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Prodigy Turns 5 in '25: Our Top 5 "Machine Learnings" for Innovation

Writer's picture: John LipumaJohn Lipuma

Prodigy, the cloud-based Advertising & Marketing AI-ML platform that revolutionized data capture for global marketers, celebrates its fifth year in business in 2025. Launched in 2020 during the pandemic, the platform initially gained wide adoption as a way for remote workers to centralize and access data from disparate sources. Five years later, the evolution of Prodigy has primarily been driven by marketer's themselves inventing new and creative ways to expand the use of our SaaMS™ (Software as a Managed Service) technologically across their organizations.


The five year period of 2020-2025 has obviously been one of massive change in how humans and machines interact to conduct day-to-day business functions, with the ever rising use of AI & Machine Learning tools to automate manual processes. The inevitable tug of war between the promises of new technology and new technology adoption is the biggest challenge facing the advertising community: it doesn't matter how great the new technology solution is if it can't be adopted and utilized in practice. Marketers and Agency Holding Companies are betting billions of dollars annually on MarTech ecosystems to remake their operations into more powerful and efficient data-driven organizations.


So what separates the technology product "booms" and "busts"? Here's out Top 5 Innovation Learnings from our five-year journey thus far:


  1. Workers Hate Manual Data Entry - Eliminate It for Them

  2. Allow Clients to Develop Your Product Roadmap - Meet Their Needs, Not Yours

  3. Grow Both Vertically and Geographically - All Roads Lead Globally

  4. Think Practically - Being a Work Horse Has Its Advantages

  5. Stay Positive Or Go Home: MarTech is Not for the Faint of Heart


Workers Hate Manual Data Entry - Eliminate It for Them

Prodigy's initial innovation was eliminating manual data entry for remote workers by replacing traditional SaaS (Software as a Service) with our innovative SaaMS™ (Software as a Managed Service) model using AI and Machine Learning to handle data ingest. We knew legacy SaaS products failed because they relied entirely on large ecosystems of users to enter their own data. We allowed for users to "Drag & Drop" their existing documents into an Upload Portal so that our tech platform could do the data entry on their behalf. Never underestimate the power of making other people's lives easier by taking mundane tasks off their plate! Manual data entry, no matter the task or department, is rampant among corporate America - even in the tech-fueled workplaces of 2025.


Allow Clients to Develop Your Product Roadmap - Meet Their Needs, Not Yours

It's a lesson the founders learned over the course of thirty years working together in the Ad Tech space selling other people's technology - and it's held true over the past five years creating their own with Prodigy: it's the users of technology who ultimately determine the product's roadmap and ongoing improvements. The reason: once you've broken ground creating something that is initially useful, the users' imagination of where to take the product next is superior to that of the "theorists" in the laboratory. The user has the power to focus a company's resources on things that are essential in keeping the product relevant for their daily use. Nearly all of the Prodigy product enhancements we've introduced over the past five years have come from the recommendations of front-line users of the product. The beauty of implementing a user-inspired enhancement is that in turn it becomes a capability that the entire user community benefits from.


Grow Both Vertically and Geographically - All Roads Lead Globally

Prodigy was launched in North America initially for US and Canadian-based Advertising Production projects, per our early adopter marketer's project specifications. In less than six months of launching, we were asked to expand product usage to European and Latin American countries - which required ingesting project details in many different languages and currencies. Within the next two years we began ingesting not only Advertising Production projects but Activation & Experiential projects for corporate sponsorships, which exponentially expanded the scopes of work brought into Prodigy. The need to ingest wide categories of marketing spend beyond ad production and across dozens of global regions is an example of growing both "vertically" and "geographically" - if you're product is good and word starts to spread within your customer base, inevitably this is where your product roadmap will lead. Using AI and Machine Learning technology to convert languages, currencies and unstructured data from thousands of different document types is a highly coveted capability - one that wouldn't be possible without an ability to grow in different directions at the same time.


Think Practically - Being a Workhorse Has Its Advantages

As a product that employs AI and Machine Learning, there's sometimes an impression that the tasks we're performing are futuristic or ahead of their time. After all, corporations in 2025 are still in the infancy stages of fully realizing the grand promises of the AI revolution. And while the AI-ML that we're using today has vastly improved over the last five years, our niche in transforming the future of work is grounded very much in practical applications: eliminating human data entry and capturing data from documents so it can be utilized in cloud-based tools. Admittedly, that doesn't sound like a thoroughbred capability within the glorified definitions of Artificial Intelligence - but as a workhorse product solving the massive problem of mining data from vast unplowed fields of documents and databases has staying power. Time is not something most workers can spare to fulfill mundane tasks and there is no shortage of work to be automated by Prodigy. Solving problems and serving as a practical solution is a great formula for any successful business.


Stay Positive Or Go Home: MarTech is Not for the Faint of Heart

Launching a MarTech product and nurturing it into a maturing five-year old entity is highly rewarding, but it doesn't come easily. There are many frustrating moments along the way on a wide range of issues: making the right choices (technical, strategic, personnel, funding), passing tests (audits, compliance, security), responding to impromptu issues (client service, users, outages) and overall maintaining your place in a competitive world. We've been able to sustain Prodigy as a labor of love working with positive people both internally and externally. We've been very fortunate to have people involved with Prodigy who are excited about our mission and encouraged by how far our clients have taken us. Innovation is bred from a spirit of optimism and positivity, it's impossible to create new things without it. Taking ideas into the field and working with others to bring them to fruition is what has made our five year journey possible. Here's to more of the same in 2025!


To learn more about Prodigy visit www.pagprodigy.com

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