Published on: October 20, 2026

A campaign being live says very little about whether it is set up to work. Caroline Butts, Head of Ad Operations at banMe Media, has spent close to a decade in campaign management and trading. She now leads the team responsible for closing that gap, from final launch QA and multi-DSP builds to the ongoing calls on where budget should and should not go. 

In this exclusive conversation, she explains why a rolling launch can beat rushing everything live, how a five-tactic plan can become 20 builds in the DSP, and what ad ops will own as AI platforms and CTV add more places to reach audiences. 

Most public attention in advertising goes to brand and creative, but a lot of whether a campaign actually works gets decided in ad operations, where the job is invisible unless something breaks. What does it take to lead a team whose best work nobody sees? 

Open communication, collaboration, proactive thinking and understanding the “why” behind performance are all pillars of strong ad ops leadership. Creating an open environment where traders feel comfortable flagging potential issues early is essential. Because every campaign is different, collaboration brings in multiple sources of experience to troubleshoot roadblocks and get to the strongest performance. 

I urge my team to keep reporting top of mind, because weekly, monthly, quarterly and end-of-campaign insights are what’s used to tell the story of how a campaign performed. Using this mindset to inform optimizations helps prevent losing sight of the larger campaign objective, and encourages proactive adjustments, like continuously shifting budget toward the strategies and inventory driving KPIs most efficiently. If the team is thinking about the story the data will tell, they’re more likely to make thoughtful optimization decisions throughout the campaign. When more reactive optimizations are needed, encouraging the team to dig into the details and understand why something is happening leads to faster, more informed decisions. 

Tracking the impact of these changes then helps shape the overall optimization story for the client. This outlook ultimately creates a stronger business partnership, where our team works as an extension of the client’s team rather than simply executing a plan.

The final quarter of the year is when media volumes spike hardest, and clients want campaigns live faster than ever. What’s the one check you refuse to skip, even when a launch is running behind? 

When timelines are compressed or a launch is running behind, there’s a natural urge to treat setting the campaign live as the priority, especially when that pressure is coming from the client or brand. However, correctness over speed should never be compromised. 

A final launch QA is essential to ensuring each campaign is set up for success from impression number one. That means validating the essentials: flights, budget, geography, creative, audience targeting, inventory, third-party tracking and optimization settings. Spending that additional hour, or even five minutes, to QA before setting a campaign element live can prevent days of troubleshooting and, more importantly, wasted client dollars optimizing toward the wrong audience or serving the incorrect message. 

In Q4, when flights have less wiggle room, a rolling launch that prioritizes larger channels or portions of the targeting strategy can be more beneficial to overall performance than rushing everything live at once. In tight turnarounds, this lets the campaign begin delivering and learning while the remaining elements are properly validated. 

“A campaign being live is not the same as a campaign being accurate.”

I’d always rather sacrifice a little speed upfront than spend the rest of the flight correcting a preventable mistake. 

Verification and brand safety tools have multiplied over the last few years, promising to catch problems before they cost a client money. Do those tools actually catch what matters, or do they mostly catch what’s easy to measure? 

When working to ensure ads are serving in brand-safe, valid, viewable and in-geo environments, third-party verification can provide greater visibility, especially for larger brands or campaigns that require meeting specific thresholds. While pre-bid filters are effective, receiving reporting across these fields allows for additional analysis and optimization opportunities. 

These verification reports track measurable risks, but it’s up to the ad operations team to effectively interpret what’s being flagged and what the overall campaign data tells us.

“Just because an ad was viewable does not mean it captured the attention of the intended audience or a site is brand-safe doesn’t mean it’s necessarily suitable for the brand’s message.”

And, as with any third-party vendor, discrepancies can occur and impact measurements like impressions in-geo. While these tools can be a step in the campaign optimization process, they’re not a replacement for operational judgment and understanding the broader campaign objective. 

A campaign can look efficient on paper while still wasting impressions, money or audience attention. What’s an operational decision that can make a bigger difference to campaign performance than clients or marketers usually realize? 

A campaign’s media strategy is almost always built around the target audience. However, once a campaign has launched, one of the biggest optimization decisions is where not to spend. 

“Campaign efficiency isn’t just about reaching more targeted impressions, it’s also about continuously removing inventory that isn’t contributing to the performance goals.” 

Typically, blocking publishers with low engagement or shifting budget away from audience segments that aren’t resonating can have a larger impact on overall KPIs than something like creative message variations. A trader will also see the algorithm naturally drive more impressions to mobile, because of audience availability and stronger CTR, while desktop accounts for a higher volume of conversion actions. The decision isn’t necessarily to override the algorithm, but to recognize that the highest-volume channel isn’t always the most valuable, and adjust the allocated budget based on the overall campaign objective. 

While maintaining a targeted approach, ongoing optimization and human judgment is where ad operations can have a significant impact on campaign efficiency and performance. 

The US market gives advertisers enormous choice in platforms, formats and inventory, which also creates more room for waste. From an operations perspective, where does that complexity create the biggest gap between how a campaign is planned and how it actually gets executed?

Media plans are usually built around one strategy, while the combination of channels, targeting tactics, audience groups, locations, and creative messages – to name a few – can require a more fragmented execution. 

A variation of channels and inventory can split a campaign build across multiple DSPs. That division can be worthwhile as accessing platforms specialized for channels like audio and DOOH can provide more granular targeting and reporting capabilities and serving on premium inventory such as Disney+ through Disney Campaign Manager rather than a PMP can allow for more competitive pricing. The more fragmented a campaign becomes, the more important operational consistency is to ensure every platform setup remains aligned to the overall targeting and strategy goals. 

Another element to monitor is budget segmentation. Campaigns often incorporate multiple targeting tactics to reach an audience effectively, but adding elements like creative A/B tests or different language targeting can quickly take a campaign from five proposed tactics to 20 tactics built in DSP to ensure the appropriate weighting and language targeting is applied. For smaller budgets, it is important to ensure these splits do not spread the budget too thin, limiting the data available for efficient learning and algorithmic optimization. 

The operational challenge is balancing this granular reality without losing sight of the original strategy. 

Consumers never see the operational decisions behind an ad, but they still feel the difference between one that fits and one that doesn’t. What’s something happening on the ad-ops side right now that you think will change how audiences experience advertising over the next few years? 

As inventory continues to expand, from new AI and LLM platforms to the growing number of CTV streaming services, so does the ability to reach audiences with more relevant messaging across a wider range of environments. Ad operations will play an increasing role in connecting cross-device experiences, making sure the right message reaches the right audience, in the right environment, without the advertising feeling repetitive or disconnected. 

Dynamic creative, while it needs input from the creative team, takes basic campaign messaging a step further by adapting the ad based on factors like audience or location. Instead of delivering the same creative, ad ops can help ensure the message is tailored to the person and the environment they’re in.

This creates more opportunity to think about the audience’s experience holistically. Someone may see an ad on Twitch, encounter a related message while listening to a podcast, and then receive a banner creative on their mobile device. 

“The goal shouldn’t be chasing more impressions. It’s making those touchpoints work together.” 

As the number of advertising environments continues to grow, that coordination will become increasingly important to making advertising feel more relevant and less repetitive.