12. INT. DOUBLECLICK OFFICE NYC SKYSCRAPER — 1999

MARK WALLACH
(sitting in an open cubical)
Back to me. 
The Goodrich brothers needed me. 
That's right... a former personal trainer.
(flexes his guns). 
The East Coast ad scene was dominated by one company —DoubleClick. 
It was founded in '96 in New York. 
They brokered deals between publishers and advertisers. 
They were the OGs who built technology for serving ads. 
By '99, DoubleClick's ad server was delivering billions of ads, 
and hiring anyone who could type. 
That qualified yours truly. 
Yeah, I did a stint making cold calls on Wall Street. 
It sucked on every level, but I was good. 
I knew almost next to nothing about stocks
and I knew absolutely nothing about internet advertising. 
I joined DoubleClick anyway. 
But that's irrelevant. I can sell anything. 

SMASH CUT TO: 

A spoofed scene from The Wolf of Wall Street when DiCaprio's character asked Brad, "sell me this pen."

CUT BACK TO:  

MARK WALLACH (CONT'D) 
All the big agency and big brand accounts were spoken for, 
so I focused on finding new kinds of clients
called direct-response advertisers, aka “performance marketers" 
(Uses air quotes with a smart-ass grin). 
These were advertisers exactly like the Goodrich brothers
who wanted customers to do something, 
like click or make a purchase or take a survey. 
That's was the beginning of programmatic advertising. 
It dominates your world and you don't even know it. 
Don't worry about it, you're not supposed to. 
Here's NYU professor [FILL IN THE BLANK] 
to explain what I did.   

CUT TO:

13. INT. LECTURE HALL AT SOME FANCY B-School - Present time

We fade in from the black of a packed theatre-style lecture hall. We close in on a CELEBRITY PROFESSOR getting ready to impress the students with his infinite knowledge and authentic charisma. Someone like Scott Galloway or Greg Coleman would smash this scene. 

CELEBRITY PROFESSOR 
Performance advertisers were high-maintenance. 
Real ankle-bitting nit-picky types. 
While most of the salespeople at DoubleClick 
would close one deal and start working on the next one, 
Wallach would be crunching spreadsheets like a maniac
and tinkering with his clients’ ads as new data rolled in. 
He was AI before AI. 
Imagine this kids... Drugstore.com buys an ad for razors
and blasts it out to twenty different sites. 
One percent of the people who see the ad
on sites like Yahoo or Huff Post or Huff Post
click through to Drugstore.com, but three percent click through 
when they see the ad on Fortune.com. 
The data shows the way to the money. 
Quick! Shift all the ads over to finance sites, 
double-down your ad budget, 
and check-in at the same time tomorrow to see what happened. 
Voila! For the first time, these direct response marketers
could really track their purchases by the day or by the hour. 
That's what MARK figured out how to do. 
He juiced the logic of the ad server to his advantage. 

We pan to the elated student audience and close in on MARK WALLACH in the middle of the pack hunched over his laptop.

MARK WALLACH
That's right. It turned out to be a crash course
in how the digital advertising market worked. 
I became the top-selling salesman at DoubleClick, 
but you already figured that out. 

We quick pan to our CONSULTANT sherpa who is seated on the side of the auditorium classroom. We see wide-eyed students. They're all mesmerized. 

CONSULTANT
Then it all came crashing down in. 
On March 5, 2000 the dotcom bubble burst. 
DoubleClick’s stock price plunged. 
They laid people off just as quickly as it had hired them. 
The suddenly distressed media division WALLACH worked for
was sold off to another company. 
They did not have the same interest in a smarter ad server, 
so WALLACH quit and started his own company. 
The plan: Build an ad server that would always serve
the highest-paying ads to the people
who were most likely to click on them, 
and put the rest of the industry on its knees. 
At the time, it seemed ludicrously ambitious. 
Looking back, the ad server turned out to be the boring part. 
In the end, WALLACH invented the first programmatic ad exchange. 
It mutated into a monstrosity 
that would eventually collapse the entire advertising industry.  

