A Global Sports Streamer Turned 1.42 Billion World Cup Ad Attempts into a Daily Fix List with Nexa

The World Cup's opening match kicked off at 9 p.m. in Madrid. Five hours later, the second match started for late-morning viewers in Tokyo. Every ad break in between was premium inventory that advertisers paid for, and every break that ran empty was revenue that didn't come back. A global sports streamer's head of advertising said that the tournament generated nearly six months of normal ad revenue in a single month.

But ad teams weren’t confident in their ability to measure ad performance at kick-off. They were concerned that:

• Internal BI reporting was too slow for decisions that had to land before the next match.
• Ad-server delivery data was split across vendors, leaving blind spots.
• There was no way to connect a drop in fill rate to the serving issue behind it.

That’s where Conviva came in.

Every ad attempt was one question away with Nexa

Conviva's Streaming Experience Insights read video, ad, and app data together on every session. Across the 39-day tournament, that meant capturing every one of the streamer's billions of ad attempts across millions of unique devices. Nothing was sampled. That mattered, because the problems that threatened to cost the streamer most were narrow: a single creative, a single ad path, a bucket of failures with no vendor tag. Sampling would have smoothed them away.

Nexa read the census-level data across country, device, ad position, ad server, creative and CDN to utilize multiple dimensions. Instead of building dashboards for each question, the streamer's team asked Nexa, Conviva's analytics agent, in plain language.

On opening day the streamer used one prompt in Nexa to get answers before the next kickoff

The morning after the opening match, one prompt covered the full first day, from the opening ceremony through the second match. Nexa analyzed 18.17 million ad attempts and ranked unfilled inventory by root cause, market, device and ad server.

In one pass, Nexa found:

• 528,000 unfilled ad breaks, a 2.91% unfilled rate, with mid-roll carrying 95% of the gap.
• About 59,000 breaks with two fixable causes: ad requests missing required keys and requests failing on load that could be addressed before the next day's matches.
• A structural demand gap behind the remaining ~87%, a commercial conversation rather than an engineering fix.

When the tournament ended, Nexa built a complete ad performance report across billions of attempts, broken out by country, ad position, device tier, ad system, creative and CDN. It was then narrowed to the streamer's three broadcast territories: Spain, Italy, and Japan, which carried 80.9% of the tournament's ad volume.

Why Ad Ops became Conviva's top user at the streamer

In April 2026, nobody from the streamer's Ad Ops or Ad Tech teams were among its 10 most active Conviva users. During the World Cup, the Ad Ops team accounts became number one.

The data didn't change. The way into it did. Ad performance spanned dozens of dimensions, and reading it used to take someone who knew which dashboard to open and which filters to stack. With Nexa, an Ad Ops lead asked the business question, such as where premium inventory was underdelivered and which vendor owned it, and got an answer framed the same way.

That pattern spread beyond ads. Nexa also built a single CDN performance heatmap across the World Cup window for the streamer's delivery teams: 565 million plays, 11 countries and more than 15 CDNs, in minutes rather than days of manual work. More recently, Ad Ops used Nexa's unified video and ads session timeline to reconcile individual sessions against ad-server data.

Why it worked

Averages told the streamer the World Cup went well. Census-level data showed where it didn't, down to the creative, the device and the ad path. Nexa made that detail usable by the people who owned the revenue, fast enough to act on before the next match.

Measuring every session was what made the answer right. Making it one question away was what made people use it.