for the following nine yearsapart from a brief two-year stint as western unions marketing director for latin america and the caribbeangraham led starcoms global branding initiatives for such corporate giants as ubs merck and coca-cola he also worked two years with omnicom media group setting up an analytics team in chicago working with clients such as walgreens mcdonalds and cisco then in late 2016 amazon advertising came calling with an irresistible prospect: launch its analytics and media management team i saw a special advertising opportunity and knew that amazon had an unmatched amount of data even though i had just returned to the us and was still getting established in chicago it was just too exciting to pass up over the following five years graham built amazons agile consulting team of analysts we enhanced existing advertising products by using artificial intelligence and other advanced approaches such as natural language processingessentially building algorithms that look for anomalies in word patternsto weight text information in reviews and make them more helpful he explained the end result delighted amazon as well as advertisers and consumers this work also sharpened grahams skill set for the next challenge which oracle presented in january 2022 my time at amazon was incredibly rewarding and i absolutely loved it but my rate of learning had slowed down he said so when the oracle opportunity arose graham jumped headlong into his next adventure serving as insight team lead for moat oracles ad measurement and marketing analytics suite the aggie way these days graham is testing his mental flexibility anew seeking new ways to help advertisers work faster and smarter to achieve greater success and then scale this rapidly and he attributes his ability to pivot so effectively in no small part to his educational experiences at texas a&m i really enjoyed the diversity of courses he asserted the coupling of theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience was incredibly helpful in building my mental flexibility something that has served me well throughout my career and helped me apply the knowledge i was gaining in different and creative ways being a student at texas a&m is empowering graham insisted the school instills the idea that you can make a difference that theres a lot that you as an individual can do he also lauds the universitys commitment to quality the bar is set very high he added theres a shared determination to leave things better than you found them theres also a great tradition of teaching excellence at texas a&m graham noted adding that he was fortunate enough to learn from passionate world-class teachers like dr william bassichis and dr tom adair 57 in physics dr robert popp in geology dr terry spencer in geophysics dr william pride in marketing and dr philip yasskin and dr francis narcowich in mathematics among others and then theres the incomparable aggie ethos he noted aggies are genuinely really friendly and welcoming and their values are first-rate you hear repeatedly that aggies should never lie cheat or steal nor tolerate those who do and thats something you integrate into your approach to life for these reasons and many more graham would like aggies to have a greater presence in the tech industry theyre currently underrepresented and i know they could do a lot for the industry he asserted he has spoken with university representatives about the burgeoning aggies in tech program in mays business school and is enthusiastic about its prospects i would love to do anything i can to advance opportunities for texas a&m graduates in the field he observed considering his achievements thus far theres little doubt that grahams passion for improvement and aggie pride will support and inspire other aggies to lead the way in the digital world this story was originally published by the texas a&m foundation