FADE TO BLACK:

BUSINESS NEWS ANCHOR (V.O.)
...After what they are already calling 
the Black Friday of AdTech, 
marketers around the world are counting up the damage
as Madison Avenue runs for cover. 

CONSULTANT (V.O.)
None of the programmatic experts
and certainly none of the marketing leaders
or jargon-filled talking heads had a clue it was coming. 
But there were a few who saw it coming.
While the whole ad world was having a big programmatic party, 
these outsiders and oddballs saw what no one else could. 
They saw the giant lie at the heart of programmatic ad exchanges. 
They saw that most of the ad inventory was either fake or total dog hit. 
Everything was a masquerade to cover up 
a lemon market destined to collapse on itself. 
And they saw it by doing something that everyone knew
but nobody could act on
because they were all stuck in a prisoner's dilemma. 

12. INT. DOUBLECLICK OFFICE NYC SKYSCRAPER — 1999

MARK WALLACH
(sitting in an open cubical)
Back to me. 
The Goodrich brothers needed me. 
That's right... a former personal trainer.
(flexes his guns). 
The East Coast ad scene was dominated by one company —DoubleClick. 
It was founded in '96 in New York. 
They brokered deals between publishers and advertisers. 
They were the OGs who built technology for serving ads. 
By '99, DoubleClick's ad server was delivering billions of ads, 
and hiring anyone who could type. 
That qualified yours truly. 
Yeah, I did a stint making cold calls on Wall Street. 
It sucked on every level, but I was good. 
I knew almost next to nothing about stocks
and I knew absolutely nothing about internet advertising. 
I joined DoubleClick anyway. 
But that's irrelevant. I can sell anything. 

SMASH CUT TO: 

A spoofed scene from The Wolf of Wall Street when DiCaprio's character asked Brad, "sell me this pen."

CUT BACK TO:  

MARK WALLACH (CONT'D) 
All the big agency and big brand accounts were spoken for, 
so I focused on finding new kinds of clients
called direct-response advertisers, aka “performance marketers" 
(Uses air quotes with a smart-ass grin). 
These were advertisers exactly like the Goodrich brothers
who wanted customers to do something, 
like click or make a purchase or take a survey. 
That's was the beginning of programmatic advertising. 
It dominates your world and you don't even know it. 
Don't worry about it, you're not supposed to. 

CUT!

11. INT. NYC FANCY RESTAURANT - 1999

It's lunchtime. We meander through a busy restaurant, probably an upscale Italian place like Emilio’s Ballato or a Frenchy place like Balthazar. We hear internet ad chatter and see deal-making in action as we pass through the place. Our CONSULTANT Sherpa is sitting at a table. We finally meet him. 

[Note: The background restaurant scene transitions from what it was like in 1999 to the present time 2023]

CONSULTANT 
I told you we'd meet. 
Too bad it's in a place like this. 
Back then it was banner ads. 
Today's all "programmatic" ad exchanges.
(uses air quotes with a dose of skepticism)
In '99, the Goodriches needed to 
expand their business as fast as possible.
And they needed to do more than find people like this
(gestures to the dining room)
who only sell overpriced banner ads. 
They needed to find a guy who could goose an ad server. 
Ad-serving technology was at the center of it all. 
Do you even know what an ad server is? 
I didn't think so. 
So, who better to explain it than 
The Godfather of Programmatic himself, 
Brian O'Kelley... aka "BOK".  
(uses air quotes, again)

We close in on BOK. A kind-looking motherly woman is sitting next to him at the table with our CONSULTANT. It's BRIAN's mom. 

MOM 
Go ahead, Brian. 
Explain what that ad server thingy does 
like you did for me in 1999.
(looks directly into the camera)
I had no idea what my smart son did for a living, 
but I had to tell my friends something.

