Using artificial intelligence to revolutionize online advertising
“There are more than 500 billion pages on the internet and many of them are looking for ads to fund what they do, and that’s where we come in,” says Richard Howe.
Richard Howe, BEng 88, traces his career trajectory back to a hobby he began as a teen: taking apart cars and putting them back together.
Now CEO of Inuvo — an AI-powered advertising and data company — Howe grew up on the South Shore of Montreal, where his fascination with tinkering with car parts ignited a love of seeing what was under the hood.
“I’ve always been fascinated with how things are built,” Howe says in an interview from his home in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fast-forward several decades and Howe is still enthralled by the nuances of technologies that affect us all, such as AI.
Inuvo, which he has led since 2009, leverages a proprietary model of the human language trained on information retrieved by its patented web crawler. It examines online interactions and predicts consumer intent, offering a solution to the “death of the cookie” problem of the privacy-driven phase-out of third-party cookies used to track browsing behaviour.
Essentially, the company’s AI pairs the reasons behind why people are interested in products, with the reasons why people are consuming content — TV, webpages, etc. — without using any consumer information.
Howe shares the example of Bose’s noise-cancelling headphones, and how its advertising executives wanted Inuvo to test out its media-buying innovation. Inuvo’s AI system found an intriguing connection between the headphones and an unusual audience: those who owned small dogs.
Many small-snouted dogs, like pugs, have breathing problems and snore, Howe explains, which makes it challenging for their owners to enjoy solid sleep with their pet nearby. “So, we can pair those Bose ads with websites run by small-snouted dog owners looking for advertising,” Howe says.
Inuvo is catering to a massive client list, now close to reaching $100 million USD in revenue.
“There’s more than 500 billion pages on the internet and many of them are looking for ads to fund what they do, and that’s where we come in,” says Howe.
Finding a ‘perfect fit’
When Howe looks back on his years securing a civil engineering degree at Concordia, he recalls thinking, “If this is the path I’m on, I want to excel at it.”
And he did. Howe graduated first in his class, and was awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Undergraduate Scholarship.
“Concordia was such a great experience, and I loved learning from so many classes there, especially in physics and math,” Howe says.
After earning a master’s from McGill University, Howe moved to Vancouver with his wife to begin working for Buckland & Taylor, a consulting firm focused on the structural engineering sector.
“I was always amazed by how structures are built so it was a perfect fit for me,” says Howe, who blended a talent for coding with his passion for engineering.
He built software that engineers used to help them construct, for example, the first cable-stayed bridge stretching across the Mississippi River.
Howe then moved on to spend four years in a sales position at HNC, a software firm in San Diego specializing in the fraud, risk and underwriting markets. “We were the first company to commercialize the type of AI tech called neural networks to apply to solving credit fraud issues,” says Howe. “That’s what got me fascinated with AI.”
Working in sales was foreign to Howe, who was used to typing code into a computer. “I was always great at engineering and math and coming up with ideas, but I knew that if I were to be successful as an entrepreneur, I needed to figure out how to be a salesperson,” he adds.
Those people skills have been invaluable for Howe at Inuvo, which was named as a nod to his Quebec roots — a mash-up of the words “innovate” and “nouveau,” French for “new”.
“I’m the kind of leader that gets in the dirt with my team members, and I try to solve problems with my team. I very much like that kind of comradery.”
Looking ahead, Howe sees opportunity for more growth. “The online advertising market is being materially disrupted because consumers are fed up with companies using their information.
“Upheaval is exactly when great companies emerge, and Inuvo has the solution to this problem.”