Hard To Learn

Our customer experienced a steep learning curve in setting up this business, primarily because advertising was so different from their core e-commerce business. As a consequence, our customer was held back from growing as fast as they wanted. New technology added complexity to their business, made worse because each component was disconnected from others. For example, their ad server did not talk to their booking system, or to their downstream revenue and invoicing systems. Additionally, because teams were disconnected from each other, even simple tasks like booking and flighting ad campaigns became painful. Sales teams double-booked limited inventory, resulting in revenue losses. Finally, with advertising being such a dynamic business, the business team was constantly looking for improvements, enhancements, experiments, or changes to their technology and ways of working. But with most of our customers’ engineers focused on their core platform, the ads business was often sidelined.