Your buyer is a head of data science or a VP of engineering at a specific account. Most programmatic buys spray impressions at everyone else. We build the targeting, creative, and measurement so your spend lands on the people who actually sign the contract.
The Problem
Your buyer is a tiny, technical audience
An AI/ML company is selling to a head of ML, a VP of engineering, or a chief data officer. That is a few thousand people, not a mass market. Open-exchange programmatic is built to find scale, so it optimizes toward cheap impressions and broad reach. You burn budget reaching marketers, students, and bots while the handful of people who matter barely see you.
The sales cycle is too long for last-click logic
Enterprise AI deals take six to eighteen months and pull in a buying committee of five to ten people. Programmatic platforms grade themselves on clicks and last-touch conversions that happen in days. So the algorithm optimizes for the wrong signal, the dashboard shows a low cost per click, and none of it ties to a pipeline that closes two quarters later.
Brand and demand get measured with the wrong yardstick
Display and CTV mostly create awareness and trust with a committee that is researching quietly. Those impressions rarely produce a direct click, yet they shape who shows up on the demo call. When finance asks for the return on a display line item using a click report, the channel looks dead even when it is doing real work.
Agencies sell you reach you cannot use
Most media agencies are paid on a percentage of spend, so they push you toward bigger budgets and broad targeting that inflates impressions. For a company with a narrow technical buyer that is the opposite of what you need. You end up funding an impression count that looks impressive in a deck and converts nothing.
How We Help
We start by defining who you are actually trying to reach, account by account and title by title. For an AI/ML company that usually means a target account list of a few hundred to a few thousand companies, plus the specific technical and economic buyers inside them. We map that list against what is reachable in programmatic before spending a dollar, so you know which accounts you can hit with display and CTV and which need a different channel entirely.
From there we build the strategy around the committee, not the click. Account-based programmatic lets us serve display and native to the people inside your target accounts, while CTV and online video carry the brand message to the senior buyers who decide but never click an ad. We treat awareness and demand as two jobs with two sets of creative and two sets of metrics, instead of forcing one campaign to do both and failing at each.
Execution is where the waste usually hides, so we run it tight. We use inclusion lists of vetted publishers and B2B-grade account targeting instead of the open exchange, we cap frequency so you are not paying to hit the same engineer forty times a week, and we build separate creative for the technical evaluator and the executive sponsor because they care about completely different things. Every line item maps to a named audience and a named job.
Measurement is the part most programmatic vendors skip, and it is the part that decides whether you keep funding the channel. We instrument view-through and account-level engagement, not just clicks, and we connect the ad data to your CRM so you can see which target accounts moved from cold to engaged to opportunity after they saw your media. That closes the gap between a display impression and a deal your sales team closes months later.
The difference with Winston Francois is that we are operators, not a media-arbitrage shop. We are not paid more when you spend more, so our incentive is to find the smallest, sharpest buy that produces pipeline. We will tell you when programmatic is not the right channel for a given goal, and we will tell you when your budget is too small to run it well. That honesty is the whole point of working with us.
We also keep the program connected to the rest of your go-to-market. Programmatic works best as air cover for paid search, paid social, and outbound, not as an island. We coordinate the messaging and the timing so a target account sees a consistent story across channels, which is what actually moves a slow technical buyer from aware to in-market.
What we deliver
- Target account list scored and matched against programmatic reachability
- Audience and buyer-persona definitions for technical and economic decision makers
- Account-based display and native campaign setup on B2B-grade inventory
- CTV and online video brand campaigns aimed at senior buyers
- Separate creative tracks for the evaluator and the executive sponsor
- Inclusion-list publisher curation and frequency caps to cut waste
- View-through and account-engagement measurement wired into your CRM
- Cross-channel coordination with paid search, paid social, and outbound
In AI/ML, the win is not cheap impressions. It is reaching a few thousand technical and executive buyers inside your target accounts and proving, through account engagement rather than clicks, that those impressions pulled real pipeline forward.
