Life at Aditude: Yirmi Lazar
Yirmi Lazar, Director of Revenue Operations, describes a typical day in his life working remotely from Toronto, Canada. Life at Aditude is a series about the individuals working behind the scenes at Aditude.
Yirmi Lazar, Director of Revenue Operations, describes a typical day in his life working remotely from Toronto, Canada.
Life at Aditude is a series about the individuals working behind the scenes at Aditude.
Meet the Aditude Team: Can you introduce yourself and describe your role at Aditude?
Hi, I’m Yirmi Lazar. I’m the Director of Revenue Operations at Aditude and either manage or get involved in anything I can to increase yield and make our publishers more money. This can be anything in the wide and wacky world of ad tech, from price flooring tests to lazy load settings to privacy regulations to analyzing user behavior to interpreting Google policies to anything else a publisher needs.
Day in the Life: What does a typical day look like for you at Aditude? Walk us through your daily responsibilities.
A typical day starts and ends with analyzing charts and graphs I build of the various A/B tests we’re running. In the middle of all that, I’m advising clients on Slack, in calls performing revenue deep dives with them and our internal teams, and helping our growth and product teams determine priorities based on client input and actual data.
Every single day (and hour) is different with a changing industry, constantly growing client base, brand new ideas, and all sorts of mind-bending problems. I love it and I live for it.
Your Journey to Aditude: How did you end up working at Aditude? What inspired you to join the team?
I got introduced to Jared through a couple of mutual connections at Google. I realized very quickly after meeting him and learning about the company that it was destined for very great things. It was such a fun interview process, where the out-of-the-box questions I was getting asked were direct indications of how well-thought-out the products and services were. Jared and Erik were (and still are) pretty good people, too.
Favorite Projects: What has been your most exciting or rewarding project at Aditude so far?
Anything related to our dynamic flooring or video solutions. They combine so much of what makes Aditude great to work for, getting to wrap our brains not just the obvious “standard basics,” but around handling extremely niche data points, extremely niche publisher needs, and extremely niche advertiser technological requirements to make the best solutions.
Challenges & Solutions: What are some common challenges you face in your role, and how do you overcome them?
The most common (but rewarding!) challenges usually involve each publisher being uniquely different in their website technologies, userbases, internal revenue goals and expectations, and understanding/knowledge of the overly complex ad tech world. You overcome it by diving in headfirst and taking one problem at a time, then taking a step back to look at where else you can apply this newfound knowledge and skill set. Suddenly when you have 5 more publishers to review, you start to recognize patterns in them purely from experience, and the next challenges that arise from them are that much easier to conquer.
Team Collaboration: How does collaboration with other team members affect your work?
Collaboration is everything. In a world of problem-solving and building, getting different vantage points from various areas of expertise or ways of thinking helps make sure you’re never stuck on something for very long. Feeling part of a whole and part of something big in itself is a huge motivator. I cherish our daily standups, weekly meetings, and shared Slack channels where anyone can ask anything and expect help or encouragement.
Career Advice: What advice would you give someone looking to pursue a similar career?
Always keep learning, always stay curious, and fall down any rabbit hole as you start getting exposed to new industry terms and concepts (which will probably lead to more rabbit holes). That might start with very basic questions like “How does an ad get onto a webpage?” or “What makes an ad valuable?” and never require you to know literally everything, but the most successful people in the industry are always known to be curious.
Tech & Trends: What emerging technologies or trends are you most excited about in the programmatic advertising space?
I’m always excited about the emergence of new data around UX and its influence on things as usually straightforward as ad placement, lazy load and refresh opportunities, and flooring. In the business of making publishers more money, many companies take the short-lived approach of covering sites with ads with generic layouts. Everyone benefits as we look at the balance between driving users to our publishers via strong technical SEO, fast loading ads that don’t hold up site navigation, and take into account where a user could and should be looking without obtrusive ads turning them to AdBlock or competitive sites.
Memorable Moments: Share a memorable or funny moment you've had while working at Aditude.
A few weeks into my life at Aditude in the summer of 2022, Jared sends me a Google Meet link to join immediately. While simultaneously firing off a hundred emails and Slack messages as he does, he distractedly asks me, “Hey, do you like Disney?” I’m taken aback, I don’t know how to answer, I’m nervous that my new boss will think I’m weird if I say yes. I go with the cool, “Sure.”
Suddenly his face grows like the DMV sloth in Zootopia, and I realize that my life will never be the same again.
Future Goals: Where do you see yourself and Aditude heading in the next few years? Any exciting plans or visions for the future
Everywhere. Success. Making publishers even more money than today. Growing their sites, their pageviews, and their CPMs. Adapting to whatever the world and the industry feels like throwing at us. Buying more custom t-shirts with inside jokes. Having fun, probably visiting Disney World a bunch.
