Ad Ops All Stars: Melissa Chapman, Part Two Consulting

In many cases, ad ops is an under-appreciated part of a publisher's business.

Melissa Chapman is on a mission to change that by lifting up ad ops professionals and helping them communicate the strategic nature of what they do.

As the founder of Part Two Consulting and a Collaborator at Beeler.Tech, Melissa advises publishers on building out their ad ops teams and brings ad ops pros together via the Beeler.Tech community to learn, share best practices, and support each other.

Listen to or watch the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear Melissa's story.

Resources from this episode:

• Connect with Melissa on LinkedIn
• Email Melissa at melissa [@] parttwoconsulting.com
• Connect with Melissa through the Beeler.Tech community

 

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Transcript:

Kathleen: Welcome back to the Ad Ops All Stars Podcast, I am your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Melissa Chapman who has her hands in a lot of pies, she's got Part Two Consulting where she is the founder and she is also a collaborator at Beeler.Tech which has come up a lot in my conversations on this podcast and as has your name so I'm really excited to finally talk to you. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa.

Melissa: Thank you. It's great to be here. I appreciate it, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Yeah. I'm really excited to chat with you. We had a great conversation before this talking about what we were going to talk about and I feel like there's a lot here. So hopefully we can squeeze it all into one hour. I always ask the same icebreaker question so if you've heard this podcast you know it's coming which is, how would you explain what you do for a living to a five year old?

Melissa: I think I would say, because I was trying to think I don't have a five year old in my life but somebody a little bit younger than that and I would describe it as, I try to help make the internet free.

Kathleen: That actually might be one of the best answers I've had yet.

Melissa: Thanks.

Kathleen: That is really good, it boils it down to the essence of what it's about, right? I love that. And it also, I feel like when people talk about ads, so often when they try to answer this question, part of their answer sounds like an apology like, "I'm really sorry, but I place ads", but I really like the spin you put on it that, "Hey, it's about making it free." Who can't get behind that, right?

Melissa: Well, and we have to be careful with little kids, right? Because it's like, oh, or you might pay. They don't know about paying. They don't know about money, right? That is not something... Yeah. And maybe they have a concept of ads and maybe they don't, but it really is what helps make the internet free or at least partially free, so.

Kathleen: That's true. All right. Well, you nailed it. So my next question is really just about you and I mention that you have a consulting company, you work with Beeler.Tech, you've done a lot of different things in your career. Tell me a little bit about what you're doing right now, and then we'll kind of like rewind the clock and go back to how you got into it.

Melissa: Sure. So for my own consultancy, I do a variety of things. So the place that I spend the majority of my time is with Beeler.Tech and that's really a community all about helping publishers in the industry move forward with less friction, right? And then I also do other consulting with publishers and I tend to want to focus on people and process, because that's where some of my passions are. But I do anything from hands on to strategic thinking about how to set up a digital business. One of my current clients, they didn't even have an ad server in place, they barely had to add them their website, right? And so kind of helping them understand. And I like to grow stuff so that it was a good fit for me.

Kathleen: I love that. And your name has come up a lot. I think because so many in the industry know you from just the collaboration, you've done the work to help the community. And those are themes that seem to keep coming up over and over in these conversations, it's one of the things I love about this industry, being somebody who's really new to it. So I want to go back now, as I said, and let's start at the beginning and tell me about the evolution of your career, because that's the other recurring theme in these interviews is nobody goes to school for ad ops, so how the heck does anyone land in this job, right? In this industry. How did you land in this industry?

Melissa: Yeah. So I always love these stories and I think I have a little bit of a unique one. So I've worked at two publishers before I started my own consultancy. And the first one I was at for a number of years before we even had a website, right? So that's showing my age a little bit. So we developed a website. I was actually helping, I did multiple things at this company, but I was helping do QA on the website, right back before QA was a big automation process and we decided to bring our ad sales in house. So if we go back in time, Google, that used to be DFP, before that it was DART. The company I was with, we were their last client where they were doing our ad sales for us. Yeah. When we walked away, they literally closed the door.

Kathleen: That's like being the last Blockbuster.

Melissa: Yes. Yes. A little bit. So anyway, the long and the short of that is we decided to bring ad sales in house, which meant we also needed to bring ad operations in house or at least do something with it. So we had actually tried to outsource it and because nobody internally had a lot of knowledge about it. It really didn't go very well. So my approach from my boss was, "Hey, you can keep doing what you're doing, or we need somebody to help solve this problem that we've got and bring our ad operations in house. And by the way, nobody internally knows anything about this, including yourself. What do you want to do?" And so I said, "Oh, I want to do it." Right? Because I like to solve a good problem. And I figured I can't make it any worse than it was.