Our Methodology
We run programmatic as an account-based discipline, not a reach play. The first weeks are about targeting precision: building and scoring the account list, defining the buying committee, and confirming what is actually reachable on B2B inventory before any spend goes live. We would rather start with a smaller, cleaner audience and expand than light up broad targeting and chase it down later.
Once live, we manage to account-level signals. We watch which target accounts are engaging, how brand exposure on CTV correlates with later demo requests, and where frequency is climbing without payoff. We shift budget toward the accounts and placements that show movement and pull it away from the ones that only generate impressions. Optimization decisions are tied to pipeline and account engagement, not to whichever metric the ad platform happens to reward.
Throughout, we keep measurement honest. View-through attribution is modeled and reported as a contribution to pipeline, never sold as a hard last-click number, so your finance team gets a defensible read on what the channel is doing inside a long, multi-person sales cycle.
How We Work
We start with a paid strategy and audit engagement before any media runs. That covers account list construction, persona definition, reachability analysis, and a measurement plan that ties programmatic to your CRM. You come out of it knowing whether programmatic is even the right channel for your goals and what it will take to run it well.
From there most clients move into an ongoing management retainer. We build and run the campaigns, manage the inventory and frequency, produce and test creative for each buyer type, and report on account engagement and pipeline contribution rather than vanity impressions. Media spend is billed separately and transparently, and we never mark it up.
We work as an extension of your team, not a black box. You see the targeting logic, the inventory list, and the real numbers. We meet on a regular cadence to make budget-allocation calls together, and we flag fast when something is not working so you are never funding a dead campaign for a full quarter.
Engagements are sized to your stage. A Series A company testing the channel runs a tighter, lower-budget pilot, while a growth-stage company with a defined account list and a bigger team runs a fuller program across display, CTV, and native at once.
- Higher share of impressions landing on named target accounts instead of broad audiences
- Account engagement that sales can see in the CRM, not just clicks in a dashboard
- Brand presence with senior buyers who never click but decide the deal
- Lower wasted spend from frequency caps and curated inventory
- A defensible view-through read that survives a finance review
If your ai / machine learning company needs programmatic advertising leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
What does programmatic advertising cost for an AI/ML company?
A focused engagement with Winston Francois typically runs $15K-$40K per month in fees, plus media spend that you control and that we never mark up. The fee range depends on how many channels you run, how much creative you need, and whether we are managing one tight pilot or a full display, CTV, and native program at once.
How long before programmatic advertising produces results for us?
Early signals like account engagement and reach against your target list show up within the first four to six weeks once campaigns are live. Pipeline impact takes longer because AI/ML sales cycles run six to eighteen months, so the deals these impressions influence often close two or three quarters out.
How does programmatic integrate with our existing marketing and sales stack?
We wire the ad platforms into your CRM so account engagement is visible to sales, not stranded in a separate dashboard. That means matching your target account list to the targeting platform, passing exposure and engagement data back to your CRM, and aligning the programmatic story with what your paid search, paid social, and outbound teams are already saying.
Why work with Winston Francois instead of a traditional media agency?
Most media agencies are paid a percentage of your spend, which gives them a reason to push bigger budgets and broad targeting. We are not, so our incentive is to find the smallest, sharpest buy that produces pipeline for your specific technical buyer.
How do you prove return on investment from programmatic for a long sales cycle?
We measure view-through and account-level engagement, then tie both to your CRM so you can trace which target accounts moved through the funnel after exposure. We report view-through as a modeled contribution to pipeline, never as a hard last-click number, because honest attribution matters more than a flattering dashboard.
Is programmatic advertising a fit for an early-stage AI/ML startup?
It can be, but only if you have a defined target account list and enough budget to reach it with meaningful frequency. A Series A company with a few hundred named accounts and $20K or more a month in media can run a tight, focused pilot and learn a lot.
