Recently I was speaking with a friend who’s heading up a new digital publishing organization that’s taking their sales in-house, and they’re shopping for all the usual trappings of ad technology, as well as standing up an Ad Ops team from scratch.

At first I thought, “good luck with that!”, but then after some more serious thought, it occurred to me what a unique opportunity he had to build a world class organization.  After all, so many organizations started their Ops teams so long ago, and have entrenched platforms, and business lines to support that they probably wouldn’t work with today if they didn’t have to.

Starting a new team in this day in age still has all the downsides of inexperience, but all the benefits of learning from everyone else’s mistakes.  After all, how many of us in the Ops community haven’t thought at one time or another, “if I could just blow it all away and start from scratch…”, oh how we’d do things differently.

It got me thinking – what would the best Ad Ops team in the world look like? (more…)