Amobee Takes a Senator to ‘Ad Tech University’

The Amobee office in Champaign, Illinois, received an unexpected visitor this summer: Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL).

The senator was stopping by offices at the University of Illinois Research Park when he shook hands with our team of engineers. The meetup was casual, and the senator asked what Amobee does in layman’s terms. We explained what we do and talked about what attracted us to the University of Illinois: the university’s top-five ranked engineering program; top-three ranked advertising program; and the opportunity to collaborate with students and faculty on projects in the advertising technology space.

Senator Durbin got the main points of what we’re doing – offering career-advancing and educational opportunities to engineers and engineers-in-the-making at a university with a reputation for innovation.

Our Role at the University

Amobee’s Champaign office is uniquely placed at the University of Illinois, a school with a long history of producing innovations like the modern web browser, LED, and plasma TVs. Many leaders in technology got their start here, including Max Levchin (PayPal), Steve Chen and Jawed Karim (YouTube), and Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons (Yelp). The University also hosts the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which houses one of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers and provides leading-edge computing, data storage, and visualization resources. Amobee being here just makes sense.

We share the University of Illinois Research Park with companies including AB InBev, Capital One, Dow AgroSciences, Littelfuse, Grainger, AbbVie, Raytheon, Riverbed, State Farm, and Yahoo. With events and career fairs, a casual lunch with a VC, brand or other influencer could lead to a research collaboration or partnership with Amobee – exactly the kind of access and opportunities that could spark the interest of smart students seeking challenging work.

I often speak at classes and events, and when I walk into a room of computer science students and say, “Today we’re talking about advertising,” people tend to pick up their devices and tune me out. Then I mention that we built tech to handle three million bid requests per second and process six terabytes of data per day. By the end of class, people are raising their hands and engaging. Afterward, students ask if they can give me their resumes.

These moments remind me how fortunate we are to work closely with the university, offering students the chance to learn on our platform first-hand and telling the Amobee story to bright young minds who might decide ad tech offers the potential for growth and challenges they’re seeking.

For more on opportunities to work at Amobee, visit our careers page.

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

If you’re curious to learn more, watch the on-demand demo or take a deep dive into our Research & Insights section where you can find recent webinars on-demand, media plan insights & activation templates, and more data-driven content. If you’re ready to take the next step into a sustainable, consumer-first advertising future, contact us today.