Max von Weber on the hacked ad account that led him to build Adnomaly

Max von Weber is the co-founder and CEO of Adnomaly, the Düsseldorf software company he set up in April 2021 after years as a paid social campaign manager at a media agency. Its platform watches ad accounts across paid social, programmatic and paid search, pausing unusual campaign setups before they spend.

In a recent case study, the company says its work with WPP Media Germany now covers nearly 2,000 advertiser accounts and delivered a return on investment of 923 per cent.

Here he tells Business Matters why a hacked account became a business, and why he would hire differently today.

What do you currently do at adnomaly?

I am the founder and CEO of adnomaly. We provide automated quality assurance for digital advertising, helping agencies and advertisers catch mistakes across paid social, programmatic and paid search before they become expensive problems.

I usually describe us as a circuit breaker for media budgets. If you are running a big media account, there are hundreds of things that can go wrong at any given moment. Someone puts in the wrong budget, targets the wrong country, uses the wrong taxonomy, forgets an end date or makes a mistake with a currency conversion. Or someone hacks the account and starts launching campaigns at two in the morning.

The strange thing is that, despite how sophisticated advertising technology has become, a lot of the checking is still done by another person. You finish setting up a campaign and ask a colleague to triple-check the work. I was a campaign manager myself, so I have done thousands of those checks.

At adnomaly, we automate that process. We monitor activity across the major buying platforms and look for things that are unusual. We run very sophisticated checks, tailored to clients’ specific use cases, and automate tasks that would otherwise eat up hours of teams’ time, if they were even possible to do manually.

If we see an anomaly, we alert the media buyer and pause activity before the campaign actually starts spending. Our solution is currently safeguarding campaign budgets for more than 15,000 advertisers, and is used by many of the world’s leading media agencies, including WPP Media, Publicis Media, Havas and OMG. We think of it as two-factor authentication for unusual or unwanted campaign setups.

As CEO, I also spend a lot of time speaking to customers, understanding what is changing in the industry and explaining the positive impact on ROI that automated safeguards deliver.

What was the inspiration behind your business?

Funnily enough, inspiration struck during a phone call at about ten o’clock at night. I was working at a media agency as a Paid Social Manager, and one of my colleagues called because she had noticed something strange in a client’s ad account. We logged in and found eight campaigns, each with a daily budget of €750,000.

The crazy thing is, none of us had created them. We did not recognise the page ID and we were not advertising in the US from that account, which was where the campaigns were targeting. The account had been hacked.

We managed to shut everything down, but afterwards I kept thinking: why did one of us have to notice this? These campaigns were so obviously different from everything we normally did. Why was there not something watching the account that could simply say, “Hang on, this does not look right”?

Hacking was really just the extreme version of a problem I already knew existed. As a campaign manager, you are constantly worried about making mistakes. Is the budget correct? Is the geo right? Is the campaign going to stop when it is supposed to?

Our answer to all of this was basically another human being. We had buddy checks, spreadsheets, control sheets and PDFs: all these time-intensive manual processes to make sure nothing went wrong.

So I started building something to solve my own problems. Very quickly, I realised every agency had some version of the same issue. Within two weeks, I had quit my job.

Who do you admire?

I admire people who know an industry really well, see something that makes people’s lives unnecessarily difficult and decide to fix it. That is essentially how adnomaly started. I was not thinking, “I want to become a founder, what company can I start?” I was a campaign manager with a problem that annoyed me.

When I meet founders who have that same connection to what they are building, I find that interesting. They understand the problem because they have lived with it, and they are building something because they genuinely think it can help people. I admire that.

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

The hiring order, probably. We are bootstrapped, so we grew by adding clients, and every new client showed us which role we needed next. Account management, development, then product. All sensible hires on paper.

What I did not consider was what each hire did to my own role. Product and account management happened to be the parts I was good at. Once someone else owned them, my time moved to what was left: sales and operations, the areas where I am not naturally strong. So the person responsible for our weakest areas was the one least suited to them, and I spent my days on work I did not particularly enjoy.

I would not call it a mistake, because the company grew, and those were good hires. But if I started again, I would hire against my own weaknesses first, rather than my strengths. I would rather put 150 per cent of my time into what I am good at than invest an extra 50 per cent just to become roughly as good as someone I could have hired in the first place.

What defines your way of doing business?

We are bootstrapped, so naturally we have to take good care of the clients we work with. We almost overinvest in them because, in a positive way, they are everything we have. But this approach also comes from having been in their shoes and done the job they do, and knowing what a particular update of our platform will mean for our customers.

So whatever we deploy, we make sure to double-check that it will help our customers and take work off their to-do list, not add to it. It is how we have built adnomaly, and how the platform evolves. As a campaign manager, I did not want another dashboard to look at. I wanted something that took work away from me, handing back time and resources to overstretched teams and giving us the reassurance that if a colleague or I had made a mistake, the guardrails we had built would pick it up.

That is still an important test for us. Are we actually making someone’s working day easier? Are we removing a manual task? Are we preventing a mistake that would otherwise cost them or their client money?

If the answer is yes, great. If we are adding complexity because a new technology happens to be exciting at the moment, I am much less interested.

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Start something in an area you actually know and care about. There is a lot of glamour attached to being a founder, from the outside at least. The reality is that it is a long road and quite often it is not a smooth one. You need a lot of passion for what you are doing because you are going to spend an enormous amount of your life thinking about it.

For me, the combination of passion and knowledge is really important. I knew media buying. I had sat in the campaign manager’s chair. I had done the buddy checks. I had taken the ten o’clock phone call when an account was hacked. So when I started building adnomaly, I did not have to convince myself that the problem existed. I had lived it.

That does not mean I knew how to build a company. I have learned a lot, I am still learning every day and I surround myself with people who know things I do not. But I understood the problem.

Find something you know unusually well. Find the bit of it that frustrates you, or that everybody accepts as “just the way it is done”, and ask whether it actually has to be that way. Then make sure you care enough about the answer to stick with it.

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