Melissa: Because it was not going well. So I did that. And within, I think three or four months, we were trafficking all of our own ads. We had a team in place, that sort of thing. So my story's a little different because I actually was never a trafficker. So I started right into leadership on it. And then I was fortunate enough that grew over time, I grew the team out. I eventually changed organizations, in the next organization there was more of a team in place, but it needed to be consolidated, it needed its quality to go up. And turns out I love building teams and fixing things and helping to figure out the right structure of stuff. And so both of those were really great roles for me.

Kathleen: So you did talk about that when we first spoke that you're... I always ask people, what are you passionate about? And you talked a lot about how you're passionate about building and managing teams. And I'm curious, because you've worked in a few different places, you also now consult with a lot of different people and talk to them through the community. Are there, let's say, recurring themes of, it's kind of like, I think there's a book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. What are the five dysfunctions of ad ops teams? What are the things that you see most often that need to be fixed?

Melissa: Yeah. So I think some of the common things I see is companies don't know what ad ops do. They often under estimate their value to the organization. I literally had a head of sales say to me once, "Well, I mean just go get another person, pay them like 25 grand." No kidding. Now this was 15 years ago, but to 25 grand and my take was, "You really want somebody trafficking your $85,000 campaign that's making 25 grand?" That math doesn't make sense for me. So that's a challenge. Where it sits in an organization is a challenge because it's both technical and it's customer facing, so that bounces around quite a bit. And I think the other thing is many, many people that end up in ad ops stumble there. So a lot of times I'm dealing with people who don't have a clear vision for future, right? They don't know what they want to do next. And so sometimes they get a little stuck in that, because they've never thought about it because they stumbled into this job. And I would say from a people growing perspective, that's the toughest one.

Kathleen: That's interesting. And I can completely see that because we talked about there isn't a degree for this or some, yeah. There's no formal academy of ad ops or at least that most people are coming out of. And so they come from something else. And in fact, it's funny when I think back on the interviews I've done, I've had people who prior to going into ad ops were truck drivers or hairdressers or software engineers. Like it really runs the gamut. I had a professional flute player. Yeah. It really runs the gamut. And so they don't know what they want to do when they come in, how do you guide people on your team through that?

Melissa: Well, so I think there's a couple different things there. There's how do you pick the people for your team that are going to be good ad ops professionals and how do you decide where they want to go next. Let me take the second one first. So at the end of the day, my take is I can't really make the decision about where you should go next, you have to make that decision. What I can tell you is some careers or some other roles that people can go into, at least in the organizations that I've worked at and really worked, right? So thinking about they could go into analytics if there's a centralized analytics team, they could go into product management, they can go into sales support. You don't see that quite as often, but it does happen. My experience is a lot of the people that are in ad ops have a really good base on how the business works and a little bit of technology and a little bit of trouble.

Melissa: Right? So they're really good in other areas, but they have to make the decision about what they want to do. I'm actually talking to somebody right now who is thinking about going into training, right? And that's because that's something they like to do in their current job, but is that something they want to do? Back to the former, I always looked for people who had a few things, right? I wanted people who had a high level of attention to detail, right? Because again, you make a mistake. We literally had a mistake. Yeah. That was an $85,000 mistake. I mean, that hurts a person's feelings and no lots of people are talking about that, right? They're not all that big of course, but almost every mistake you make costs money.

Melissa: The majority of them anyway. So high attention to detail, the ability to translate concepts from different people, right? So to be able to help somebody understand and take a technical concept and explain it to a salesperson or explain it to an executive, that's harder, right? And that's something that people often learn on the job and that's a coaching thing, right? You just keep working with them at it and you give them exposure and experience to be able to get in front of those people and work through it.

Kathleen: Yeah. And the other thing I always wonder about is there's such a spectrum in terms of organization size within the media and publishing world. So you talk to some folks that do ad ops and they're in really small companies and they're teams of one or two people, and then I talk to people who are from massive large publishers where there's a lot of opportunity to advance within not only the team, but the company. And so in terms of how you mentor folks, I guess this is a multi-part question and I'll throw it all out there and you can answer it in whatever order makes sense. But how do you guide people in terms of whether their next step should be to a bigger company or a smaller company?

Kathleen: Because I do think that has a big influence on what your potential is to do after that, and then also positioning themselves for that next role, because I feel like there are certain skills within ad ops that you can develop more in order to better position yourself. But also there's this element at least that I've come to appreciate from these conversations of collaboration across the organization where ad ops is positioned for it, but maybe not everybody necessarily on the team has that in their job description. And so, I don't know, I'm throwing out a lot here, but yeah, I think you see where I'm going.

