What are the biggest challenges facing today's ad ops teams?

This week on Ad Ops All Stars, Media Tradecraft COO and Co-Founder Justin Hansen talks about viewability, content analytics, and identity - three of the biggest challenges that publishers are coping with - and explains his approach to solving them.

Justin's ad ops career has included stints working in-house in various ad ops roles, and now as a consultant helping some of the world's top publishers solve their monetization challenges.

What do the most successful publishers do when building out high performing ad ops teams?

This week on Ad Ops All Stars, Aditude Founder and CEO Jared Siegal talks about some of the most common mistakes publishers make when building out their ad ops business, and shares insights on what they can do to fix them.

Jared's ad ops career began at Answers.com, where he joined early in the company's growth and eventually was part of a team managing $150 million in programmatic revenue. From there, he went to Playbuzz, where he built out the video team, and led ad ops as well as publisher account management. 

That experience ultimately led him to create Aditude, where he helps publishers build out their ad ops functions and tech stacks. His work at Aditude gives Jared unique insights into the common challenges facing publishers, as well as the best practices that some of the most successful publishers are using to drive revenue.

What does it take to build a successful career as an ad ops leader?

This week on Ad Ops All Stars, Beeler.Tech founder and CEO Rob Beeler shares insights from his storied career in ad ops.

Known throughout the industry for his roles as Content Czar, and later Publisher and Chairperson at AdMonsters, Beeler's career has spanned in-house work as the ad ops leader for Advance Internet and GOLF.com, to providing consulting and building a thriving community of ad ops professionals at his company Beeler.Tech.

He describes working in ad ops as "50% of your day is putting out fires, 50% of your day is being strategic, and 50% of your day is managing people" — basically, a battle against complexity — and talks about why learning from the wider community of ad ops pros is the best way to stay at the top of your game. 

In addition, he discusses the importance of building your personal brand and why that can help you to advance in your career.

What is it like to grow an ad ops team from 8 to 200 people?

This week on Ad Ops All Stars, ENGINE Senior Vice President of Client Services Elizabeth Rodriguez shares her ad ops career story.

While she's currently working in client services, Elizabeth has run ad ops and worked more broadly in publisher operations. When she joined GroundTruth, the ad ops team included 8 people - four in the US and four in India. During her time there, Elizabeth grew the team to include 200 people around the world, with 45 of them working directly in ad ops roles. 

In this week's episode, she explains how she developed a formula for knowing when to grow the team, shares her advice for managing multinational (and multicultural) teams, and talks about how she's learned to prevent herself and her team from experiencing burnout.

What skills do ad ops leaders need to develop to advance in their careers?

This week on Ad Ops All Stars, U.S News & World Report Director of Ad Technology & Platforms Emily Morin talks about why, as an ad ops leader, it is so important to develop a well rounded understanding of the media business. 

Emily's approach to building her career is based on the theme of what she calls "holistic unification" - which refers to bringing together all of the different sides of the media business. From content, to business strategy, to marketing, web development and technology, she's made it her mission to learn more about what drives success in the media world.

Her well-rounded background has made Emily the natural choice to spearhead major organizational changes at publishers like Hearst and U.S. News & World Report, and in this episode, Emily shares advice on how to manage change as an ad ops leader, navigating relationships with other teams, and why she's a fan of agile management. 

What does it take to build a more diverse and inclusive ad ops team?

This week on Ad Ops All Stars, Eric Hill of Cars.com talks about his experience as a black man in the ad ops world, and what he's doing today to increase diversity in the profession. 

Eric's ad ops career has taken him from managing digital revenue and operations at Tribune, to overseeing advertising strategic sales for Microsoft, and now serving as ad operations and ad trafficking manager for Cars.com. In that time, he's managed teams as large as 50 people and as small as four, working on both the direct and programmatic sides of the business.

Today, Eric is focused on giving back to the ad ops community by mentoring younger professionals, and playing an active part in encouraging diversity and inclusiveness.

As an ad ops leader, what are the biggest challenges you wish you could solve?

For Keith Candiotti, viewability was at the top of the list. During his tenture as Director of Ad Operations at the New York Daily News, Keith learned a lot about building high performing ad ops teams and optimizing the team's tech stack and processes. 

Building on that experience, Keith went on to found Optimera, a company that began by focusing on helping publishers to optimize viewability and has since evolved to provide a wide range of services aimed at improving ad revenue and performance.

From how to work with a direct sales team, to differentiating your direct business from your programmatic offering, Keith shares his insights on what it takes to lead a best-in-class ad operations team.

Most ad ops teams got their starts as purely direct sales models and then evolved to a programmatic one, but Marc Boswell and the team at LoveToKnow Media have done just the opposite. 

Having begun with an all programmatic stack, they're now developing a direct sales business line—all while completely revamping the company's programmatic business (or as Marc puts it, "blowing up the entire programmatic engine and starting over").

In this episode, Marc talks about how he undertook a complete overhaul of his programmatic stack and ad unit structure without harming revenue, why he won't work with resellers, what he did to build a faster ad stack, how his team is involving with the addition of direct sales, and what it's like managing an all-remote team (a model that dates back to pre-COVID times).

James Strang is the Founder of AdOps Boost and a technical whiz when it comes to the business of ad operations.

He's also a champion of neurodiversity who's been chronicling what he's experienced professionally as a person on the Autism spectrum via a series of videos on LinkedIn (search #spectrumofjames on LinkedIn to find his video blogs).

In this week's episode of Ad Ops All Stars, James shares how his career led to the field of ad operations, what he's building at AdOps Boost, and why he believes neurodiversity is an asset that should be valued by employers.

Lila Hunt is Head of Digital Ad Strategy at System1 where she heads the team that owns the company's programmatic ad revenue strategy.

From teaching ballet and preschool, to getting a degree in multimedia, to working in ad ops, Lila explains how her career led to leadership roles in ad ops, and why she thinks ad ops should be renamed "monetization."

She also digs into what her experience has been like as a woman in the ad ops industry, including the challenges she's faced, and how she's preparing to go out on maternity leave in just a few months.