Choreograph

Choreograph Create:
From Startup to Global Scale-Up

Challenge

Choreograph Create is a dynamic ad optimization platform within Choreograph's global data solutions. Now part of the WPP Group, Choreograph focuses on leveraging data-driven marketing technology to help businesses optimize strategies and drive growth.

Before being welcomed into the Choreograph family, Create was a small and determined start-up with an excellent product and a bright future on the horizon.

To grow and scale to the level of expectations, the company knew they needed an experienced partner, well-balanced in their expertise, professionalism and craft — to help them along the tricky path.

Commitment to craft is what drives Metosin's continuous contribution to open-source software libraries, and our overall approach to consulting and engineering. Over the years, it's paid dividends in a delightful way; we've collaborated technically with many clients before a single email is exchanged.

This is also how our journey with Create began. Their team already used and were happy with our open source tooling with Clojure as the language of choice. Our expertise in building successful SaaS businesses helped to pave the road from staffing towards a true partnership.

What Was Done

Metosin was brought in to help scale the Create platform. It needed to be dynamic to support fast moving ad-business and resilient enough to handle the deluge of service requests coming in as the business was growing. The existing platform presented a significant opportunity for development to become scalable as a global service. Additionally, there were requirements to integrate new video formats into the service to reach a broader audience.

But technology was only one aspect of the job. A scale-up of this magnitude touches every part of the organization, so it is imperative to have a good picture of how the problem we are being paid to solve will affect the technology, the business and the stakeholders. We have found that consultancies tend to focus on only one of those aspects, to the detriment of the others. At Metosin, we have developed what we call (for lack of a better name) our Triangle philosophy. We can place people according to their abilities and preferences in a triangle where each corner corresponds to Technology, People, and Business. Our observation is that for projects to be successful, the team should have a composition that results in a balanced position in the triangle. Just excelling in technology, or business, or dealing with people's issues is not sufficient to successfully carry a project to completion. At the same time, every consultant is different, and has different strengths. We strive to tailor our teams so that they have a good balance across those dimensions, so we can best serve the project. In exceptional cases, a single person is sufficiently skilled in all three aspects, but we have found that most often, different profiles are needed to create the dream team for any given project.

Through close collaboration with internal teams and support from management, we were able to establish mutual trust and respect right from the beginning as we tackled product roadmapping and facilitated decisions about the key strategic development projects - with our Triangle approach mentioned earlier. We filled roles like interim director of engineering, helping to hire permanent staff for key positions. Over the course of the partnership, the project scope bloomed and included agile full-stack product development, cybersecurity consulting, threat modeling, site reliability engineering, DevOps, data analytics, system design and more. We coached internal product owners on core development processes and practices to make way for a more transparent development roadmap.

Result

Choreograph Create has continued to grow and the product has made a major pivot from a managed service product to a full SaaS product. This has resulted in explosive revenue growth.

As one of the key highlights, we integrated Create with an internal Google Gemini Pro 1.5 -based video analytic system to give insights on which ads are going to behave best before a single impression is being served - saving millions on media waste on clients like the Google Pixel Team. Google promoted the solution in their GoogleNext 2024 Keynote Talk.

Metosin has become an essential part of Create Engineering and our joint journey continues.

"Metosin has been an invaluable partner."

Customer testimonial

"Metosin has been an invaluable partner, providing exceptional developers to work on a key platform in our suite of products, as well as outstanding engineering leadership and consultancy. Their professionalism and flexibility have seen them seamlessly integrate with our ways of working, enhancing our processes without disruption.

Their deep expertise in Clojure—a niche but critical language for our systems—has been a game-changer. The technical leadership and strategic insights from their senior consultants have been particularly impactful, collaborating with our teams to address complex technical challenges with confidence."

- Chris Hardiman
SVP Product - Optimisation, Choreograph