Melissa: I think so. No, I do. So let me start at the beginning and then we'll kind of see where it goes from there. So I tend to talk to people about, do you want to, and I do this with young people too because I do mentoring with high schoolers and then people in early college and that sort of thing, and younger people don't always think this way, so it's actually easier once you've got somebody that's an adult and has been working really well. But do you want to go deep in a role and really understand it and really focus and do that same kind of work? Or do you want to be a generalist and do you want to have your hands on a lot of pies doing a lot of... Or you probably want a smaller organ organization or an organization that's growing something new.

Melissa: If you want to go really deep, you may want to go to a big organization where you are going to specialize very specifically in your role. I also encourage people to think about what sizes of organizations have you worked at before and what do you like. Because some people just don't like big or small, right? Like it's just, there's no right or wrong. It's just a matter of what you prefer. I have a friend who always wanted to have a large scope of influence, right? And you can do that in big and small organizations, so that's very role dependent in kind of what you're doing, right? I like to be able to build things and fix stuff and I care less about the size of the organization and more if I can do that, I don't want to go in someplace where everything's already all buttoned up and I just need to run it.

Kathleen: Right. Going in and do the same thing every day over and over again for the rest of my life.

Melissa: And it's hard to optimize that stuff, right? And optimizing is what I like to do. And I like to take people and help them, have them tell me what they like, identify what they're good at, help them do more of that and minimize the things they're not good at. And then slowly grow those things they're not good, right? And then I think kind of where you were going with the other part of the question is thinking about, if somebody wants to position themselves, sometimes you got to do more of the stuff you don't like or don't want to do, or that was hard.

Melissa: And so, I've encouraged people within my organization to say like, "What kind of role do you really think you want? Okay. You think you want this? All right. Let me put you in contact with the head of that team." And just an exploratory conversation. Now maybe I know what the role needs, but maybe I don't, right? Let's get other people involved in that conversation in a very non-risky, you're not applying for a job yet. You don't have to worry about being turned down, right? You could just think about, "Oh, that job really requires this. Is that something I want to do?" So I don't know if that's exactly where you were asking, but I certainly had those.

Kathleen: No, you answered it much better than I asked it. Yeah. The other dimension to this, I think today, when you talk about building and managing teams, you really can't have the conversation without incorporating some discussion around diversity, equity and inclusion. And I would love to know if you had to grade the ad ops industry, if you will, scale of 1 to 10, 10 being nailed it, 1 being failing, how would you grade it for DEI?

Melissa: I think ad ops and I think probably even media in general, the grade's not great. And I think that about a lot of industries, I think that about a lot of companies.

Kathleen: I was going to say there aren't too many industries that great.

Melissa: Well, that's what I mean. Yeah. So I don't think we're doing great. I do think more people are thinking about it, but I mean, if you go to conferences, there's a lot of white guys in the room, right? And I don't say that in a, I hate white guys, right? My dad was a white guy, my boyfriend's a white guy, right? But there's a lot of them there. And so, when I think about diversity, I don't think about diversity just in male or female, right? I'm thinking about color, background, age, age is a real bad one for ad ops, right? You get to be around my age and things start to not, it's hard. It's much harder for people to get roles. You see a lot of people go into consulting.

Kathleen: So now that you say that, I was on Twitter yesterday, I just have to tell this story because...

Melissa: Yeah, please.

Kathleen: I thought it was hysterical. And somebody that I know pretty well in the marketing world, who is an entrepreneur who is probably in his thirties, if I had to guess, posted a tweet basically saying that people do their best and most creative work before the age of 50. And then after 50, you should focus on teaching and giving back, because your creative years are over. And I was like, oh, without saying how old I am, let me... I was like, well first, number one, I disagree. But I think a lot of industries there is that, I mean marketing certainly. And marketing is like a step cousin or a cousin of ad ops. Yeah. Yeah. There's that issue for sure.

Melissa: There is. And I mean, to your tweeter, whoever that person was, right? Do I think a lot of people over 50 have a lot to teach and a lot to give back? Sure, I do. Do I think we should pigeonhole them and that's the only thing they can do? No. And do I think lots of people are still creative? Absolutely I do.

Kathleen: And I almost... I haven't treated this back yet, but I'm thinking about it and I'm going to use a little profanity here and say that the big benefit of hiring somebody over the age of 50 is they have no shit left to give, right?

Melissa: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Kathleen: You are so much less constrained as you get older. And I do think that that can actually feed creativity. That's just me, but anyway.

