expand our capabilities and explore new ways to harness real-time data, this tooling transformation is a crucial foundation. It’s already changing how we build applications, surface insights, and serve our clients—and we’re just getting started.
At What If Media Group, innovation isn’t a buzzword—it’s baked into our infrastructure.