Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Understanding Ad Ops
Ad Ops is a somewhat generic term describing any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns. Traditionally, this process was very simple. But many consumers now interact with brands in a multi-screen digital world with attention split between desktops, smartphones, and tablets.
Each of these devices provides a different user experience, displaying advertisements through banners, video, text, search, and mobile to name a few. Marketing teams must be able to interact with various platforms including ad networks, ad servers, ad exchanges, supply-side platforms (SSPs), and data management platforms (DMPs). Ultimately, each campaign must respect the device it is being displayed on while maximizing ad revenue for the company.
As demands increase, Ads Ops teams are utilizing new trends such as programmatic advertising, where automated software purchases digital ad space on their behalf. However, these teams must manage a range of unautomated tasks while understanding both sides of the advertising ecosystem. In other words, they must be sensitive to the needs of the sell-side (publishers) and buy-side (advertisers).
Some major responsibilities of Ad Ops teams
Individuals within an Ad Ops team enjoy a dynamic and varied role, with no two days being the same.
Nevertheless, there are some core responsibilities unique to most campaigns:
Scheduling. In other words, when should the ad be scheduled for maximum ROI? Scheduling may revolve around a certain time of day, or it may focus on holidays, weekends, or special events.
Trafficking. This requires a specialist role to oversee the monitoring and delivery of ads across various exchanges or servers. Tasks may include the tracking of third-party vendor ad tags or the implementation of ad campaigns using dedicated services such as Google Ad Manager.
Optimization. Every ad must be optimized for the number of clicks it receives. Optimization can be achieved through correct ad placement, word choice, and proper SEO. In some instances, ads must reflect an awareness of changing trends or standards.
Yield management. Each task that an Ad Ops team performs should have some relation to driving revenue. Yield managers search for opportunities to increase revenue generation through advertising. This may involve the restructuring of content based on user behavior analytics or the reallocation of inventory pricing to increase profits.
Ad Ops best practices
All Ad Ops teams should incorporate these best practices as the basis of a sound campaign:
Define objectives – what is the goal of the campaign? It is not enough to broadly state a goal of increasing profits or brand recognition. Use the SMART goals system to help define thoughtful, effective objectives.
Define the correct medium – how should the message of the campaign be delivered? Mediums such as email, social media, video, and content will be most suited to a specific target audience or device.
Craft the message – make sure that the ad campaign centers on one key idea or message. Importantly, it must be relatable to the target audience and company objectives.
Evaluate and adjust as necessary – continually evaluate campaigns for effectiveness and reconfigure if important targets or metrics are not being met.
Ad ops vs. Programmatic
Ad ops comprise the advertising services that manage digital ad sales online. Advertisers who want to purchase ad space are connected with websites that have ad space to sell with tailored ad ops technology.
More generally, ad ops refers to any process or system that supports the delivery (or management) of advertisements via digital mediums. These mediums may include mobile, search, video, banner, rich media, and more.
Ad operations is managed by a team responsible for ad creation, management, and testing with a goal to generate revenue.
They interact with various ad networks, exchanges, or servers and also with supply and demand side platforms.
Major responsibilities of ad ops teams
Scheduling – this deals with decisions pertaining to when ads should run. Some are run at certain times of day, while others are optimized for holidays, weekends, or special events.
Trafficking – ad traffickers are those that manage an ad campaign with the assistance of an ad server such as Google Ad Manager. They manage and monitor delivery across ad exchanges and track third-party tags from multiple vendors.
Optimization – any initiative to optimize CTC (cost to click) factors such as ad location, SEO, trends, or standards.
Demand management – to cater to the enormous demand that sales teams of some publishers generate, ad ops teams are also responsible for many client-facing duties such as handling contractual matters, negotiating on behalf of the client, and following up on agreements to ensure compliance.
Yield management – where the team seeks to streamline operations to reduce costs and maximize profits. For example, an ad ops team may reconfigure the layout of a website based on user behavior.
What is programmatic advertising?
Programmatic advertising involves the use of algorithmic software to purchase digital advertising, drive impressions at scale, and deliver a better ROI for marketers.
In contrast to traditional advertising methods which require proposals, quotes, tenders, or negotiation with the seller, programmatic advertising’s use of software makes it an automated buying and selling solution.
This frees up time that can be better spent on ad optimization to improve the company’s likelihood of success.
Companies are increasingly turning to programmatic advertising to streamline their approach as the world emerges from COVID-19 and AI tech becomes more advanced.
How does programmatic advertising work?
Programmatic advertising utilizes data insights to serve ads to targeted users at the right time and the right place.
In short, this ecosystem is supported by three main components:
Demand-side platform (DSP) – a place where advertisers can purchase ad inventory.
Supply-side platform (SSP) – comprised of software that enables publishers to sell ad impressions to buyers in real-time. These impressions may be for display, mobile, or video ads.
Ad exchanger – where the SSP feeds inventory into the ad exchange itself and connects to the DSP. At this intersection, advertisers, networks, publishers, and agencies can buy and sell ad space with prices normally set in a real-time auction. Remember, this process is automatic.
What is the difference between ad ops and programmatic advertising?
In very general terms, programmatic advertising is a type of ad ops that is best suited to less technical users who desire a more hands-off solution.
The obvious difference in automation level, some argue, also means that traditional ad ops requires individuals to have a more robust and specialized skill set than those employed in programmatic.
In many companies, programmatic advertising is simply one of many tools in their ad ops arsenal. Ad ops also tends to be more functional and versatile because it has been around longer and has had more time to develop.
Key differences between ad ops and programmatic
Ad ops comprise the advertising services that manage digital ad sales online and refers to any process or system in support of the delivery or management of advertisements via digital mediums.
Programmatic advertising involves the use of algorithmic software to purchase digital advertising, drive impressions at scale, and deliver a better ROI for marketers.
In general, programmatic advertising is a more automated type of ad ops that requires less specialized knowledge and client interaction.
Key takeaways
Ad Ops refers to a suite of systems and processes that support digital advertisement delivery across multiple devices.
Ad Ops is a broad and dynamic industry requiring responsive and multi-skilled teams. These teams must be well versed in the scheduling, optimization, and trafficking of ads.
Some aspects of Ad Ops have been automated to reflect the increasing complexity of online advertising. Nevertheless, Ad Ops requires that practitioners be competent using a range of ad networks, servers, exchanges, and platforms.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.
Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.
Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.
Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.
As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.
Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.
The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.
Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.
According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.
The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.
The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.
Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.
Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.
One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.
Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.
Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.
A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.
Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.
interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond.
Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.
Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.
A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.
The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.
Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.
Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.
Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.
Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.
Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.
The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.
Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.
Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.
Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.
Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.
Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.
Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data.
Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.
Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.
A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.
We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.
Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.
Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.
Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.
Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.
Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.
Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.
Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.
Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.
360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
