A Taste For Tech
For the following nine years—apart from a brief, two-year stint as Western Union’s Marketing Director for Latin America and the Caribbean—Graham led Starcom’s global branding initiatives for such corporate giants as UBS, Merck and Coca-Cola. He also worked two years with Omnicom Media Group setting up an analytics team in Chicago working with clients such as Walgreens, McDonald’s and Cisco.
Then, in late 2016, Amazon Advertising came calling with an irresistible prospect: launch its Analytics and Media Management team. “I saw a special advertising opportunity and knew that Amazon had an unmatched amount of data. Even though I had just returned to the U.S. and was still getting established in Chicago, it was just too exciting to pass up.”
Over the following five years, Graham built Amazon’s agile consulting team of analysts. “We enhanced existing advertising products by using artificial intelligence and other advanced approaches, such as natural language processing—essentially building algorithms that look for anomalies in word patterns—to weight text information in reviews and make them more helpful,” he explained. “The end result delighted Amazon as well as advertisers and consumers.”
This work also sharpened Graham’s skill set for the next challenge, which Oracle presented in January 2022. “My time at Amazon was incredibly rewarding and I absolutely loved it, but my rate of learning had slowed down,” he said. So, when the Oracle opportunity arose, Graham jumped headlong into his next adventure serving as insight team lead for Moat, Oracle’s ad measurement and marketing analytics suite.
The Aggie Way
These days, Graham is testing his mental flexibility anew, seeking new ways to help advertisers work faster and smarter to achieve greater success and then scale this rapidly. And he attributes his ability to pivot so effectively in no small part to his educational experiences at Texas A&M.
“I really enjoyed the diversity of courses,” he asserted. “The coupling of theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience was incredibly helpful in building my mental flexibility, something that has served me well throughout my career and helped me apply the knowledge I was gaining in different and creative ways.”
Being a student at Texas A&M is empowering, Graham insisted. “The school instills the idea that you can make a difference, that there’s a lot that you, as an individual, can do.” He also lauds the university’s commitment to quality. “The bar is set very high,” he added. “There’s a shared determination to leave things better than you found them.”
There’s also a great tradition of teaching excellence at Texas A&M, Graham noted, adding that he was fortunate enough to learn from passionate, world-class teachers like Dr. William Bassichis and Dr. Tom Adair ’57 in physics, Dr. Robert Popp in geology, Dr. Terry Spencer in geophysics, Dr. William Pride in marketing and Dr. Philip Yasskin and Dr. Francis Narcowich in mathematics, among others.
And then there’s the incomparable Aggie ethos, he noted. “Aggies are genuinely really friendly and welcoming, and their values are first-rate. You hear repeatedly that Aggies should never lie, cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do, and that’s something you integrate into your approach to life.”
For these reasons and many more, Graham would like Aggies to have a greater presence in the tech industry. “They’re currently underrepresented, and I know they could do a lot for the industry,” he asserted. He has spoken with university representatives about the burgeoning Aggies in Tech program in Mays Business School and is enthusiastic about its prospects. “I would love to do anything I can to advance opportunities for Texas A&M graduates in the field,” he observed.
Considering his achievements thus far, there’s little doubt that Graham’s passion for improvement and Aggie pride will support and inspire other Aggies to lead the way in the digital world.
This story was originally published by the Texas A&M Foundation.
This story source was originally published by Texas A&M Arts & Sciences.