Advertising Data Analytics Company
The Situation
A national advertising data analytics company maintained a large database of local market advertising spending data used by media companies and agencies across the US. Their clients accessed this data through a traditional web dashboard, but the company wanted to make it available where users already work — AI assistants, CRMs, internal tools, and other integrated platforms.
The company's data lived in a private database behind a VPC with a complex permissions model — users belonged to companies with product subscriptions that granted access to specific markets and tools. There was no API layer suitable for external consumption, and exposing the data required production-grade authentication that connected clients could negotiate automatically.
What I Did
- Designed and built a remote MCP server that exposes advertising data to connected clients over authenticated HTTPS using the Model Context Protocol
- Implemented a full OAuth 2.1 authorization server with dynamic client registration, PKCE, JWT-based access tokens, and magic link authentication — integrated against the existing user database
- Built 6 MCP tools (market lookup, spending breakdowns, trend analysis, category rankings, media mix, market comparison) with per-request permission enforcement
- Deployed on AWS with Lambda, API Gateway, VPC networking, and infrastructure-as-code — including cross-database architecture spanning existing production data and new MCP-specific tables
Outcome
Authorized users can now access advertising spending data through any MCP-compatible client — whether that's an AI assistant like Claude, an IDE like Cursor, or integrated directly into their existing business tools. The system enforces the same permission model as the existing platform — users only see data their subscription allows. The server handles the full OAuth handshake automatically, so connecting is as simple as entering a URL.