About
Ben Davis
Documenting nightlife and wildlife.
Ben Davis is a Los Angeles-based photographer and designer who has worked in online video and AdTech since before YouTube. His design work spans print, interactive, and motion graphics for clients including Boiler Room, The Austin Chronicle, and SXSW.
I came in through the art department.
People hear "programmatic advertising" and picture Mad Men. It's more like Silicon Valley. I got here as a designer and creative first, then had to pivot to an analytical approach to keep the lights on at our fast-growing video startup. That led to work in the growing programmatic ad business, which led to where I am today.
If you've ever tried to explain what you do at a dinner party, Kit Harington feels your pain. ↗
Reporting is a design problem.
When I moved to the AdTech side, I inherited a lot of manual reporting work that nobody had gotten around to fixing. So I fixed it. Dashboards for account managers, automated benchmarking reports for publishers. Tufte had it right. A good report isn't just accurate, it's considered. Information-rich, and if possible, beautiful.
The problem you think you have isn't always the problem.
The most useful hour I can spend with a client is the one before the scope is written, when we're still mapping the actual terrain. AI tools have made execution faster than ever, but they've also made clear thinking more valuable, not less. Someone who asks the right questions first is still the highest-leverage thing in the room. No offense to our robot overlords.
