Operative Blog

Glad you’re here and welcome to the inaugural post of our soon-to-be infamous Ad Ops Blog!  Over the next weeks and months (and years and millenniums …), we’ll be discussing ‘everything Ad Ops’ – from processes and best practices that will make your Ad Operations hum, to the latest developments in technology that will make your ads sing … and to boot, we’ll have fascinating interviews with our brilliant operations staff whose experience represents more than 100 years in online advertising (I know, I know … that’s before the Internet, or even before TV, but it’s true and always sounds really cool in the “About Us” section on the company web site).  Seriously, over the last 10 years we’ve had the pleasure of working with literally 100’s of small and large publishers and agencies as an integral part of their Ad Ops team … so, we’ve learned a thing or two about what works and, even more intriguing, we’ve learned what’s a total waste of time and effort.

But wait there’s more! In addition to our own existential musings about the Wonderful World of Ad Ops, we hope to feature some of YOU, our devoted readers, and your unique perspectives and opinions.  After all, what good is having a blog anyway if it’s just going to be a one-way conversation?!  So, at worst we promise not to bore you to death, and at best we hope to provide you with timely and relevant information that you can start using right away.

To quote from a not-so-famous Latin verse:  A cane non magno saepe tenetur aper (“A boar is often held by a not-so-large dog.”)  OK, a slight digression … but the point is that every good solution needs a darned good problem to precede it.  And, what better place to root up a bunch of problems that need solving than in Ad Ops.  So to kick this off, we’ve blame-stormed and come up with some Topics, Considerations & Challenges faced by Ad Ops that we’d like to get your help in selecting for future blogs.  If there are subjects here (or not here) that you would like to see covered, please let us know … second drum roll, please:

• Late to the dance … a creative love story [Late creatives]
• And what math are you using? [Unraveling the mysteries of primary and third party ad server discrepancies]
• I want it THIS big! [Impact of nonstandard ad units]
• What’s in an ad tag? [Deciphering the anatomy of an ad tag]
• Why I don’t fix my own car [Should you consider partnering with an Ad Ops expert?]
• Recovering from Analysis Paralysis [How to build efficiencies in Ad Ops that work]
• Kaboom! Oh No!! NOT AGAIN!!!! [Top Five Ad Ops disasters to avoid]
• The kid’s menu isn’t always cheapest [Which ad server will provide you the best value?]
• The replacement TV doesn’t work either [Creative houses need more than just "send me a new creative that   works” to make it work]
• My life is a bit complicated [Why bad ad tagging is just money down the drain]
• Just short of the goal line [Tinkering with optimization]
• It sounded really cool when we pitched it [As creatives get more complicated, so does the development and testing]
• Alice doesn’t work here anymore [Ad Ops asked to do more with less during down economic times]
• A little lumpy around the middle [Managing to the ebbs and flows]
• Who’s the new kid? [Effectively on boarding new operations staff]
• Who took my abacus?! [Maintaining and gaining new technology skills]
• There is no good ‘make good’ [How quality translates to dollars]

In our next series of blogs, we’ll take a closer look at many of these topics and attempt to provide helpful discussion of solutions to these new and old challenges faced by Ad Ops.  We encourage you to share with us your thoughts as well … we’ll do our best to address them right here in future posts.  We encourage you bookmark this page, email it to a friend, colleague or associate (as well as add our RSS feed).

Thanks for stopping by and reading this far … we look forward to many interesting discussions to come.