Data Science | Ontology | Artificial Intelligence | Automation

How to build the

programmatic
engine for the
future, now.
Leveraging trend spotting to inform
key technical design decisions,
feature selection, team building,
value propositions, and customer
journey road mapping.

Blake A. Williams
VP Application Delivery
mobile 972-951-0568
bwilliams@businessevolution.be
It’s predicted that more than $46 billion in ad dollars will be spent on
programmatic advertising in the United States this year, with 86.2% of all
digital display ads bought programmatically by 2020.”

"Todd Krizelman, CEO—MediaRadar"

Table of Contents Pure Gold

1 The Top 7 Programmatic Trends

2 Solving The Programmatic Business Problem

3 Business Driven Technical Design Decisions

4 Get Started Building. Code & Team Concurrently

5 Start Now!
SECTION
1
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Section 1

The Top 7 Programmatic TRENDS

1 Third-Party Data Proliferation: Data Exchanges
The onset of the Big Data revolution just a few years ago set in motion the eventual exposure of data as an
additional resource like labor and capital. Something to be traded and monetized by the drink or under
unlimited access. Data Exchanges like Dawex and other data marketplaces are blazing this trail with great
success. Programmatic models will start including this data to inform strategic demand side buying and
supply side creation of ad space. Further to the point, the hyper personalization of marketing compounds
the utilization of services that create granular context for programmatic engines to operate within.

2 Programmatic TV: Countless Ad Inventory Alternatives

The rise in programmatic ad sales on television has been slow but notable; according to eMarketer, the US
market expects 5% of all TV ad spend to be programmatic by 2019. Sound insignificant? It isn’t: 5% equates
to $3.8 billion.

The industry is expansive, covering broadcast television, Video On Demand (VOD) options such as Netflix,
digital channels such as Sling, and YouTube-like video content. With the growth in programmatic, the
advertising options in these avenues will increase exponentially, inspiring expansion of existing models like
over-the-top (OTT) and ad select, in which customers choose an advertising message, as well as customer
interaction with advertisers.

3 Programmatic Radio: Integrating New Players to the Market

While traditional AM/FM radio still holds a footing in the industry – 90% of US consumers still listen on a
weekly basis – internet and streaming radio are growing rapidly.

• Spotify has 159 million monthly active users

• iHeartRadio recently surpassed 100 million registered users.
• The case of SoundCloud is also significant. According to Forbes, it has 175 million users and rising!

This provides plenty of ad sales opportunities for the likes of iHeartMedia, Spotify, and TuneIn Radio to all
participate in programmatic with the inclusion of ad servers such as AppNexus, FreeWheel and Adswizz
available.
 Section 1
4 Programmatic Guaranteed. A Secondary and Futures Market.
The buy and sell side are becoming more and more nuanced in their value exchanging mechanisms. The
offering of guaranteed ad space for an agreed upon price seems to closely resemble the long talked about
shift or inclusion of a futures market for ad space. The pressure to create look-a-like exchanges of value is
further accelerated by Wall Street “innovators” seeking to encourage the expansion of Maddison Avenue
operations to include secondary market exchanges. With the proliferation of blockchain, not bitcoin, there
could very easily be a reality in the near future where guaranteed ad space is purchased and resold between
buyers on secondary exchanges.

5 Incredibly Specific Pricing Models.

The buy and sell side are becoming more and more nuanced in their value exchanging mechanisms. The
offering of guaranteed ad space for an agreed upon price seems to closely resemble the long talked about
shift or inclusion of a futures market for ad space. The pressure to create look-a-like exchanges of value is
further accelerated by Wall Street “innovators” seeking to encourage the expansion of Maddison Avenue
operations to include secondary market exchanges. With the proliferation of blockchain, not bitcoin, there
could very easily be a reality in the near future where guaranteed ad space is purchased and resold between
buyers on secondary exchanges.

