Bye for now, advertising!
As noted in the previous post, I want to practice more self-reflection by increasing my writing habits this year. So, to live up to this resolution, I’m writing this retrospective as a completion of this current chapter in my career.
In the past six years, I’ve worked in five marketing/advertising jobs. I graduated from college in December 2015 and flew to the West Coast on New Year’s Day of 2016. This is a marketing associate job at an early-stage startup where I supported sales activities by planning trade shows. I moved back to New York City a year later, landing an entry-level job at a large media conglomerate. In that role, I gained experience running clients’ display/video/audio campaigns programmatically, and this was the start of my many years working in programmatic advertising. Next, a wave of companies started to move media activities from agencies to in-house, so I joined the movement by switching to the digital marketing team of a global brand, helping them establish the capacity for the display media channel. My programmatic journey continued and I came to the vendor side by joining an ad-tech company at the beginning of 2020. In this company, I’ve worked on two different teams. My first job was assisting advertisers in running campaigns using a media-trading software. Then, in the summer of 2021, I transferred to a different job family and became a program manager, helping product owners launch products in the organization.
I’ve taken note of two significant learnings from these experiences.
- Achieve big results with small optimizations
- Become an expert generalist
1. Achieve big results with small optimizations
Starting my job as a programmatic campaign manager in 2017, my core responsibility was to ensure the advertising budget was spent according to a media plan. A booked campaign flight typically spans from weeks to months. I would monitor the spending, and find the right timing to adjust several campaign settings to improve campaign performance. We call this type of adjustment campaign optimization, and adjustable campaign settings are called optimization levers.
The most common mistake in campaign optimization is to blindly apply the most impactful optimization lever, i.e., audience targeting or bid setting, for an overnight result because pulling these levers could also hurt campaign delivery. Instead, it would be best to have detailed data analyses to guide you. You can make a data-informed optimization plan and start with small levers. Small levers help validate the plan in a controlled manner and in turn reduce the campaign delivery risk. Running a series of small-lever tests is usually how campaign managers like me improve campaign performance in the long run.
I’ve optimized campaign performances for years, and the small-lever test has proven effective and sustainable. This method also changed me as a person, so I applied the same approach to managing my career: Instead of having a graduate degree (an impactful optimization lever) to tell me what I should work on in life, I’ll have actual experiences to guide me to go deeper and better chart my path.
2. Become an expert generalist
When I started working as a programmatic campaign manager, I was responsible for executing media plans in various media-trading softwares. Every software is different and iterates quickly, so my work was hyper-focused on knowing all their nuances.
Then I moved to the in-house digital marketing team, and the problems that I was tasked with to solve became much more complex. I needed to build the campaign from end to end, which means I needed to 1) understand the business to build media plans and 2) own the entire display media channel using ad server, website analytics tools, and data reporting tools. Knowing the media-trading software isn’t enough to do the job. I needed to broaden my knowledge base to learn the other facets, such as creating ad banners, trafficking ad creatives, setting up audience lists, and even creating data dashboards for weekly business reviews. I had to work backwards to figure out the nuts and bolts in making a campaign happen.
At the ad-tech company, my consultancy job brought complexity to a whole new level. Instead of running campaigns myself, my job was 1) training a broad set of advertisers to run campaigns using our software regardless of their background and 2) partnering with product teams to develop new features and troubleshoot product issues. Just knowing media execution is no longer enough. I also tried to learn the tech that enabled the software.
After a year and a half, I decided to move away from client-facing work. I love talking to customers, seeing what their pain points are, and understanding how I can help them. But I don’t see myself in a sales career. To make the transition, I combed through my time at this company and found that my “extracurricular” projects on product SME-ship stood out. These projects were the results of my extensive client work on helping build custom solutions and documentations. So I focused on the project work to deliver a new career prospect as a program manager. Since I made the switch last summer, my customers have become internal product managers. This is a rewarding job where I can assist hundreds of new features shipped out to deliver more functionalities for advertisers.
Over the years, I’ve been acquiring new skills to handle more challenges. I first started specializing in campaign activation and then expanded horizontally to manage campaigns from one end to the other. I didn’t stay in the media world; rather, I moved to the vendor side to learn the tech. Having both media and tech experience helped me become an expert generalist. I don’t claim to know everything in media or tech, but my interest helped me to dive deeper by working on a series of projects. As a result, I became a program manager leveraging these project experiences.
Programmatic campaign management was media agencies’ hottest role for the last decade. The people in this sector’s most popular trajectory is hopping across agencies to fast-track managerial roles. But that’s not my wish. Whenever I look for new opportunities, I aspire to tackle more interesting problems and pick up new skills along the way.
I’m leaving advertising this week and heading to a data science team to continue to be a program manager. My new team builds machine learning and recommendation systems to help customers discover their next buy on eCommerce marketplaces and I cannot be more excited to explore the world of Big Data. Of course, the new job also leads me to an unfamiliar new business, but I will pack these learnings with me as I go.
Goodbye for now, advertising! I say goodbye for now to you because this is not goodbye forever. I hope our paths will cross again someday.
Special thanks to my families/editors: Jamie Yang and Lena Yang
