About AdMonsters
What is AdMonsters?
AdMonsters is the global community of ad operations and technology leaders.
From a business point of view, AdMonsters is an integrated trade publisher, event producer, and service provider focused exclusively on online advertising operations and technology.
What is Ad Operations?
"Ad Operations" (also known as "online ad operations", "online advertising operations", "online ad ops", "ad ops", and "ops") refers to the people, processes and systems that support the sale and delivery of online advertising.
For more detail, see What Is Ad Operations?
What does AdMonsters do?
- We produce a series of conferences, including our Publisher Forum, Leadership Forum, Network Operations Forum and OPS.
- We provide professional services, i.e., ad operations consulting and training.
- We create (and curate) a blog, articles, videos, a discussion forum, and other media.
- We offer other services for our members, including an online job board.
Everything we do is exclusively focused on online ad operations and technology.
How does AdMonsters make money?
People do ask...
- We sell registrations and sponsorships for our conferences
- We sell professional services
- We sell advertising on our web site
- We sell listings on the job board, and offer other services to members
Why does AdMonsters exist?
AdMonsters exists because Community is Necessary
Community not only improves our personal and professional lives, a functional professional community is a requirement for an industry and a craft to evolve and advance to its highest potential. A community is necessary for professionals to meet each other, find and learn from mentors, become mentors themselves, solve problems, create and find solutions, develop policies, experiment and test theories and launch and promote products. A community is necessary for professionals as people, to find understanding, share stories, learn, grow, laugh, and make human contact in an increasingly virtual world. Community is Necessary.
Who are the Monsters?
The Monsters are some of the most experienced professionals in global ad operations and technology. The Monsters are also incredibly smart, super cool, friendly and tons of fun. The Monsters are a group of ad operations professionals working together to deliver on the AdMonsters mission. The Monsters are all the members of the AdMonsters community. Are you a Monster?
The AdMonsters Mission
Our mission is to create a uniquely valuable professional community through events, media, services and membership, driven by our core values.
Core Values
Focus
At the center of our focus is online ad operations and technology. This subject area and this field of professional expertise, is our primary defining factor. Very close to the center is online publishing and publisher ad operations.
As part of our original focus on publisher ad operations and technology, a focus on publishers and publisher issues remains very important. AdMonsters belives in the value of best practices in the field and actionable tactics informed by pragmatic strategy. Standards have their place, but standards follow best practices, and we choose to focus on the latter.
Forum
Also at the center of our focus is that AdMonsters creates a forum. A forum is more than a room full of people - it is a carefuly curated and facilitated gathering of peers, designed to foster open, honest and productive conversation, with specific ends in mind. A forum doesn't happen by itself.
Peers
AdMonsters vets each attendee at every one of our events to ensure that all participants are true peers, and meet our criteria for creating a productive forum.
Sponsorship
While AdMonsters believes stongly that sponsors contribution to the forum goes well beyond their financial support and marketing objectives, we believe equally strongly that quality of the forum, and in fact the goals of sponsors, are best served by being very careful to avoid purely "pay to play" sponsorship, and to carefully craft (not just limit) sponsorship involvement so as to create valuable member-sponsor interactions, and to protect the integrity of member-member conversations. Among other things, this means that in most cases, sponsor participation is limited and does not include admission to the bulk of member discussions.
Trust
A requirement for any productive forum is trust amongst participants. AdMonsters seeks to build that trust by vetting participants, keeping the size of the group small, and fostering face-to-face interaction.
Community
The first thing we hear from new members is almost always "I'm so relieved to know that I'm not the only one doing this". AdMonsters seeks to create a meaningful and long-lasting professional community that benefits all members. Our goal is for AdMonsters participants to come away with much more than just a business card and hangover - the all-too-common result of many other "conferences" and trade shows.
Scale
AdMonsters believes that bigger isn't always better, and that the most productive interactions happen in groups below the "tipping point" of ~150 people. Therefore our conferences and events are almost all designed around small groups of 25-150 participants.
Growth
- Growth of the industry
- Growth of your company
- Growth of your department
- Growth of yourself
Integrity
AdMonsters considers it a privledge to serve a diverse set of clients from across the industry. Many of our clients are competitors, and many are also clients and partners of each other. It is one of our core duties, and essential to our ability to create value for our clients, that we serve all clients fairly and with integrity, and never give privledges to any one client that we are not prepared to give to all clients. AdMonsters is committed to working fairly and equitably with everyone we do business with. We will be transparent about our decision-making criteria and processes, our policies, and our operations.
Straight Talk
Corporate speak and legalese are lame. We don't believe in indirection, obfuscation, hedging, double-speak, and other varieties of "business english". We strive for and promote straight talk at every opportunity.
Continual Improvement
AdMonsters is itself part a the professional community that we create, and we constantly incorporate feedback from our members and sponsors. In the spirit of kaizen, we seek to constantly improve all of our events, and for each AdMonsters conference to be the "best yet" of its kind.
Humanity
AdMonsters believes that is important to recognize the human side of work, and to encourage a balanced approach to work and life.
Fun
We are all "Monsters", and fun, social time should be part of our working lives.