Hudson MX CPO, Matt Greenhouse talks modern software design for the media ecosystem

At the start of the year, Hudson MX welcomed our new Chief Product Officer, Matthew Greenhouse, to the team. Matt is joining us at an exciting time, as we shift focus toward rolling out our full core product to clients. As he leads our product team through this exciting new phase, we sat down with Matt to talk about the “how” and “why” behind Hudson MX’s modern enterprise media platform design.

To be sure, delivering a product that meets the needs of such a highly differentiated group of clients is no simple task, but Greenhouse has been preparing for the work he’ll be doing with us at Hudson MX for the last 25 years. Before joining us, Matt spent years building out KPMG’s e-commerce group at KPMG before founding ColSpace and eventually joining Mediaocean, where he founded and headed Lumina. 

Throughout his career, Matt has led the development of databases, file sharing, media planning, and full-workflow software for some of the world’s largest brands and agencies, including Dentsu, BBDO, Gillette, Nike, and Adidas. Over the years, Matt has come to truly understand the underlying challenges of the media and advertising industry that make building software for agencies in this space so difficult. It was also during this time that he developed the passion for the work he does with Hudson MX today.

“I started to realize that there were no “industry-wide standards.” Everyone goes about it a little differently. Even the KPIs they tracked were different. There is so much inefficiency from start to finish. This is at the core of the problem we're trying to solve. And one that I've personally been trying to solve for decades now.

My goal is to design software that finally empowers agencies to work the way they want to, both internally and with their clients. So that's what drives me. I joined Hudson MX for precisely this reason. I'm excited to be at a place that has the people and the technology to make this happen.”

A little more about Matt

From the world wide web to enterprise-scale solutions

Matt’s interest in building software solutions began in school at Northwestern in the early 90s, when what we now ambiguously refer to as “the internet” was generally regarded as a potentially exciting new frontier—called the world wide web. Matt spent the first decade of his career successfully helping companies figure out what the web was and how they could leverage the web and software applications to improve how they worked.

It was also during this time that Matt was introduced to the world of advertising, when his team at KPMG's new e-commerce team won a bid to build web-based solutions specifically for BBDO, one of the most well-known ad agencies of its time. A bulk of his clientele and focus soon became these media agencies.

By the internet boom of the late 1990s, Matt saw the need for new technology to help clients share information more efficiently, and started Colspace, a company delivering modern, configurable software. Soon enough, the application of his software grew to specialize in databasing and reporting, largely tailored to facilitate collaboration between the media divisions of global brands and their agencies. This not only allowed teams across many countries to be able to all share data like media plans in the same space, but also for Matt’s team to build a database where reports could be generated “mid-flight,” giving insights that allowed for new possibilities for media teams. Matt would eventually bring ColSpace in-house to MediaOcean, where he also founded and headed Lumina until 2020.

Let’s talk about it.

So many of the industry-specific issues you’ve confronted in your career have been around for decades. So why are agencies so focused on addressing them now?

So, yes, we’ve talked for a long time about general inefficiency—but also agency differentiation. Part of the real challenge has always been that every agency is a bit different. Every client is different as well. For example, marketing for sports apparel can be very different than, for instance, beauty products. Those audiences care about different things, so marketers are going to advertise differently. Some of their KPIs might even be different. 

What's happened now, as we've shifted to digital, is that there's also an astronomical amount of data.  And instead of an ad costing $10,000 or $30,000, it now costs cents or dollars, meaning that with that same ad spend, you can place an astronomical amount of additional ads—which is great.

But the challenge is that agencies and brands are swimming in data. On top of that, there's a lack of consistency in the data, which requires people to align and transfer it across each point in a workflow.

This shift has also empowered brands in new ways that make it more critical for agencies to demonstrate their added value and differentiate from one another, as well as put a strain on agency talent. A lot of the perks and exciting aspects often associated with working at an agency are often overshadowed by the realities of the daily data entry—making the type of work teams went into the field to do much harder to come by.

What role does software play in this challenge, from your perspective?

Historically, the software itself has not been seen by agency leadership as something that provides any real strategic advantage for them. Because of this, it has always just been a huge expense item that they’d like to spend much less on. 

But as agencies learn of the opportunities that come with more modern alternatives to their legacy systems—like the ability to share data in real-time with clients via an agency portal, for example—they are saying, “Our platform can actually be a strategic investment, not just a place that people in the back office are punching stuff into so I can invoice my clients.”

