Built by an operator, for operators.

John M. Williams played wide receiver for Washington State University from 2003 to 2005. Football never fully left: years later, with his marketing career underway, he coached high-school football in the East Valley at Casteel High School and Higley High School. He went on to earn an MBA from the Colangelo College of Business at Grand Canyon University.

His paid media career has run for more than 15 years, on both the agency and the brand side. In 2017 he was a Digital Strategist at CDK Global, working on automotive digital programs. From 2019 he was in senior account management at Hanapin Marketing, the agency behind PPC Hero and Hero Conf, later part of Brainlabs. There he wrote for PPC Hero and spoke at PPC Hero Summit 2020. He has also been Media Director at IMM (Ideas Made Measurable), run ecommerce paid media at OuterBox, worked on media for Farmers Insurance and paid media programs for Gen Digital / NortonLifeLock, led customer acquisition as Director of Customer Acquisition at Silver Mirror, and worked as a Senior Paid Media Specialist at Seer Interactive.

Across those roles he has been directly responsible for more than $350 million in ad spend on Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, LinkedIn and YouTube, for brands including General Motors, Farmers Insurance, Prudential, Eventbrite, Columbia, Harvard, AutoNation and NortonLifeLock.

Where the idea came from

Inside agencies and brands, John kept seeing the same pattern: account managers spending most of their time wrangling data and too little on strategy. So he built Buddy, an AI agent with live Google Ads API access that does the wrangling, asks clarifying questions before acting, and labels every change for rollback. He open-sourced it on GitHub, and in 2026 released it as Buddy by Ahmeego on the App Store and Google Play. At Hero Conf 2026 his talk was about exactly that: the paid media tools you need don't exist, so we're building them live.

It All Started With An Idea is the agency that grew out of that work, headquartered in Queen Creek, Arizona. It runs paid media, nonprofit ad grants, measurement, SEO and web, and commerce systems for businesses across the US, with Buddy on every account. AHMEEGO is the platform side: free tools and education, built by the same founder.

Outside the accounts

John writes for Search Engine Land and PPC Hero, publishes the Creating A Digital Disneyland newsletter, and hosts the Paid Search Playground podcast. He is also an artist: Adweek profiled his work in its Profiles in Black Creativity series, in a feature about the art he makes out of love for his son.