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You do something with advertising

„So, what do you do for a living? You work in advertising, right?”

Anyone who works at adverserve is regularly confronted with this question. It’s a question we all dread. One that should be so easy to answer, but often turns into long, awkward explanations. Answers that often leave the other person unable to follow and determined never to ask again. To prevent precisely these moments, we’re taking the time today to clarify things.

What do adops do?

Who are these almost mystical beings who sit in darkened rooms wearing black and yellow hoodies in front of their screens, on which green letters flicker against a black background? Basically, the question is easy to answer: they make sure that ads are displayed on the internet.

End of article. Thank you for reading!

Okay, not quite. Of course, there’s much more to it than that.

Campaign management Adops?

The most fundamental task that every AdOps employee must be able to perform, and which requires that everything you do leads to a goal, is campaign management. It should be noted that, for us, “campaign management” is just a nicer way of saying “booking campaigns into an ad server”. Campaign management in the true sense of the word encompasses a much broader range of activities, the scope of which could fill entire books. However, we want to limit ourselves to a blog entry here and stick to the more technical part – ad operations, i.e., the actual work on the ad server. So, first, here is an explanation of these terms, as we still hope that someone outside the industry will stumble across our blog and think what we do is really cool.

Ad server: A collection of computers and software on which advertisements are stored and which displays these advertisements on websites using special technologies and algorithms so that they are visible to website visitors.
Campaigns: Advertising campaigns, as we know them from television. Be it Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus or the German postal service’s summer mail campaign. Exactly the same advertising, only in our case for online.

In everyday life, it works like this: the operator of a website commissions us to display the advertising campaign of a specific advertiser on their website in return for a fee. The website operator sends the key data for the campaign (duration, where the campaign should be displayed, who should see it, how often a user should see this particular campaign, and much more). Adops’ task is to transfer these specifications to the ad server. There, the ad server’s algorithm intervenes and ensures that the advertisement is displayed correctly on the corresponding website.

Is this really necessary?

You may be wondering why you need someone to book campaigns when you could enter the details yourself. The reality is that almost anyone can operate an ad server, but the wealth of options offered by an ad server is vast and can be overwhelming for most people who don’t use it on a daily basis. Campaigns can become very complex, and this requires an experienced person to operate the ad server.

Here are a few examples:

There are 20 different advertising formats, each with different target groups.
You want to measure how many people actually ordered the product after seeing the ad.
Visitors to the website should be tagged so that they receive follow-up campaigns if they have shown interest in the campaign (e.g., by clicking on the ad). This is known as „retargeting”.
The ad should be tailored to the content of the page (e.g., ski ads should only be displayed in articles that deal with winter sports).
This list is only a small selection of examples. Completing it would probably take more time than binge-watching „Game of Thrones”.

In short: if you want to implement a good advertising campaign, you need someone who knows what is technically feasible – and then implements it efficiently.

Creativity meets technology

Creativity is what is most valuable in marketing. And creativity should not be limited by the fact that creative minds first have to spend a lot of time learning about ad servers in order to know what is even possible. Adops are the bridge between creative ideas and their implementation. Adops ensure that creative ideas can be realized without anyone having to take an IT course focused on marketing first.

Debugging

Problems? Not with us!

As in all areas of life, unexpected problems and errors can occur in advertising. Some are major, some are minor. Some incur costs, others are purely visual. But for advertisers and website operators, they all have one thing in common: they are annoying.

This is where we come in. Our Adops don’t let errors and problems get them down; they see them either as a challenge or as an opportunity to learn something. We are the nerds who put our thumbs and index fingers on our chins and quietly say, “Interesting, let’s see how we can solve this.” Because even advertising sometimes needs a psychologist who selflessly takes care of it when things don’t go as they should.

The online advertising industry uses so many different websites, apps, technologies, and new developments that it’s impossible for mistakes never to happen or problems never to arise.

The causes are as complex as life itself. Human error, outdated technologies, updates that lead to errors, interactions between technologies that get in each other’s way, etc.

The topics of „What can happen,” „Why,” and „How to solve it” could be the subject of another blog post. Here is just a small excerpt of issues that should not actually happen – but unfortunately do.

• No ads are displayed (worst case)
• Ads are cut off
• Ads are displayed in the wrong place
• Click measurement does not work
• Viewability measurement does not work
• The ad is seen by too few users
• Technologies measure different numbers for the same ad, etc.
• This requires experts who not only know how to operate the ad server, but also know it inside and out and understand exactly what an ad server does, how it does it, and how it interacts with websites and technologies.

Hello World

Scripts and templates

Anyone who spends a lot of time on the web and has their ad blocker turned off (and we hope that’s everyone—after all, without advertising, there wouldn’t be such a wide range of websites) will occasionally come across ads that are so different in their design that they immediately catch the eye. These can be, for example, different parallax effects, dynamic size adjustments, reactions to user input such as mouse scrolling, etc.

One might ask what magic is at work here. The answer is: the magic of web-based markup and programming languages. And don’t worry, this magic is only used for good purposes.

We write the scripts that adapt the advertising banners sent by creative agencies to make them look cool and interesting. The same advertising banner could be displayed in different advertising formats. For example, as a static advertising banner (half-page ad), as an advertising banner with dynamic resizing (site bar), or as an advertising banner with a parallax effect (understitial).

No matter what ideas website operators have for making advertising more attractive to their users, we are the right partner for them. We take care of the implementation and can also help with brainstorming. We are not reliant on existing templates, but can develop completely new advertising formats from scratch.

We take care of creating the appropriate script and storing it in the ad server as a template so that the advertising format can be used again and again without having to do new programming each time.

Implementation

In order for advertisements to be displayed, web developers must integrate the ad server code into their site. The ad server then runs its algorithms to select and display suitable advertisements. Each ad server provides detailed instructions, but let’s be honest: very few web developers have the time or patience to read a hundred-page document before implementing the ad server on their site.

The know-how is gathered in the minds of our adops. We provide web developers with an explanation of the installation, a simple example, and a check of the implementation. In addition, they can draw on the full experience of our adops, get tips on what to consider during installation, and how to optimize the ads, e.g., for better visibility.

So here too, if you want to add an ad server to your website, talk to your friendly Adops in the neighborhood.

And if you’ve read this far, you’ll get a bonus in your workbook. Thank you for reading. Feel free to leave a comment and give us a like on all social platforms.