Advertising operations only gets a mention internally when it goes wrong. Fact. Seen like the referee in a football match: we should never get a mention in the post match report and if we do its for the wrong reasons. BUT We are truly the beating heart of our industry. we are the backroom staff at your sports club pulling the strings behind the scenes. We are waiters in your favourite restaurant working between angry chefs and hungry people.
I’ve been in adops since 1999. I was told back then to try and move out of adops as soon as I could – our account manager at DoubleClick said that their adserver would be so simple soon anyone would be able to operate it! Incredible! No thanks I thought, there are some real skills to gain here if I stick in this lane. I still don’t know everything about adops, because that’s impossible. No one will ever know it all (except maybe Rob Webster).
I used to say adops are at the technical end of a nontechnical industry that realise on technology to function. Not so now! Whether you are agency adops managing brand safety tools or publisher adops dealing with yield management it all falls to adops. I’ve run trafficRich since 2005, back then we operated two bits of tech, an agency tool (DFA) and a publisher tool (DFP) not so anymore. Our hardest job now is finding commercially aware adops people who have a hunger to troubleshoot and then training them across an ever-extending list of clients and tech, and the combination of that leads to a multitude of Intricacies!
We learn, we tinker, we evolve….
It’s all different in this game, one minute you could be sending out tags to publishers for a High Street bank campaign in Hong Kong, the next minute you could be testing the floodlights are working on a West End Show.
What does the future hold for adops? More of the same hopefully.. new players, certainly in the adserving world if Google gets broken up. More tools, more opportunities to show we are really in charge of the success of campaigns. Regardless of tech one thing will no doubt be the same in another 25 years, creatives will be late and everything will always be urgent! Hats off to my fellow adops brothers and sisters, keep spinning those plates!
Remember the success of a digital campaign isn’t all down to how the creative looks – someone somewhere is reading reports and tinkering with ad placement, it’s not all AI yet, some of it will be in time but choose a tech, build your skills, stick with it, then try something new, as long as there are jobs in ads, there will be jobs in adops.
Richard Coles, Owner, trafficRich Ltd