BOK
Ok, let's give it a go, Mom. 
You like reading the newspaper, right?

MOM
I never miss a day... you know that. 
(silly, dismissive)

The waiter places various starter plates on the table and pours water. 

BOK
Well... the internet is just like a newspaper 
only much bigger with lots of articles and pictures. 
Some people want to put their advertisements 
in this huge newspaper to show them to lots of readers.
In your newspaper, like this New York Times right here,
(pick up folded newspaper off the table)
it's people who decide which ad goes where. 
An ad server is just like that person in charge of deciding
where and when those advertisements should go in the newspaper. 
When someone like you or me opens this endless newspaper called the Internet, 
the ad server tries to understand who you are and what you like. 
For example, if you like gardening, which I know you do, 
the ad server will make sure you see ads about gardening tools.
If you like baking or sports, the ad server wants to show you ads 
about baking items or sports products.  
That's it. That's how an ad server works. 
Only difference is it does that job billions of times every day. 

MOM
(looking into the camera)
There you have it. 
That's why he's the Godfather. 

CONSULTANT
Back to the Goodrich brothers.
They needed to find a guy who could trick an ad server 
and create money from nothing.
That's called an "arbitrage." 
And that's what Wallach saw before anyone else. 
But they also needed a tech guy to code it. 
That's where this guy came in handy.
(thumb points to BOK, he's eating a forkful of twisted pasta)
Brian invented a whole new technology for the Goodriches.
And not just any technology. 
He built a technology that would change 
the way the entire advertising business works
and open a can of worms worth billions of advertising dollars.

FADE OUT:

8. INT. NEW YORK SPORTS CLUB - 1999

We stroll through a large gym floor full of machines. Men and women working out. The place is packed. Everyone looks great. 

CONSULTANT (V.O.)
If it were 2023, the Goodrich brothers
could easily have purchased ads
at the prices they wanted 
on an ad exchange. Kind of like a stock exchange. 
Think of it as a democratized platform
that gives publishers and advertisers of all sizes
unprecedented access to a massive marketplace, 
where there are sellers and buyers at every price point. 
Deals are done in milliseconds. 
Only a few people know how it really works, 
but we’ll get to that part later. 

A PERSONAL TRAINER comes into view. We see his back. He's giving a lesson to a hot middle-aged woman. She looks like a pampered housewife. She's working on squats. She's wearing a New York Yankees ball cap. He's probably nailing her on the side. Wait... maybe it's more like she's nailing him. 

SMASH CUT TO:

9. INT. FANCY HIGH RISE APARTMENT, NYC - NIGHT OR DAY

We see the same woman standing in a living room doorway. The skyline view behind her is spectacular. She's wearing nothing but high heels and a New York Yankees ball cap.

WOMAN 
Are we doing this or what?

CUT BACK TO:

10. INT. GYM

MARK WALLACH
That looks great, Sheryl. Really great. 
(turns to speak directly at us)
Twenty-some years ago ad exchanges didn’t exist. 
Not until I came along. 
The bulk of advertising on the web
were annoying banner ads, 
and those were being sold over lunches
and dinners in New York City 
at prices far above what the Goodrich brothers wanted to pay. 
I changed all that. 
Yeah, I was working as a trainer at the time. 
So what. It had its perks. 
Then the American dream happened. 

CUT!

6. EXT. DORM ROOM - 1999

We see a printed logo scotch taped to the outside of a dorm room door. It says "Dealize." We enter the room. 

7. INT. DORM ROOM - 1999

JONAS is facing a desktop computer screen. We get a good look around the place. JONAS swings around in his desk chair to face the camera. 

