I’m Adriano Meirinho, nice to meet you. The year was 1995, and I was 14 years old. I was studying building construction at a technical high school, dreamed of working in civil construction, and wanted to study engineering or architecture in college. One day I bought an issue of INFO magazine that came with a small booklet teaching how to build a web page in 10 steps. I found it fascinating; after all, I loved BBSs and the Internet and believed this kind of technology had a promising future. I skipped school one day and pored over that booklet, because I wanted my own address on the internet. It took me a whole day to make a page with a white background and black text. From then on, I realized I needed to add some kind of image to my page. I discovered a free graphics program called Paint Shop Pro. I learned how to use it, made a few improvements to my site, and decided to place an ad in the biggest business classifieds of the time: Primeiramão. My ad was simple, a title and 4 lines, offering web page development. I landed my first client: a program coordinator at the best university in Latin America. My task was to create an intranet where professors could publish their scientific papers. Then more clients came along: video rental stores, trucking companies, cosmetics companies, and others. I gave up on civil construction. I was truly convinced that the internet was promising and the way of the future! In 1999, at 17, I was called in for an interview at a large human resources company in Brazil. It was a Friday, and I was hired that same day. I would start on Monday. Monday came, and I was working in the place I had dreamed of as a child: near Avenida Paulista, in the company’s Internet department. The company had already been in business for almost 30 years. Our department’s mission was to take the business online. The company also believed the Internet was the future. I read a lot about the company’s founder and realized he was a visionary and an entrepreneur. I felt I was in the right place, and the company shared my vision of the internet. After about 3 months there, I learned to program in PHP, a modern programming language in the early days of the internet in Brazil. I learned to work with databases, and my job there was design, taking care of the site’s interface (what is now called the front end), and content updates. Then, one day, something happened that would completely change the course of my career. The company’s president had closed an aggressive marketing deal with the biggest internet portal of the time. We would have banners all over the portal and, since I was the web designer, I was given the task of creating the banners to run there. The task was done in a few days, and there were the banners on the portal. My banner, on the biggest portal on the internet. What a thrill! A few days later, I started asking myself: do these banners sell anything? Who clicks on them? Where do these people come from? I had countless questions. I lay awake at night wondering whether those banners were bringing the company any results. The company was investing R$500,000 a month in these banners! That was a lot of money. A lot of money. A few more days went by, and the portal sent me a “report” on the banners. It was a gigantic PDF, hundreds of pages long, with the banners’ names, the channels where they appeared, how many times they were shown, and how many clicks they got. It told me very little and didn’t answer my questions, so I decided to build a system to count the clicks, check whether those clicks turned into sales, which banners had the best sales conversion rate, and which banners on which channels converted the most. Pretty basic by today’s standards, right? I ran my analyses and went to talk to the portal’s account manager:
“Please take these banners off these channels, because they don’t convert at all. I’m just spending money and it doesn’t sell anything. I’m paying 1 real per click for nothing!” “What do you mean, they don’t convert at all? How do you know?” the account manager asked. “Because I have a system that calculates it and shows me which banner brings us the best sales results!” “Wow! What system is that? Can we see it? It would be great if all our advertisers had this, because we would keep using inventory on channels that don’t convert for clients. After all, if it doesn’t convert for you, it might convert for other clients.”
I showed them the system and sent screenshots, and they passed the idea on to other clients. Around that time, the internet advertisers of the day met once a month to share experiences, and I passed the concept on to them as well! Do you know what I discovered? I discovered that I had POWER. I had data and analyses, and I could prove whether or not that investment made sense for the company. I could stand up for the company to the portal with data and facts. I realized that the more I worked to optimize the investment, the more I could prove that my work was necessary and important, and that this way I could grow along with the company.
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