Ad ops leadership roles: findings across 50+ job postings 🧐
We analyzed 50+ VP, director, and manager job postings in an effort to get a better understanding of what top media/ad tech employers are looking for in an ad ops leader
You can learn a lot from job postings. Companies are typically transparent in what they’re looking for and the tools they use internally. If you’re a SaaS company(eg. Ad Reform) you should be searching for your ideal customer profile to see who’s hiring (marketing), what challenges they need a person to solve (product), and what products they already use internally (sales/customer success).
If your an ad ops professional looking to advance your career, these job postings can give you a breadth of data and knowledge on what you should be doing/learning to put yourself in a position to take advantage of those opportunities in the future. This can take a while to dig through, so we spent some time analyzing 50+ VP, director, and manager job postings to give you the Sparknotes version 👍
Cross-functional
One common theme that you typically see with leadership roles in any business unit is the ability to work closely with other business units. This is amplified with ad operations. With media and ad tech companies being so reliant on digital ads (increasingly programmatic) for revenue, ad operations teams have to work with almost every business unit ⬇️
The majority of the job postings discussed the importance of building links between sales (pre-sales and contract), account management (dealing with customers and partners needs), finance (billing/IO), engineering (ad issues/ user experience/javascript/ads.txt), support (troublshooting technical ad issues or trafficing issues). Building strong relationships and knowledge of these business units is core to leading an ad operations team.
Salaries 🤑
According to Glassdoor data, the average salary of a director of ad operations is $119,265. The majority of salaries, however, are slightly below $100k.
Years of experience
Job postings typically contain some sort of experience level that’s desired. This should never deter you from applying but if you have 1 year of experience you probably shouldn’t waste time on a role thats looking for 15+ years (Pro tip 👍). In our research we found a low of 3 years experience and a high of 15+ years.
Top terms used
Job postings are pretty short, so we copy/pasted all the postings into a tool to get a feel for the most common terms used (outside of the, a, ad, etc.). Here’s what we saw:
Honorable mention: excel mastery and DFP🧙
It’s a bit sad that this was so common amongst the job posts, but spreadsheets are still the most used tech in ad ops. You’d better have a strong grasp on excel if you want a leadership role (table stakes).
DFP might as well be excel, but heavy experience with Doubleclick came up quite a bit. If not an expert already, Google offers a bunch training certs on their products. It may also be wise to find an ad ops mentor who’s leading a larger team (or team at a much larger company), and lean on them for continued growth.
Due to programmatic, ad operations is a budding field, but be prepared to wear a lot of hats if you want to lead a team/org. What else? Are there any other qualities you would add?