6 Artificial Intelligence-Powered Ad Sales Management

“Artificial Intelligence-Powered Ad Sales Management”…… a very ominous and buzzword compliant headline
that promises to change how work gets done for all of us. The coordination possibilities, low level decision
making being automated, and preparation of operational key performance indicators will absolutely change
how we service our customers and extract profits from our business models. The key for me and this has
always been my position, is the AI can be fabulous, if you don’t over design it. The key is to develop
completely practical artificial intelligence algorithms that don’t sound sexy, but do a lot of heavy lifting. This
approach leverages that big brain of ours as a complimentary computing capability, so you still have to hire
the right folks, but their capability and scope can be significantly improved and widened respectively.

7 Blending Programmatic and Direct Sales

The blending of the in person experience with programmatic capabilities in big data environments, facilitated
by IoT devices, and personalization of shopping experiences and customer journeys inevitably had to come
together. Strategically, it’s all been building to this. The market has been oscillating between whether the in-
person or online experience was the horse to bet on, and only now has the idea started to resonate that the
two should exist not only in harmony, but synergistically create the most optimal profit outcome. Think
prisoners dilemma.
SECTION
2
 Section 2

Solving The Programmatic BUSINESS PROBLEM

If loving data is wrong, I don’t wanna be right!

No matter what the technical architecture of the programmatic engine, must include the integration of data
from adjacent partners with similar interests. Potential partners who may share analytics or actual data
would be manufacturers, manufacturer's financing companies, auto insurance providers. Getting historical
data across brands like Chevy, Toyota, Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, would create a huge
opportunity to generate insights around brand loyalty, brand switching behavior, and many other insights.
Better yet, a deep analysis over this data in its aggregate may even produce the capability to identify the
actual sales funnel for many different types of customers, in many different regions, for many different
brands. The point is that you can gain insight into potential customers and proactively drive their behavior
based on the customer journey you think they want, except your actions will be driven by data.

Artificial Intelligence. It’s just math! Now let’s build.

As the headline suggests, AI is just math. Albeit complex at times, it’s simply a combination of functions that
use input, throughput, and output of other functions to dictate it’s input, throughput, and outputs. If that
seams like a circular argument, it’s because it is. That’s exactly how AI is different from a non-learning
algorithm. With that said, there are some very old concepts that we can now include in our model because
the technical and data environment has caught up to the academic theoretical models historically postulated
and evidence in observations of how people behave.
Potential AI to include in a programmatic engine:
• Propensity To Pay • Target Market Lookalike Recommendation Engine
• Price Elasticity • Omnichannel Distribution Optimization
• Price Discrimination • Personalization Engines
• Affinity Analysis • Client Side AI Recommendation Engine
• Next Best Action Recommendation Engine
 2 Section

Solving The Programmatic BUSINESS PROBLEM

You Must Orchestrate In Real Time. Automate The Busy Work.
Every digital agency is different in that their business processes are unique and their business problems
specific. Leverage multiday workshops to isolate and attack the least value add but incredibly necessary
workflows, break them down, model and map them to the systems environment and current data model
and automate them. These processes are critical to business execution but simple enough to automate with
speed and accuracy. Workers and clients alike will love the pace at which service moves around the office.

Growth Hacking. Agency Growth & Growth as a Service.

Within this programmatic engine we are focused on delivering next level growth as a service through
intelligence and human augmented execution of programmatic services. What’s just as important to
executing this correctly for the digital agency is how it grows it’s customer base, engages with them,
provides amazing service, etc. With that said, key features to include in the entire ecosystem will answer the
following requirements for growth hacking:

