Ad Ops, more than meets the eye…

“Ad Ops” is more than you assume it to be.
The longer the career, the more likely it is to be vast and diversified set of skills and experiences.

I have heard too many times:
“not technical enough” because Ad Ops.
“not customer-facing enough” because Ad Ops
“doesn’t know strategy” because Ad Ops
“doesn’t know yield and inventory management” because Ad Ops…

But the reality is that these judgments are based on a very vague title that is assumed to be very specific and mostly inaccurate, and like a lot of our industry, these assumptions are a part of the reason we find the turmoil and inconsistencies that we do.

Ad Ops folks are going to be:

– some of the most technical – qa creative, troubleshooting campaigns, reading and writing code (html, html5, javascript, css, sql etc), testing ad calls, analyzing response headers and the like, and a technical understanding of how programmatic functions at a base level. (1 personal example – I developed a way for a DSP to take an audio file and serve it, when the dsp was not able to accept audio files. This idea has since become a norm in the industry)

– Account/Client Managers – I have spent the majority of my career in front of clients, even when it is not an official part of my job description. Whether it was extending contracts, upselling products, building and nurturing relationships, helping with technical issue, expanding the partnerships… We, Ad Ops, do that too. (1 personal example – have nutured relationships that resulted in a 600% increase in spending, also have provided solutions to clients that resulted in better and more efficient campaign performance)

– Strategy, Yield, Inventory – Publishers don’t always have individual teams for these…and a lot of the times because Ad Ops was at the center of it all, we were responsible for it. Since we deal with avails, we had to have our fingers on the pulse of where our inventory was. Because we are the cross section between sales, programmatic, and revenue, we have to focus on forecasting revenue, hitting revenue goals, and how to improve yield. Because we are juggling all of this, it is natural for us to help or lead ad strategy and programmatic strategy, because in a lot of cases we are doing the analytics behind it too. (1 Personal example – analyzed sell-through rates and profit margins of ad units and realigned the strategy accordingly, which resulted in an 35% increase in direct sold revenue, on first pass.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Ad Ops actually is. Look past the title and see the experience, because you could miss out. As always, please feel free to reach out if you would like help with any of this.