I am A. Dean Kelly - An advertising technology and operations professional, specializing in streaming media and digital ad serving.

For the past 9 years I have been working in the digitial advertising ecosystem, working primarily on the publisher side. I specialize in the intersection of ad serving and web development, with expertise in testing and implementing new technologies as well as troubleshooting high-value implementations.

Projects

The DM5 Project: Implementing Google DAI on MLB.TV

In 2023 I lead the re-integration of Google's server-side ad insertion product (Google DAI). Prior to 2023, MLB was using a custom implement of Google DAI that had overstayed its welcome in our ad tech stack. As a part of a larger migration effort to re-build the entire MLB.TV tech stack, I was tasked with working directly with our media & client engineering teams.

My role consisted of a number of important tasks -

• Build a working proof of concept with our media engineering team
• Documenting the implementation of the IMA SDK and API for the client engineering teams
• Build a custom ad targeting solution for client devices with our media services team
• Testing the end-to-end implementation of Google DAI

The project successfully deployed Opening Day 2024. We were able to stream +12% more minutes and +17% more ad impressions year-over-year in 2024 because of the updated technology.

Project SABATHIA: Game Changer

One of the struggles of live event digital advertising is the forecasting of when inventory will be available. Fortunately for MLB, the schedule is posted well in advance. Working with Google, I helped test their Curve Smith application. This app allowed us to adjust the timetable for which our MLB.TV inventory expected to deliver, pushing more inventory to run during the rough estimated schedule of our most popular matchups.

In the 2024 offseason, I forked Google's CurveSmith tool and developed a web app and algorithm of my own design called the Stats API Baseball Algorithm for Transacting High Inventory Availability (SABATHIA). This app connects to MLB Stats API to download and parse the upcoming schedule, and then uses an algorithm of my own design to adjust the estimated percentage a line item should deliver in a precise one hour period. In building my own version of the app, I was able to speed up the process nearly 10x by using NodeJS instead of Google AppScript and Google Sheets.

Project GUIDRY: Business Intelligence & Analytics Dashboard

In 2024, I designed an internally used business intelligence dashboard, the Grand Unified Insights Dashboard for Reporting Yield (GUIDRY). This analytics dashboard gave my team focused insight into live campaigns and their current status at a glance. With access to campain performance, we are able to identify campaigns that are failing from either a technical issue, where VAST errors exceed expected values, and from trafficking issues, where impressions goals are below expected levels.

Building out the custom dashboard myself internall allowed for the construction of actually useful custom dimensions/metrics instead of using the pre-defined dimensions/metrics Google and others provide. This included some of the following -

• Impressions per Break: A look at the number of impressions run in a typical MLB.TV commercial break. Critical in measuring the health of our client device implementations of Google DAI.
• Impressions per Stream: A breakdown of the number of impressions run in a users stream, broken down by Platform, Team, and/or Geography.
• Error Rate: A combination of all potential VAST errors produced by a tag in our streaming environment. Important to identify prematurely ended campaigns and media that fail to transcode.

Work Experience

Manager, AdTech | Major League Baseball | 2023 - Present
Senior Coordinator, AdTech | Major League Baseball | 2020 - 2023
In ad tech, I focus on implementing cutting-edge ad serving technologies, driving new revenue streams with an emphasis on MLB.TV, the premier live baseball streaming platform.

Coordinator, AdOps | Major League Baseball | 2018 - 2020
As an ad operations coordinator, I spent my time implementing and trafficking campaigns for our digital ad products on MLB.com, MLB.TV, and other properties.

Coordinator, AdOps | THe Mundial Group Inc. | 2015 - 2018
In my time at Mundial, I learned the ins and outs of digital ad serving, cutting my teeth with implementing display & video adverting on futbolmundial.com, beisbolmundial.com, and vidalatina.com.