José Miguel Hernandez

Bebo, Archived Bebo.com

Senior Software Engineer, Ad Operations · 2006–2008 · San Francisco

Hand-built brand campaigns, then the templates that let sales teams run them without an engineer.

Bebo was one of the major social networks of the mid-2000s and the most widely used in the UK, with branded profiles and sponsorship formats arriving before social ad infrastructure was standardized.

This was September 2006 to May 2008. I was hired into ad operations, hand-building brand sponsorships in HTML and Flash, and moved from ad-operations execution to building the ad system on the engineering side, as the site grew past 200 million page views a day.

  • Flash
  • JavaScript
  • Java/JSP
  • Oracle

Key projects

Selected work from the Bebo years.

  1. Sponsorships built by hand

    Ad operations

    I built large-budget sponsorships, profile takeovers, and contests in HTML and Flash. Homepage takeovers were worth $10,000 to $50,000 a day. One campaign shipped as the full IAB size matrix (160×600, 728×90, 300×250 and 468×60), with a Flash unit and a GIF fallback for every size but the smallest: seven files in a working day. The takeover pictured ran in December 2009: the same format, a later campaign.

    SourcesBebo Starting To Add User-Selected Advertisements

  2. Skittles emoticons

    Branded campaign

    I pitched Skittles something Bebo had never sold: branded emoticons. Alongside the sponsored profile the campaign ran on, I proposed six emoticon tokens that rendered as Skittles in the same help panel as the standard set. Users spread them fast enough that the CEO had the instructions taken down, and the mechanism outlived the campaign as Bebo's general branded-emoticon system.

  3. The specifications advertisers built takeovers to

    Templates

    I wrote the ad-placement specifications advertisers' and agencies' designers built homepage takeovers to. Agencies did not always know how to assemble the assets or what they would look like together; the spec showed them, and takeovers went from booking to launch faster.

  4. Tracking, and the move to engineering

    Measurement

    Campaign performance was reported, not measured: analytics ran at one-in-a-thousand sampling, so the numbers came from whatever each of roughly 20 ad tags across 10 providers chose to return. Its replacement was running by February 2008. Ad targeting on every page load was also slowing a site that grew past 200 million page views a day. I moved from ad-operations execution to the engineering side, engineered the front end of the fix and led its product side: I wrote the spec for a counter service that split targeting and analytics out of the page, designed the data schema the front end needed, designed and built its dashboards, co-built the service, and kept the existing ad setup running until it shipped. It held up as designed. I also worked on the reporting layer: per-placement counters broken out by age, gender, and country. One of them logged 142,587 profile views on a Valentine's Day emoticon, registered in the same emoticon table the Skittles tokens had gone into. Most of that work shipped after AOL bought the company.

AOL's $850 million purchase closed that May; I went with it.

Related context