Nate Woodman · Proof in Data
Every decade, the stack transforms.
The advertising stack rebuilds itself every decade. I have spent twenty years inside those rebuilds, building the operating capability while the ground moved. The next one is underway now, and it is bigger than the last four.
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2006–2008
Analog → Digital
Media was still bought by fax and insertion order when I started. At Google in 2006 I worked on retail and manufacturer co-op strategy while budgets moved from paper to platforms. A year later at Havas Digital I made the case for what came next and secured a $20M commitment from the holding company to launch its first global trading desk. The shift from analog to digital was not a media question, it was an infrastructure question. It usually is.
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2008–2014
Static buying → Programmatic
I co-founded Adnetik, one of the first agency trading desks, back when programmatic was a word you had to explain in every meeting. As Global COO I ran it across seven markets and we grew it from zero to $40M in revenue and a $90M+ valuation. Buying moved from static insertion orders to real-time decisions, and the desks that understood the machinery beat the ones that resold it. Client KPIs for Kroger and Nissan improved more than 200% on our optimization.
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2014–2019
Cookies → Device graphs → People graphs
At IPONWEB I was GM of Demand, building the partner layer for the world's largest white-label programmatic platform: 50+ agency and DSP teams across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Identity was fracturing, from cookies into device graphs and then people graphs. As Chief Data Officer at Havas Media I led a 100-person data organization and built Converged, a people-based addressable platform that unified identity, activation, and measurement. The unit of targeting stopped being a browser and became a person.
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2019–2025
IDs → Experimentation + MMM
When IDs started dying, measurement had to be rebuilt on experiments instead of tracking. Through Proof I designed Kroger's retail media identity roadmap, led the clean room strategy that took Akamai into a strategic investment in InfoSum, architected Coca-Cola's enterprise Marketing Data Model, and helped Walmart Labs stand up a platform for scientifically rigorous incrementality measurement. Attribution by ID was structurally decaying. Experimentation and MMM were the replacement, and I wrote about it as it happened.
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Now
People-based work → Agent-based work
This shift is different in kind, not degree. The last four changed what we bought and how we measured it. This one changes who does the work. Agents now research, plan, buy, and measure, and underneath them the open web is moving from an audience economy to a context economy. I am building inside the shift again: agent-operated GTM systems, embedding-based ranking research, and the publishing operation that produced the site you are reading.
This is the shift I work on
I work with companies making this transition as a Fractional CBO or CPO, implementing agentic GTM end to end. I am also open to the right full-time role. If your company needs to operate through this shift rather than watch it, let's talk.
Services
Strategy, design, development, and science for marketing data applications
Data Strategy
Strategic design for marketing data applications: where data creates competitive advantage, what to build versus buy, and the market analysis to back the call.
Application Development
Fast-response analytics and reporting, real-time algorithmic trading platforms, incrementality measurement, geo-temporal and device graphs, and the APIs that connect them to external systems.
Data Organization
Marketing Data Models and the governance to run them at scale: marketing operations and data operations designed for high-volume marketing data applications.
Data Science
Data mining, analytics, and insight carried through to production: performance measurement, machine learning and predictive modeling, real-time decisioning and reinforcement learning.
Work that shipped
“Proof demonstrated the rare ability to see around the corner and recommend a privacy compliant data approach that fits Akamai now and ten years down the road”
EVP and CSO, Akamai Technologies
“Over multiple work-streams with our marketing and retail data teams Proof has shown the ability to internally align marketing, science and IT on a future-proof data strategy”
Director of Media, Kroger
“Proof engaged on the very complicated task of helping me design and implement a Walmart POC platform capable of scientifically rigorous incrementality measurement”
Director of Product Management, Walmart Labs
“Glasswing engaged Proof for technical due diligence and market risk assessment that required deep understanding of identity resolution and device graph solutions”
Managing Director, Glasswing Ventures