In this episode of “Full Tech Ahead,” host Amanda Razani interviews Michele Bavitz, Vice President of Growth at Theorem. They discuss the vital role of automation in digital media ad operations (ad ops) and how it addresses operational complexities across publishers, media owners and streaming platforms.
Bavitz explains that ad campaigns touch multiple internal teams throughout the end-to-end “order-to-cash” lifecycle—including sales, client success, ad ops, IT and finance. This high-volume, multi-platform environment creates massive friction and costly manual errors.
By adopting a hybrid automation model that integrates both tech solutions and human oversight, organizations can eliminate repetitive toil, reduce financial make-goods, cut operational overhead, and allow teams to upskill toward strategic growth, media prospecting and performance analytics.
Key Quotes
- “Theorem... is a digital media organization... Our model is a hybrid where with clients, we are integrating the human element as well as the tech side to bring greater automation.”
- “The end to end process in delivering an ad campaign touches so many teams... It brings a lot of opportunity for things like error, friction with internal teams as well as client teams.”
- “What I’m seeing... is less about job loss and more about upskilling... taking those resources and upskilling them to work on the tech side.”
- “You want to pick the least complex process with the highest impact... Within our experience, we’ve found that the trafficking process within ad operations is the one that has the highest impact.”
Takeaways
Address the Order-to-Cash Friction: Ad operations isn’t an isolated department; ad campaigns flow through sales, account management, finance, and IT. Automating manual handoffs within this complete order-to-cash lifecycle drastically reduces campaign errors, avoids costly client make-goods, and resolves cross-departmental friction.
- Prioritize High-Impact, Low-Complexity Targets: When initiating ad ops automation, gather all departmental leaders to map collective pain points. Start the roadmap with highly repeatable, high-volume operational bottlenecks—such as creative asset trafficking—to yield immediate cost efficiency and team relief.
- Upskill Teams from Trafficking to QA: Automation in ad ops is not a single “switch flip” that eliminates human workers. As automated pipelines take over routine uploads, ad ops roles shift naturally from manual trafficking to strategic Quality Assurance (QA), client prospecting, and data-driven pitch positioning.
- Culture and Leadership Alignment Come First: The biggest obstacle to successful automation isn’t software capability or API integration; it is organizational culture and executive alignment. All leaders across finance, sales, IT, and operations must agree on unified automation goals before deployment.
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