PrograMADic: Scene 13
Welcome back to “PrograMADic” for Scene 13. This is the final scene of Part 1. We’re shifting gears starting next week and heading to a programmatic place where greed and fear come out from the edges of the story.
Scene 12 was published last week. It’s included again to connect a flow into Scene 13.
If you’re new to our scene-by-scene script-reading episodes, you can check all the scenes published so far in this PDF version.
ACTION! 🎬
12. INT. DOUBLECLICK OFFICE NYC SKYSCRAPER — 1999 MARK WALLACH (sitting in an open cubical) Back to me. The Goodrich brothers needed me. That's right... a former personal trainer. (flexes his guns). The East Coast ad scene was dominated by one company —DoubleClick. It was founded in '96 in New York. They brokered deals between publishers and advertisers. They were the OGs who built technology for serving ads. By '99, DoubleClick's ad server was delivering billions of ads, and hiring anyone who could type. That qualified yours truly. Yeah, I did a stint making cold calls on Wall Street. It sucked on every level, but I was good. I knew almost next to nothing about stocks and I knew absolutely nothing about internet advertising. I joined DoubleClick anyway. But that's irrelevant. I can sell anything. SMASH CUT TO: A spoofed scene from The Wolf of Wall Street when DiCaprio's character asked Brad, "sell me this pen." CUT BACK TO: MARK WALLACH (CONT'D) All the big agency and big brand accounts were spoken for, so I focused on finding new kinds of clients called direct-response advertisers, aka “performance marketers" (Uses air quotes with a smart-ass grin). These were advertisers exactly like the Goodrich brothers who wanted customers to do something, like click or make a purchase or take a survey. That's was the beginning of programmatic advertising. It dominates your world and you don't even know it. Don't worry about it, you're not supposed to. Here's NYU professor [FILL IN THE BLANK] to explain what I did. CUT TO: 13. INT. LECTURE HALL AT SOME FANCY B-School - Present time We fade in from the black of a packed theatre-style lecture hall. We close in on a CELEBRITY PROFESSOR getting ready to impress the students with his infinite knowledge and authentic charisma. Someone like Scott Galloway or Greg Coleman would smash this scene. CELEBRITY PROFESSOR Performance advertisers were high-maintenance. Real ankle-bitting nit-picky types. While most of the salespeople at DoubleClick would close one deal and start working on the next one, Wallach would be crunching spreadsheets like a maniac and tinkering with his clients’ ads as new data rolled in. He was AI before AI. Imagine this kids... Drugstore.com buys an ad for razors and blasts it out to twenty different sites. One percent of the people who see the ad on sites like Yahoo or Huff Post or Huff Post click through to Drugstore.com, but three percent click through when they see the ad on Fortune.com. The data shows the way to the money. Quick! Shift all the ads over to finance sites, double-down your ad budget, and check-in at the same time tomorrow to see what happened. Voila! For the first time, these direct response marketers could really track their purchases by the day or by the hour. That's what MARK figured out how to do. He juiced the logic of the ad server to his advantage. We pan to the elated student audience and close in on MARK WALLACH in the middle of the pack hunched over his laptop. MARK WALLACH That's right. It turned out to be a crash course in how the digital advertising market worked. I became the top-selling salesman at DoubleClick, but you already figured that out. We quick pan to our CONSULTANT sherpa who is seated on the side of the auditorium classroom. We see wide-eyed students. They're all mesmerized. CONSULTANT Then it all came crashing down in. On March 5, 2000 the dotcom bubble burst. DoubleClick’s stock price plunged. They laid people off just as quickly as it had hired them. The suddenly distressed media division WALLACH worked for was sold off to another company. They did not have the same interest in a smarter ad server, so WALLACH quit and started his own company. The plan: Build an ad server that would always serve the highest-paying ads to the people who were most likely to click on them, and put the rest of the industry on its knees. At the time, it seemed ludicrously ambitious. Looking back, the ad server turned out to be the boring part. In the end, WALLACH invented the first programmatic ad exchange. It mutated into a monstrosity that would eventually collapse the entire advertising industry. FADE TO BLACK: BUSINESS NEWS ANCHOR (V.O.) ...After what they are already calling the Black Friday of AdTech, marketers around the world are counting up the damage as Madison Avenue runs for cover. CONSULTANT (V.O.) None of the programmatic experts and certainly none of the marketing leaders or jargon-filled talking heads had a clue it was coming. But there were a few who saw it coming. While the whole ad world was having a big programmatic party, these outsiders and oddballs saw what no one else could. They saw the giant lie at the heart of programmatic ad exchanges. They saw that most of the ad inventory was either fake or total dog hit. Everything was a masquerade to cover up a lemon market destined to collapse on itself. And they saw it by doing something that everyone knew but nobody could act on because they were all stuck in a prisoner's dilemma.
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Disclaimer
This script and musical is a work of fiction based on real-life events. Artistic liberties have been taken to enhance the narrative and create a compelling experience. Certain sequences, dialogues, and character interactions have been fictionalized or altered for dramatic effect. While certain elements and characters might be inspired by true stories, the portrayal of events, people, and circumstances has been dramatized and fictionalized for the purposes of entertainment and does not intend to present a factual account of the events, and any resemblance to real people, places, or incidents is purely coincidental.