What I have learned over the course of my career is that the best thing we could do as technology partners is to not try to tell our clients how to do their jobs. They know best what they want to track. They know what reports they want to look at. What we want to be able to do is give them the tools to do things in a way that makes sense to them—and adapt to their current business processes. 

So now, a modern enterprise media platform like ours allows agencies to do work exactly the way they want to work, instead of working around the constraints of their day-to-day system—and have a much closer relationship with clients because the software enables it.

How is the MX Platform designed to support such differentiated ways of working?

At its core, our software is designed to be configurable, with flexibility in mind.

This starts with allowing for a high level of configuration to customize each instance of a solution to meet distinct needs of agencies, as well as their clients, to do variations of many of the same workflows or tasks—such as media planning, buying, and approvals—but in ways that work for each client.

A lot of software developers might make the mistake of designing around one specific client’s needs and then attempting to replicate this process for other clients. From a scalability perspective, our technology and design infrastructure makes taking on new requirements and allowing new capabilities a much easier process for us because we won’t need to rewrite or build the software to accommodate that need. 

From a technological perspective, the MX Platform also offers flexibility and agility in a few different ways that systems on mainframes are not able to because of our modern, cloud-based architecture. Our technology allows for auto-scaling, redundancy, caching, and computing efficiency to automatically support fluctuating workloads, real-time data and instant data sharing, reliability, and data integrity. If one data server is down, there will be another one, so no one loses access to data or is limited by the ability to only input or extract data within certain times of the day.

There are also many examples of ways that technological principles are applied in the platform specifically for the needs of industry users. For example, the platform also is built with a robust security engine, so admins within a system can set parameters around data access and retain control over their processes.

What considerations are you keeping in mind as your team continues to design the MX Platform?

For a while now, there has been a major dissonance between industry-specific technology and the technology that we’ve become accustomed to in the rest of our lives—a phenomenon that is true not just in advertising. So, people experience a very different way of doing their work than they live the rest of their life. So you check your phone apps like Instagram, and then you sit at your desk and work on a 50-year-old mainframe system that doesn't look, feel, or work the same. So, for better or for worse, companies everywhere are going through this major transformation to bridge that gap between incumbent and newer, more robust software.

Currently, though agencies are constrained by the fact that their software is outdated, they are used to it. So, from a product design standpoint, we want to make sure that transition and transformation are as smooth as possible. We want to make it easy to set up and capture requirements to accommodate existing workflows, data, or KPIs that our clients want to use but beyond that, really what we want to do is make it intuitive for everyone.

For some people who’ve been using legacy systems for years, that's what they're used to, and their day-to-day experience, however inefficient, is relatively frictionless. Now take a 22-year-old newcomer out of college who has had a completely different technological experience thus far. There's gonna be a big learning curve and a great deal of frustration because of that obvious dissonance. 

Our job is to ask, “How do we make our software easy to adopt, but also something that as many people as possible will enjoy using, where they don't feel like they're going into a black hole back in time when they walk into their office door?”

When I work with clients, I like to see without coaching what they can figure out on their own and what questions they might have so we can get to a point where we don't need to read extensive manuals and go through hours and hours of relearning. It should be relatively easy to intuit the bulk of what the typical user might need to get done, and then training can focus on advanced concepts, shortcuts, and other powerful user-level learning.

We have many exciting things on our roadmap for 2022. What processes do you have in place to support those releases?

From a process standpoint, I’m a big proponent of working as closely as possible with our engineering team as a whole. Part of this includes standardizing a design-oriented approach to development requirements, which allows us to scope out UX/UI considerations throughout the entirety of the development and release process and ensures that we achieve that intuitive and adaptable design that we need to help agencies transition and transform efficiently. We also have an amazing network of client partners and internal SMEs that allow us to integrate high-value feedback into our design process.

At Hudson MX, we’ve built a product based on our collective vision for what we want to enable agencies and the entire media ecosystem to do in the future. What does the “Agency of the Future” look like to you?

What is really exciting is that, as we go live with the full instance of our platform, the “agency of the future” will quickly become the “agency of today.” When you have everyone from planning, to buying, to finance, to client counterparts, all able to reference information at the same time, you’ll of course achieve a greater sense of collaboration and transparency. You’ll see more data incorporated into decisions at every step of media workflows. You’ll see strengthened external—and internal—relationships. You’ll have fewer errors, a greater focus on strategy, happier teams, and happier clients. 

It’s all within our grasp.