Insights: Let me tell you a secret. Your Yield/AdOps team is probably poorly structured

I love being stuck in economy class for 6 hours. I finally have time to make my content ideas come true.

That’s probably a sentence said by no one in traceable history. However, it is somehow a reality I found myself in. Tell me – what's a better place to transfer knowledge to news or non-news publisher CEOs, like in the plane?

So in today's weekly dose of AdTech cleverness, let’s dig deeper into a topic of structuring performance expertise of your own people. I’ll stick a needle into a wasp's nest and challenge your thinking. Maybe even trust in your organization. Scary? Let’s not give up too soon.

General structure of AdOps teams based on size of the organization

In general, this article focuses on online businesses with 7 figures + programmatic revenue, but let’s cover every major status-quo in one image at the beginning.      

This approach is not necessarily wrong. But at the end of the article, I will draw you a line on how I think an efficient structure should operate for all tiers of publishers. I hope every one of you guys will find some insights here.

You, as a publisher or yield expert, of course, have some levels of trust in how:

• your monetization setup was handled historically
• how adoption change is happening in real time

You probably wouldn’t have any Ad Tech team without trust in it. 

After all, simple principles of programmatic monetization, ad server, pricing strategies and SSPs are easily understandable, right? It’s not rocket science. Or is it? 

AdTech is not rocket science. Unless… 

A long time ago, I saved this chart in my notes without noting the author. I’m glad I did so, because now it’s the time to borrow it from a nameless author (if it’s you, let me know, I owe you coffee). It's perfect and applies to any area of deep expertise. 

Let’s start with taking a quick look at it. Where do you think you are?

You understand online publishing dynamics and the basics of Ad Monetization. Direct sales is something that was around for tens of years. Now some kind of auction is going into the matrix. There is an ad server which takes a winning bid and shows it to the users, there are price floors and protection your team can play with. Easy, confident, you are probably in the “I know everything phase” (which in a game language would be beginner difficultly).

Underneath the Surface

Only after, when you or your AdOps specialists start to dig deeper, you realize there is more underneath the surface which you, as a C level manager, cannot cover. You have to trust in their expertise because topics like following is starting to ruin your matrix of knowledge:

• Should I give up on the consent management platform and implement the first thing which lands in my inbox?
• Would I fu*k up if competitors are implementing DMP/CDP and I don’t have expertise or resources for it?
• How do I optimize exit intent? 
• What the heck is the difference between PPS and PPIDs and do I even need them?