First 90 days as Programmatic Ad Ops – Part I

This post was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse by Aditya Bhelande

This is a four part blog series for folks who are new to  the world of Programmatic Ad Ops and are wanting to quickly position themselves for success in this role…

If you are working in Digital / Online Media industry and your job description says something like this…

• Oversee day-to-day operations of programmatic sales business (delivery across network and individual brands)
• Support brand and corporate sales teams in setup and execution of programmatic campaigns
• Setup of private marketplace deals (deal IDs) via supply-side platforms
• Operations and delivery of automated guaranteed campaigns, including pre-, mid- and post-flight.
• Execute updates to price floors and targeting for RTB exchange marketplace
• Trafficking and monitoring of audience extension campaigns
• Coordinate with revenue and inventory management teams on reporting initiatives

and so on…

then you know that you are in the world of Programmatic (buying and selling)! Programmatic has been the hottest trend in Ad Tech for more than past couple of years. Hence, Ad Ops is also expected to keep up with the trend, understand it and make the most out of it.

As you begin getting hang of Programmatic Ad Ops, the first 90 days of your job are very critical to set yourself up for riding the Programmatic Ad Ops wave. Here are some of the things that you should prepare yourself for:

1. Get comfortable with DATA: As Programmatic Ad Ops, you are going spend lots and lots of time with data. As you start getting your feet wet in the ocean of data, you will quickly realize the data tide is rising very fast.

Before you have a chance to process the data and its impact, you are flooded with huge sets of data. This data keeps building up and before you even know it. Data which will come from all over the place and from all possible directions.

There will hourly data, daily data, weekly data, monthly data…data from ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, Click tracking systems for Mobile, Video, Banner and much much more. So it’s going to feel overwhelming.

2. Reports, reports, reports and then some more: Your inbox is going to be filled will request for reports…tonnes and tonnes of reports of many different types from various organizations (Sales, Marketing, CRO, CFO, Revenue Operations…)

Everyone will want these reports ASAP. You will be expected to be the Reports genie! Just be aware of a few things:

• No amount of reporting is sufficient. There’s always need for more! Teams would want to analyze the same from different perspectives. Over a period of time both the depth and breadth of data keeps growing.
• By the time reports are created and reviewed, the time already has passed and it’s time create next revision of it already. It may almost feel like playing catch up.
• More often than not there would errors and things would be out of place either from data, formatting, timing or other perspective. These issues increase exponentially as the numbers of systems that you have to work with goes up.

3. Data analysis…paralysis: When you get down to using the data that you have collected for different systems, you will realize that you have the access to a lot of data, but the challenge is figuring exactly what data is useful to for you to make the “data driven decisions”.

For example, how do you which data do you need to collect from various sources to set price floors? or how what data do you look at to identify PMP deals? or how do you decide which inventory goes to direct deals and at price? and many more of such questions. So you have access to this incredible pool of data, only wonder how do you get the golden nuggets from the noise!

So before you get in a situation like this… let’s rewind and start over again…figure out the battle plan before getting into one…

Read Part 2 here…