White-Label Ad Management Solution

About the client

MediaMath is a large AdTech company providing programmatic technology solutions for industry-leading entities. The company offers ready-made and custom capabilities for brands and advertisers to meet their diverse marketing goals. The tools and platforms provided by MediaMath power ad campaigns, media and creative management, targeting, brand safety, and other aspects related to omnichannel advertising.

Goal

MediaMath sought a streamlined version of their Demand-Side Platform (DSP) in response to the needs of the pool of their customers – mainly large advertisers with a significant number of concurrent advertising campaigns. These customers requested only specific functionalities and wanted to access a simplified version of the DSP.

The envisioned way out was to build a “White-Label solution” – a flexible and adaptive ad management system that could cater to the unique needs of individual clients, adjusting to various specifications and preferences. It would retain the DSP’s core functions but eliminate excessive features and UI complexities.

Having collaborated on previous projects involving ad campaign and strategy management, and other custom solutions, the client engaged Geomotiv’s team.

Work Description

Duration:

1+ Year

Team:

The project team comprised four specialized members:

• a full-stack developer, 
• a team lead (with full-stack capabilities),
• two QA specialists – focusing on manual and automated testing.

Development Approach:

Our developers leveraged the experience gained from working on projects for MediaMath and successfully applied these insights to developing solutions with similar logic. They established the core architecture and added custom capabilities based on evolving client requirements.

The team paid much attention to testing and quality assurance to ensure flawless work of newly developed capabilities. Our QA specialists employed functional, unit, regression, and end-to-end testing to address all potential issues and bugs.

Our team embraced Agile development, engaging in 2-week sprints to deliver prioritized features from the backlog.

Each sprint included the work in three environments:

• Development (feature development and review), 
• Testing and QA (testing functionality and approval), 
• Release to production.

The team developed the system incrementally, delivering shippable product versions each sprint. A comprehensive approach contributed to the strategic release of the core system functionality upon reaching 50% completion. The subsequent refinement involved the development of the remaining 50% of the features.

Modules:

Geomotiv’s specialists implemented vital modules within the ad management system:

• Ad campaigns

Our development team designed and deployed an intuitive dashboard with a one-step flow for creating and managing ad campaigns.

• Ad strategies

The team created a module for curating new ad strategies, enabling clients to:

• create a strategy,
• submit marketing objectives,
• manage supply partners,
• set targeting,
• set locations,
• set target devices,
• create fly lists for ad strategies,
• additional key features.

Feature management system.

Geomotiv’s team effectively implemented feature management by utilizing flags to regulate specific features based on the system’s version. Through the use of LaunchDarkly, they were able to enable or disable features, delivering a customized response to each client.

Regarding feature distribution, our developers controlled access to unintended features during source code generation. The front end was organized using a shared codebase, while distinct codebases managed the back end. Each client had a dedicated Webpack bundler, compiling and delivering code that included only the functionalities relevant to their specific needs.

User management system.

The system incorporated a robust permission system for streamlined access control. The first point of contact was through a user-friendly UI featuring a universal login interface. The permission system included three distinct roles:

1. Admin:

• Create, edit, and delete user accounts.
• Assign and manage user-specific flags.

2. Manager:

• Create and manage campaigns.
• Develop and implement strategies.
• Access comprehensive reports.

3. Reporter:

• Access analytics reports.
• Utilize the user interface for data exploration.

Integrations:
The system seamlessly integrated with internal platforms, enhancing functionality and data management:

1. Integration with the reporting system:

• Users could access analytics insights, extract statistics, and visualize advertising campaign metrics directly on their screens.
• It facilitated the data transfer between systems, ensuring a dynamic user experience.
• Developers employed Cron jobs for scheduled job execution. They implemented automated scripts to load updates into the reporting system.

2. Integration with Databricks:

• Developers needed to handle Big Data sourced from Apache Spark.
• They utilized the service for crafting queries and presenting data in a user-friendly format.

Work Stages

1. Requirements gathering
2. Architecture design
3. Agile development cycles: development- testing- production
4. Release

Results

The ad management system developed by Geomotiv has experienced widespread usage and popularity among high-profile MediaMath customers, who are premium advertisers. Thanks to our contributions, the client strengthened its industry position by providing exclusive solutions tailored to each customer’s unique needs.

Here’s what made that happen:

• Proper architecture design: Our developers created a solid tech backbone that could meet evolving requirements and avoid roadblocks;
• Efficient feature management: The system’s flexibility allowed it to accommodate various functionalities within a unified framework.
• Custom functionalities: Relying on extensive experience with ad campaigns and strategy management, our specialists created tailored software on the first try.
• Rigorous testing and QA: Our specialists ensured quality by integrating different testing techniques into the development cycle.