❑ How will you leverage access to data and AI to
discover new accounts?
❑ Can you accelerate decision maker identification in
your own sales process?
❑ What are you doing to automate the personalization ❑ How is the work being done being captured video,
of content to agency prospects?
❑ What platform will your team use to execute
multi/omni-channel engagement?
❑ How will you create micro-experiences that wow in
customer service and in daily communications?
❑ How will you create content consistently for your
brand to give maximum value to the public /
followers / prospects?
❑ What is the plan for creating a culture of innovation,
freedom to create, surprise, and progress internally?
Specifically, what are the actions the company will
engage in?
voice, publishing, as the team creates new value and
celebrates the wins?
❑ Growth and rapid scaling is about bootstrapping and
access to capital, make sure there is a plan to
leverage both at the appropriate time so market
share isn’t missed out on. Make sure the money is
there long before you need it, it takes time.
SECTION
3
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Section 3
BUSINESS DRIVEN Technical Design Decisions
Overview
The largest problem in many medium to large organizations is the distribution of responsibilities. The has to
be done to get more work accomplished but it carries with it a danger that plagues most companies because
business operators are technologically illiterate. The market will not bear such ignorance much longer and
the crowd that remains ignorant will be ushered out the door with a severance package for someone who
embraces technology. I say all this to say that technology decisions should NEVER be left to technical
people. The incentives aren’t aligned in most organizations to create a positive outcome. For instance,
while those “in the business” bonus off of performance metrics like increased customer base, revenue
performance, strategic initiative successes, etc. Those in IT (CIO, CTO, CDO, etc) are deemed successful
based on security, availability, uptime, optimized network loads, etc. These metrics have absolutely nothing
to do with each other. To solve this problem I recommend letting the business establish the technical
requirements for their business initiatives and operations and let technical folks do what they do best.
Source, deploy, and manage the software and hardware required to achieve those business decisions. If you
cannot do that, then at least prevent IT decisions from being made strictly for IT’s sake.

Programmatic Business Requirements

This is probably the easiest part of designing a programmatic engine of the future. All you have to know is
what you want the engine to be able to do, who is going to benefit, and how much of a priority it is to the
overall success of the engine.

Requirement 1- Learning From History

There have been potentially millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man hours creating both
successful, average, and poor performance programmatic campaigns. The engine must perform deep
learning to create a model that leverages this data. The worst thing you could do is not take advantage of
this historical investment, and let you engine just start learning from new data.

Many folks are probably saying, “well our data isn’t good
data, or its not clean, or there’s missing fields”. Do not
accept this excuse to execute. Where there are holes in
the data, identify them, list them by size, priority, and
PRO Tip! then leverage the folks in your company with the tacit
knowledge to make some assumptions and generate
synthetic data. No this isn’t a perfect methodology, no
it’s not the best case scenario, but we have to keep
something very important in mind. The perfection of
predictive models and any AI for that matter, is not
binary. The answers produced are never yes/no. There is
always, always, always, a confidence interval and margin
of error. When AI is “learning” it’s minimizing errors in
expected output vs actual output, over time. So don’t let
absolute certainty get in the way of good enough to get
started. Make a strong effort, but avoid diminishing
returns.
 Section 3
BUSINESS DRIVEN Technical Design Decisions
Requirement 2- Robust Data Ingestion & Partitioning Capability

There are many servers popping up that are aggregating the demand and supply side ad opportunities to
make programmatic a little more seamless. Your job is to build something that connects to todays version of
these servers and then also create a private space to collect, clean, and integrate each clients first party data
in real time.

Requirement 3- AI as a Service

Having already trained a neural net on each

customers historical data and integrated server data You must be prepared to
into a clean area, we must be able to deploy versions
of multiple AI that are both unique to each client but compete! Anything else is
also learn from the larger patterns across the activity unacceptable!
of the entire client base, giving each client the benefit
of community knowledge.

Requirement 4- Rapid and Flexible

Deployment

There are software development methodologies that

can accommodate a build once and reuse strategy,
such that everything built for one customer can be
easily reassembled and deployed for another, with
less than 5% customization. Furthermore, there are
javascript frameworks like React Native that help any
application feel like it was designed specifically for
whatever device the app is being viewed on. Very
different from being responsive which uses brute
force to shuffle things around depending on the
viewing device.

Requirement 5- Rapid Intelligence Sharing

You have got to be able to mobilize any of the input-throughput-output data from your system with minimal
support or near 0 engagement from IT. That means that anyone in your company or client base should be
able to develop their privileged version of an API without needing to submit a requisition and get in the IT
que.

