Ad ops in 2025 has evolved far beyond trafficking banner ads. It's the strategic capability that lets brands deliver consistent, high-performing creative at scale while maintaining quality across every touchpoint.
What is ad ops? Ask any marketing team this question and you'll get wildly different answers. Some think it's about banner trafficking. Others picture people wrestling with spreadsheets at 2am. The reality is far more complex and crucial than most people realise.
So what does modern ad ops really look like? Teams are managing creative air traffic control across dozens of channels, formats, and markets. They're the bridge between creative teams who want artistic freedom and media teams who need systematic delivery. And they're struggling to keep up with demand.
Ad operations has evolved from simple campaign trafficking to streamlined workflows that power modern marketing. Today's ad ops professionals are part strategist, part technologist, and part creative producer.
Imagine you're planning a campaign launch across 12 channels. Each channel needs 5 different formats. That's 60 assets. Now add in A/B testing variations, localisation for 3 markets, and last-minute brand guideline changes. You're looking at 500+ individual files.
Matt Booth, Head of Customer Success at CreateTOTALLY, sees this chaos daily: "We see campaigns that maybe took 50 hours to deliver manually. Through our technology, we can bring that down to a couple of hours. So maybe two or three hours for a comparable result."
That's a 95% reduction in creative production time. But speed isn't the only problem teams are solving.
Teams are navigating complex email chains. "It's people not knowing what version they're reviewing, whether they're looking at version two or version 22," says Booth. Nobody knows which version is current, who's approved what, or where anything lives.
Creative teams train to solve complex problems, not resize banners endlessly. Yet that's exactly what they're doing. We're burning out talent on grunt work while strategic thinking gets pushed aside.
With teams spread across time zones, agencies, and freelancers, maintaining brand guidelines becomes nearly impossible. Every adaptation drifts a little further from the original vision.
The most successful teams aren't simply buying new tools. They're fundamentally rethinking how creative production works through creative automation.
Instead of creating everything from scratch, smart teams build modular templates that can generate hundreds of variations. As Booth explains: "We take our lead from the modular templates teams that are uploading. Whether that's through Adobe Creative Cloud or Figma. That is how we create consistency."
Designers create once, the automation system adapts endlessly.
Real example: Miele, the appliance manufacturer, now delivers 35 language adaptations for every e-commerce video they need. What used to take weeks of coordination now happens in minutes through creative automation.
Beyond the industry hype, here's what actually works. The AI that's working right now is practical: quality checking that legals are the right size, flagging missing elements, handling basic translations.
"We're discovering how we can do QC through computer vision," says Booth. "It's a very clear pass or fail." No creative judgment needed. Just systematic checking that everything's in place.
The most significant shift? Teams are finally connecting what they make to how it performs. "We can connect every individual adaptation made by the platform to the media performance data," Booth notes.
Real impact: The Wine Society reduced its cost per acquisition by 23% because they could test different headline variations at scale and see exactly which messages resonated with different audiences. They had the creative automation engine to make all those variations and the data to optimise them.
Here's what effective teams focus on:
Building workflows that scale without breaking. Understanding how creative automation integrates with existing tools, from project management platforms to Digital Asset Management systems.
Reading the data that connects creative decisions to business outcomes. Which variations perform best? How do different formats affect conversion rates? What creative elements drive the strongest results?
Becoming the bridge between creative teams and media teams. It's part psychology, part project management, part technology. Modern ad ops professionals speak both creative and data languages fluently.
Ensuring brand consistency across hundreds of touchpoints without micromanaging every decision. Setting up guardrails that protect the brand while enabling speed through creative automation.
Yes, speed matters in ad operations. But if you're only measuring how fast you can produce assets, you're missing the bigger picture.
Are your designers doing creative work or administrative tasks? Are your project managers fighting fires or building systems? "It enables creative teams to focus on being creative," says Booth. Happy teams produce better work.
How often do you get creative approval on the first review? This tells you more about ad ops workflow effectiveness than pure speed metrics.
How quickly can you test new messaging, formats, or approaches? The ability to iterate fast through creative automation often matters more than producing individual assets quickly.
Are your brand guidelines being followed across all touchpoints? Consistency drives recognition and trust in modern advertising operations.
This is about humans and automation working together. It's about humans doing what they're best at while automation handles the repetitive tasks.
"Humans are great at coming up with the original concept, the original ideas," says Booth. "You can then scale, deploy, and deliver far quicker by using automation."
Your creative team focuses on the big ideas. The creative automation system handles the endless variations.
We're moving towards ad operations workflows that automatically generate new creative variants based on performance data, test them, and scale the winners without human intervention for every decision.
The future ad ops professional needs to understand both creative production and media performance. These disciplines are merging to create exciting new opportunities.
Based on what's working for leading teams, here's your action hierarchy for implementing modern ad operations:
How many hours did your last campaign actually take?
How many people touched each asset?
Where do approvals get stuck in your ad ops process?
Pick your most repeated creative format and build a modular system with creative automation. Focus on one format, one channel first.
Link what you make to how it performs. Start with one channel where you have good data access for your advertising operations.
Ad ops is increasingly the strategic capability that lets brands deliver consistent, high-performing creative at scale. It's not about managing banner ads anymore. It's about building systems that free creative teams to do their best work while ensuring every piece of content serves your brand's strategic objectives.
The teams getting ad operations right aren't just more efficient—they're more effective. They're delivering better business results because they've solved the fundamental challenge of modern marketing: maintaining quality and consistency while scaling creative production to meet omnichannel demands through creative automation.
Your ad ops team deserves to build systems, not fight fires at 2am.
Ready to stop fighting your workflows and start building better ones? Book a discovery call and we'll show you exactly how creative automation can deliver for your ad operations.
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Discover what CreateTOTALLY can do for your advertising operations
Ad ops stands for advertising operations - the strategic function that manages creative production, workflow optimisation, and campaign execution at scale.
No, while programmatic is about automated ad buying, ad ops encompasses the entire creative production and workflow management process across all channels.
Modern ad ops professionals need technical skills (understanding automation tools), analytical abilities (performance measurement), and project management expertise to bridge creative and media teams.
Leading teams report 60-95% reductions in manual production time while improving quality and consistency through creative automation platforms.
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