JONAS 
Hi, I'm Jonas Goodrich. 
Me and my brother Nolan 
started the mess advertisers are in today.  
We're the O.G.s of programmatic. 
We figured out how to turn internet deals 
for all kinds of stuff 
into an irrationally profitable newsletter. 
Companies like Barnes & Noble
paid us commissions for referring customers. 
eCommerce companies in their infancy
needed to show constant growth.
So they didn’t try very hard to stop people like us
from signing up, even multiple times,
with bogus email addresses
just to get freebies. 
There was an easy trade in play
and we were on the other side of it. 
That's when it clicked. 
These guys are paying us to give away their stuff. 
It seemed crazy because it was.

MUSIC: Something hip hoppy like "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS by Diddy and Notorious BIG. 

~What y'all want to do? 
~Want to be ballers, 
~Shot callers, brawlers, 
~Who be dipping in the Benz 
~With the spoilers.

Hundred-dollar bills fall from the dorm room ceiling like confetti to cue up our storytelling CONSULTANT. 

CONSULTANT (V.O.)
For two kids used to working minimum wage, 
it was intoxicating. 
But they needed to figure out
how to get more people into their database. 
They needed to do advertising. 
So, the Goodrich brothers started buying
ad space in other email newsletters. 
It was magic. Anything they spent on advertising
quickly converted into new subscribers
who quickly converted into commissions. 
They ran ads and generated revenue virtually instantaneously. 
It was one of the greatest arbitrages of all time.
They couldn’t buy ad space fast enough, literally. 

CUT!

CUT TO:

2. INT. AD AGENCY - 1999
We see the nameplate of Milner Vincent Bennett McNamara Schulman on the door. A group of fat cat agency executives sit around a conference room table. They aren't actually fat. The men are wearing nice suits, no tie. The women are in grey pantsuits. 
 
CONSULTANT (V.O.)
These ad agency people placed 
some of those first banner ads 
without telling clients, 
they figured it would be easier 
to explain after the fact.
By the late ’90s, advertising 
on the Internet was big business. 
Websites had banner ads, 
which were sold by agencies, 
while search engines had text ads, 
which were sold through automated auctions. This roughly corresponded 
to a bicoastal divide. 

SMASH CUT TO:

3. INT. SWANKY L.A. OFFICE - 1999

We zoom in from above on a super cool open office in a retrofitted warehouse in Culver City. The parameter of the interior has glass wall offices. Casually dressed busy bees are buzzing about the place. 

CONSULTANT (V.O.)
The techies on the West Coast 
decided it was best to charge 
advertiser clients when people click on ads. 

We end up zooming in on a young surfer dude's computer screen. If Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times and Ridgemont High was a designer, we just found him. He's designing a banner ad called "Punch the Monkey." 

DESIGNER
(Turns toward the camera)
No, seriously, dude. Back in '99, 
clients were all like, 'We want clicks, man!'
They were so totally stoked on clicks. 
So we made ads that got clicks. 
Lots of clicks. Even if they were kinda, 
like, meaningless clicks. It's supply and demand, bro. 
Now take a hike. I'm like totally busy, dude. 
(Gets back to work)

SMASH CUT TO:

4. INT. SWANKY NYC OFFICE - 1999

Now we're quickly hovering down Park Avenue around 20th Street in the Flatiron District. We hear traffic and horns. It's New York, could the cliché be any other way?  We enter a brick interior loft office through a floor-to-ceiling window. Worker bees buzz about. Everyone is fashionably dressed. It's like they just came out of a Vogue/GQ photo shoot. 

CONSULTANT (V.O.)
Agency madmen wrote the rules 
on the East Coast. They developed a 
different model. Typical magazine publishers
like Time or Newsweek or newspapers
like USA Today or The New York Times 
were, quote, unquote, "going digital."
It was easy money everywhere. 

A man and a woman are looking at the same computer screen. NYT.com is on the screen. We zoom in on an office phone. We hear a voice coming through the speakerphone.

VOICE
Look, I can sell my ad inventory 
to you or someone else. 
Either way, I'm getting a $25 CPM. 
Are you in or out? 

WOMAN
Give us a second, Bob.
(hits mute button).
What a dick. He's totally fucking us.