Requirement 6- Insane Querying Power

Querying has advanced so far lately that it’s basically automating the point and click functionality of a
dashboard based on the sentences you type. You can type “organize data by geography and then sort by
performance”, and the data will reorganize to suit the request in real-time. Eventually this will be voice
driven and you won’t even have to type it anymore. With that said, make sure you query capability is at the
leading edge of the times. It’s too awesome not to and the downside risk of having a half-ass capability is
too great.
 Section 3
BUSINESS DRIVEN Technical Design Decisions
Requirement 7- Avoid Ugly

There are many tools out there that do an okay job at visualization, but there is also another population of
visualization tools and services that make data look amazing. Life’s too short to have done all this work to
get to some bush league dashboard. There’s no time for average. Not for you. Not for your clients. Not for
your business. Push for the best.

Requirement 8+ Marketing Specific Requirements

Up until this point, all requirements have been functionality driven and independent of typical marketing
requirements. I’ve categorized these last requirements into a single section because were are explicitly
stating in all the other requirements, the capabilities that are required to be able to perform and execute
this sections requirements. Stated differently, we have addressed the root cause of the primary motivators
that create the actions & experiences we want to be able to enjoy as we conduct programmatic operations.

Make sure you can actually Audience Data

do all the cool stuff you want • Comprehensive management of all types of
your agency to be able to data
• Identity management
execute with ease. • Segmentation
• Look-alike modeling
• Data Transparency

Audience Reach

• Access to inventory
• Cross-channel campaign management
• Real-time bid automation
• Data integration
• Cross-channel attribution
• Performance algorithms
• Forecasting & planning tools
• Transparency

Audience Engagement

• Dynamic ad targeting
• Ad types
• Frequency capping
• Creative sequencing
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Section 4
START BUILDING Code & Teams
I have one major rule when building software.

You have to use common sense first. I don’t really care what methodology you use to make sure things are
getting done to your and clients expectations, and that resources aren’t being misallocated. What ever you
do make sure it makes common sense and you’d be willing to spend your own retirement using the strategy
and tactics you deploy.

Get Started.

Building a solid team with low churn big enough to

move and scale quickly is a tough challenge. Even if
you’re in a big company, don’t do it alone, there are
some easy things you can do to strike a solid balance It’s not easy, but it is
between costs, progress, and team size. You’re
going to want to do all three of these things below if simple. Don’t make it
you are a one person programmatic operation, harder than it has to be.
building a next gen capability and service.

Find a Partner to Build With. Source Talent. There’s No Right Answer.

With a clearly articulated vision in
, mind you can find a partner
experienced in cloud
environments, microservices,
react native, and some deep
learning capabilities with proven
use cases. What you’re looking for
is experience in any sector,
industry, vertical. Data is data, is
data and it cannot tell what silo its
in. Find folks who have built
models like the one you’re looking
for, and go from there. You’re at
the leading edge of development,
the terrain is tough, get used to it,
this is what it’s like out here in
front of the pack.
There’s no one shot one kill
solution to this so you’re going to
want to use a multi-pronged
approach. Find at least 6 big
data/AI/analytics recruiters and
retain the best 2 after interviewing
them for 1 quarter (3 Months) at a
time. This will turn the funnel on.
Get out there to meet ups, socialize
for the specific seats you’re trying
to fill. You’re picking your “football
team”. Don’t look for jacks of all
trades. You’ll get a lot of mediocre
work done, and do nothing
awesome. Of course use job
boards etc. and ask friends for
recommendations.
You’re building now, so the buck
stops with you. Have a plan, make
sure you do your homework, but
don’t get bogged down by over
thinking things in the moment.
Make decisions. Repeat actions that
work. Eliminate those that don’t.
Don’t operate in a vacuum. Get
advice, determine what’s right for
you and your team and decide.
Eliminate motion that doesn’t
equate to progress. And most
importantly, don’t hire people that
you wouldn’t want having complete
autonomy over their area of
expertise. You’re team must be
smarter then you, then let them be!
This is one of many publications
designed to be simple and guide you to
executing flawlessly and to help avoid
the pitfalls of innovation while
reinforcing traditionally lucrative
revenue streams.
This is a general template for success. To speak with me or
engage on a current project please feel free to reach out
with questions, comments, diverging opinions, or just to
network. Good luck out there, and no matter what or how
you choose do it, give it everything you’ve got!

Blake A. Williams
Digital Transformation Enthusiast / Designer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakewilliamsmba/
mobile 972-951-0568
bwilliams@businessevolution.be