Ad Operations is one of the most important, albeit unsung, roles in digital media, and it’s also one that is growing in complexity. Publishers and ad networks, facing stiff competition, are under extreme pressure to deliver ROI to their advertisers, which means that the team of people who are responsible for campaign success needs an in-depth understanding of what makes campaigns work. The challenge is that many of these teams, and the knowledge that they harness, exist under the radar.
That’s why the IAB created its Digital Ad Operations Certification program in 2013 and corresponding training curriculum – to help facilitate organization-wide information sharing and to position ad ops team members in key, strategic roles.
“Traditionally speaking, ad ops professionals are thought of as backroom people who are not talking to clients and who may not be the most outspoken people at their companies,” says Meredith Ian, Director of Learning and Development at IAB. “But these are the same people who see what makes a campaign successful and what goes into making a product successful. That’s why more and more digital media leaders are finding ways to tap into and leverage that insight.”
Here’s how Ian and her team are translating this industry-wide need and market opportunity into a cohesive training and certification program.
Understanding the ad ops persona
The meaning of the term ‘ad ops’ can vary between companies.
“The first perspective, and what most people think of as ad ops, is on the ad network or publisher side,” explains Ian. “It’s the team responsible for getting campaigns live, monitoring them, and optimizing them. But there are other types of Ad Ops roles. Some are known as ‘traffickers’ who are launching campaigns and monitoring performance behind the scenes. Others are on the buyer side, at agencies, and are responsible for making sure that the creative is working, getting information stored in ad servers, and doing analytics across all campaigns. There are also third-party ad servers and creative services providers. Each persona has varying levels from junior to senior, and each is looking at the industry from a different perspective.”
In an ideal world, ad ops professionals will have experience with all of these functions and roles, but that is the exception to the rule. Plus every organization is different, which means that at any given time, ad ops team members have a partial view, at best, of the industry. That’s why Ian and her team have made ‘the big picture’ a core focus of the IAB’s training program.
“We include topics that cover multiple perspectives, including the daily mechanics of getting campaigns live as well as the bigger picture of bringing on new products, conducting cost-benefit analyses, and testing new vendors,” says Ian. “The training is designed to enhance their knowledge in core areas and fill in gaps that aren’t a part of their everyday roles.”
Addressing the need
Ian worked with two subject matter experts to design the IAB Digital Ad Operations Certification Exam Prep Training: Katie Stroud, an ad technology learning and development specialist, and Doug Wintz, founder of DMW MediaWorks, a digital ad ops consulting firm that works with digital publishers to revamp and upgrade their ad ops procedures. This curriculum-development team also assembled an advisory group of ad ops professionals to help review and refine the IAB’s curriculum.
“We worked with people between two and ten years of experience and brought them into a room together,” explains Ian. “These were all individuals who previously took and passed the IAB Ad Ops Certification exam. We reviewed our content with them, and made sure that our content aligned with their experiences at work and on the exam.”
Following a process of feedback and iteration, Ian and her team launched the IAB’s Digital Ad Operations Certification Exam Prep training class in June 2015 and are gearing up to run a second round in September. The IAB will be hosting two public courses: a full-day in-person class in New York City on September 24th as well as a four-part live e-course for learners in all regions.
“We want to help Ad Ops professionals and media professionals develop a big-picture understanding of the industry and help them prepare for the Certification exam,” says Ian.
The bottom line
The ultimate goal, for the IAB, was to design a program that helps Ad Ops professionals from all walks of digital media push everyone’s insights further.
“There are some very technically savvy sellers and product people out there,” says Ian. “But, I think people can go a little bit further.”
As Ian points out, this level of training comes with bandwidth challenges: Ad Ops professionals are often faced with a heavy workload and are needed to solve problems that arise unexpectedly, and so they can tend to have little time for new training opportunities. Ian and her team have addressed this challenge by condensing the learning process into neatly packaged forms to fit different learners, near and far.
“If busy people are going to take time out of their day for training, they’re going to want the training to be practical and to give them information they can really use, right then and there,” she says.
Learn more at iab.com/topics/certification/