MAN
Because he can. Look, they told us 
to get the campaign booked by end of day. 
Fuck it. It's not our money. 

WOMAN
(hit mute button again)
OK, Bob, you gouged us, again.
Fax us the insertion order. 

VOICE
That's what I thought.
It's my pleasure to serve you. 

WOMAN
Fuck off. Just fax us the insertion order. 
(ends the call with a forceful click)

SMASH CUT TO:

5. INT. NEW YORK TIMES SALES OFFICE - 1999

We enter a busy ad sales floor. Several sales reps are on the phone getting deals done. Bob the ad sales guy is dialing a number on a fax machine.

BOB
Remember these. It's called a fax machine. 
I sold millions of dollars of ad using this beauty. 
I have a boat now, it's really nice. 
Supply and demand baby, it's a beautiful thing. 

CUT!

FADE IN:

“The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.” 
― Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth

FADE TO:

1. INT. COLLEGE DORM ROOM -1999

A college kid is plugging away on a desktop computer. Beige packages are everywhere. Jonas Goodrich, a junior at a fancy Ivy League college, is on financial aid. But you would never know it. The camera pans to a poster on the wall of Milton Friedman. It says, "There is no such thing as a free lunch."

JONAS
(Turns around 
from desktop, 
speaks directly 
to the camera)
Everything is free 
on the internet.

JONAS spins his desk chair back around and gets back to typing like a madman. We'll meet JONAS later.  

The voice that walks us through the beginning of it all is smart and to the point. Probably very good-looking too. 

CONSULTANT (V.O.)
The first banner ads appeared on 
Wired’s website, HotWired.com, 
on October 27, 1994, featuring
brands like AT&T, MCI, Club Med, 
1-800-Collect, and Zima. 
Most advertisers were confused 
by the web and suspicious of 
who these web-crawling users were. 
They bought ads anyway.  By the
boatload. It was the future 
of advertising and everyone knew it.  

CUT!

Logline 1: The Rise of Penny Programmatic
Our protagonist, Penny Programmatic, embarks on a voyage of self-discovery and growth. Coming from the TV media world, she joins the world of programmatic advertising for a change of pace and to build her career. She rises fast becoming a programmatic celebrity. She gets sucked in, loving every minute of this exciting new world. She drinks the Koolade of data and algorithms until she faces its darker aspects. In a world where there is lots of knowing but very little true knowledge — because those who have it won't share it — she gets caught up in an ethical dilemma by learning too much. 

Logline 2: The Programmatic Gamble
In the cutthroat opaque world of programmatic advertising, a group of eccentric and visionary agency adtechies uncover a hidden web of fraud, manipulation, and greed. As they navigate the volatile landscape, they must decide whether to expose the industry's corrupt practices or succumb to the pressures of the advertiser's prisoner’s dilemma where self-preservation takes precedence over the potentially embarrassing truth of burning billions of dollars. 

Logline 3: Ad Fraud Anonymous
Fed up with the twisted world of programmatic advertising, our protagonist, a disillusioned programmatic trader, decides to take matters into her own hands. She creates a web of deception, building a fraudulent empire of fake ad inventory while maintaining a straight face during her day job. Her campaign strategies are so successful in appearance that she keeps getting promoted up the chain. She must juggle the consequences of her actions while questioning the ethics of her choices as her bank account grows and the folly unfolds. 

Logline 4: Web of Deception
A morally ambiguous programmer, living a seemingly ordinary life, runs a covert ad fraud operation from the comfort of his humble abode. Unbeknownst to his friends and family, his intricate web of deception stretches across borders, ensnaring unsuspecting advertising executives, and blurring the lines between right and wrong. But when an ambitious cybercrime investigator gets wind of his operation, he must navigate treacherous alliances, unravel the truth behind his own creation, and confront the moral implications of his actions before the threads of his deceit come tear apart, forever altering his life and the world of programmatic advertising.