CTO interview: Mohammed Alisrawi, building advertising in the Metaverse
In this interview, we talk to Mohammed Alisrawi, CTO at Landvault and the lead architect of its adTech stack. Mohammed has had a globetrotting career in technology, and has been working primarily in the advertising industry for more than 10 years. He shares with us some of the challenges he’s faced getting ads into mobile games in a way that is less-intrusive than most people are used to… and you’d be surprised at how challenging that is!
Your journey spanned across several countries and continents — Syria, the UK, and France — and that’s just the ones I remember! Can you explain your unusual journey?
I studied information systems engineering in Syria for five years where I rank first in my graduations.
I then moved to Lebanon to work for online marketing agency where my journey in the AdTech/MarTech space started by building from scratch all kind of monetisation solutions for both publishers and advertisers.
This company expanded to have a sister company in Dubai. I then moved there to lead the new company technical department, building innovative new solutions that included a the first self-serve social media promotional platform and a full stack in-content programmatic video ad platform in the MENA. The social media promotional platform enabled clients to create and run campaigns on any ad network without needing to create specific content for the advertising. Just a Facebook or any social media post URL would set it up for you.
After almost four years with the Dubai company, working remotely from Turkey, I moved to France.
There, after one month, I saw a job advertisement, it seemed like a description of myself. I contacted almost everyone in that company, and was hired on the interview day and that’s where my journey started with Admix leading the development of its AdTech stack where we delivered our first ad in a VR room end-to-end from the ad exchange into the game in just one month!
LandVault is surfing on the hype of the metaverse. What is it?
Recently Admix acquired and merged with Landvault, to become a go-to service provider for major intellectual property holders and brands, enabling big companies across all industries to enter the metaverse and be montized with Admix’s in-game advertising technology. We became the one-stop shop for any brand wanting to enter the metaverse.
What do you mean by metaverse?
That’s a good question, as there is no single, concrete definition. But there are characteristics, including a 3D experience that is persistent, the ability for people to interact with each other in the 3D space, and a few others. In short we can say, it is a persistent virtual 3D space hosts diverse digital experiences. I personally and from the technical point of view, I see it as a multiplayer game on super scale.
Could you explain the tech challenges you encounter at LandVault?
Admix came to improve the advertising experience in mobile games, and make it unintrusive, or non-disruptive. The ad a user usually encounters on a mobile game stops them from playing the game, but we put it inside the 3D scene in the game — as a billboard or a banner, for instance.
We wanted to create a solution, owned completely in-house, that would customise it how we want and to be super scalable and cost efficient. It had to be very stable, performant and compatible with the existing technologies on the supply supporting multiple operating systems and game engines including the bespoke ones and works cross all game genres.
On the other side, It had to integrate with demand partners seamlessly supporting real time bidding protocols and different ad formats.
Overall, It also had to comply with how the advertising industry works and integrates with key players for viewability, ad fraud and performance measurement vendors.
For example in the absence of viewability measurement standard in the 3D spacewe had to come up with our one.
All that was the source of tones of challenges.
With the help of a great talented and dedicated team of engineers we overcame all these. We wouldn’t be here without them. I will take the chance here to thank them all, I am very proud of what we have achieved together!
For instance, most of AAA game studios use bespoke game engines that are closed to us, which added complexity and technical challenges. We succeeded in building an Ad software development kit ( Ad SDK) for Android, iOS, PC, and Mac, and integrated with Unity, Unreal and bespoke engines too.
As our Ad SDK runs inside the game operated by the game engine on top of the operating system it receives very dynamic ad content from thousands of different advertisers and campaigns so we have to make sure that all received ads are displayed exactly as expected and make sure it that our Ad SDK is super performant; as any small lag or memory leak will be directly visible in the game.
Publishers treat their game as their babies, so they are very considerate of time lags.
On top of that, some other developers will have something conflicting with our SDK, even though it works for another 100 publishers. It gave us a chance to create a generic architecture.
It sounds like you had your work cut out for you! What was your timeframe from start to finish?
We were extremely tight on time, so I reached out to three engineers who went from contact to hired in a month and a half. In two months, we sold the first version of that SDK to our game partners with screenshots saying “perfect, it works.” It was amazing. And we had no exposure to their game engines!
I was responsible for designing the architecture of the SDK. We ended up over-delivering successfully using other components we’ve built before. This was one of the great results of proper software architecture and modularity.
What is your tech stack?
Our stack consists of multiple software of different functionalities and requirements. Cross the stack we used C++ , C#, Objective-C, and Java.
We used React and TypeScript for our web platforms.
Our Supply Side Platform (SSP) is a scalable, high-load low-latency platform required to handle high QPS and billions of requests every day.
It is challenging to hire for the SDK, as we don’t build games. We need people who know Unity and Unreal, but they want to build games usually, not an SDK. It’s not the same approach to stability, performance, deep level coding.
I think unifying the tooling and used programming languages is the right choice whenever it is possible. In a stack composed of different software of different functionalities and runs on different platforms we didn’t have many options.
If you want to connect with Mohammed, click here.
To learn more about Landvault, visit their website: landvault.io
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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