Thought Leaders in Big Data: Mike Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets (Part 1)

Marketing technologies are hot these days, and Metamarkets is doing some cutting edge analytics in the media buying area. Very interesting.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Metamarkets and yourself.

Mike Driscoll: I’m the CEO and Founder of Metamarkets. We are a SaaS software platform that provides interactive analytics to the roles of leading programmatic media buying companies like AOL and Twitter. These companies use us to provide interactive analytics both internally and to buyers and sellers on their digital advertising markets.

Why I was so excited in getting involved in Metamarkets is that I was actually a Computational Biologist by training. I finished my Ph.D. in Boston back in 2007. I came out to Silicon Valley, frankly, because that’s where the technology innovation was. I was looking for a place to apply my skills in Big Data and data science before those topics were very hot. What I found was this role of digital media marketing and advertising is an extraordinarily rich vertical for data-driven applications and analytics.

As a data scientist, it really is a playground to work in this space. I founded Metamarkets a couple of years after arriving in Silicon Valley in 2010. We’ve been at it ever since. Today, we’ve 50 employees across two headquarters. I’m in the New York office today. Most of our engineering team and marketing team is based in San Francisco.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on your customers and the value you provide to these customers. How do you provide the value? What do you do for your customers? What kind of problems are you solving? You choose whichever customers are particularly interesting and exciting to discuss, and then let’s do maybe one or two use cases.

Mike Driscoll: The fundamental problem that Metamarkets software solves is that when data gets large, it often gets slow. In the first generation of Big Data technologies, we had things like Hadoop and other tools which were very good at scaling out our ability to wrangle very large data sets. Metamarkets works with clients like AOL whose marketplaces generate, at peak volume, as many as two million transactions per second. These media markets are places where publishers and advertisers meet.

They are actually about a hundred times more complex than the New York Stock Exchange. Across the marketplaces that we serve, there can be as many as 600 billion transactions that occur. In the New York Stock Exchange, you might see about six billion trades. The complexity of this data means that many of the traditional business intelligence tools that have been developed over the years really didn’t scale. You can’t put 600 billion data points into an excel spreadsheet. You can’t put two million events a second onto your desktop.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Mike Driscoll, CEO of Metamarkets
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