Melissa: I would agree with that. I would agree with that statement. Yeah. So ageism is one that I think we have a real problem with, but I do think that... And some of that can get into publishing and media and they don't have enough staff at media companies to write, my gosh, we're getting rid of reporters for crime and sake, right? So it's hard as somebody matures through their organization. Yeah. Maybe you want to bring in somebody that's younger and cheaper. So I get how some of it happens, but I think that we really have to focus more on the diversity thing and really all the angles, right? The LGBTQ+, you name it, right? Physical disabilities or lack... Let's really make this a more robust world. And I'm a big believer in not robust and diverse for the sake of it, but because I truly believe it's better.

Kathleen: That's what I was going to ask you. That was going to be my next question.

Melissa: A hundred percent.

Kathleen: So I feel like people always ask, okay, so there's one thing to check the box with diversity, but why is it so important? I know the answer I have in my head, but like...

Melissa: Yeah. So I'm no expert in this area, but the fact is if you're trying to sell, so just a simple example, and it's not an ad ops example, but if you're trying to sell something to people, you think about it the way you, the things you know, right? Your experience and the way you think about things and the words you use are not the same as everybody else. So you are naturally going to position things in ways, more likely to people that look and sound and have the same backgrounds as you, right? So the more diverse your organization is, the more widgets you can sell, because you'll be able to speak to more people in ways that make them interested in buying widgets. Well, I think that applies a hundred percent across the board, right? Whether that's strategic thinking creative, right? Like all of it, all of that feeds into what a person is and how they get and what they bring to the table.

Kathleen: I agree with that. Well, and I would say also that, and maybe this is off base, but I feel like in today's world, when brand safety and ad quality in particular are such hot topics and user experience is now, as if not, more important than ever, right? On a website. So people are scrutinizing the ads that appear on your site and they're coming to conclusions about the media property that hosts those ads based on what's in the ads. And so if you have people in your ad ops team who are from diverse backgrounds, I just feel it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to reach certain conclusions, it just means that you're going to be able to have a more nuanced conversation and potentially spot things that could get your organization in hot water, down the line faster than perhaps an organization that does not have a diverse team.

Melissa: For sure, right? And that's the kind of the reverse of that you're right. To use diversity for positive, but also to use diversity to minimize negative situations, right? I just think, I'm a big believer and you get smarter and you learn more things and you don't stop learning. And man, I can learn a lot of things from a lot of different kinds of people. And anyway, I just think it's a good life thing. I think it's great for your life, I think it's great for your career and I certainly think it's good for businesses.

Kathleen: Yeah. I personally agree with you. I want to change the subject a little bit, because you do have a very interesting perspective on what's happening in the world of ad ops because you host a happy hour every Friday for publishers and people in the industry where people are talking about the things that keep them up at night and the challenges they're facing and the developments that are in the news. I would love to know from your perspective, what you think some of the biggest challenges are right now that ad ops folks are grappling with or trying to grapple with?

Melissa: Well, I probably won't be unique in the people you've interviewed on this one, but for me the big, I always want to say one thing and then I'm like, no, it's two. I certainly think publishing is in a tough spot right now. That's not specific to ad ops, but it certainly impacts ad ops, right? And it puts pressure on where revenues come from and how things work. But I think the biggest challenge, and to me it feels different. So one of the things I always liked about this industry going into it is my job felt different every year because there was new different challenges and that kept me in the same role maybe with a slightly different title, but for years on upon years, which is not really my thing, right? My thing is to like go find a new problem. Well ad ops brings the problem to you.

Kathleen: Problems happen all the time.

Melissa: So yeah, exactly. And so for me that's both frustrating, but it's also what kept me in the industry.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Melissa: But I think the biggest one now is around privacy. So that spills into what Chrome is doing and deprecation of third party cookies, but it's actually bigger than that. And so I think that's a huge piece of it and where ad ops spends a lot of times talking about right now and I certainly do in our community. But there's also just privacy in general and what does that mean, and helping people understand there's a lot of people that are leveraging privacy for both good and bad, right? Scaring people about the use of their data or what that means or Big Brother, however you want to think about it.

Melissa: There's a whole education piece that I don't think we did well as a publishing community, helping them understand advertising and targeting and that sort of thing. But I think that privacy and then all the downstream effects from that are really hard because it gets into regulation and it gets into legal stuff. And well, ad ops is always touched legal a little bit. Not like it does now. Like it's so much harder for people in the industry to keep up. Now you have to know all the customer stuff and you have to know all the technical stuff. And now you have to understand all the privacy data and identity stuff and figure out the strategy for your company for the next two years.

Kathleen: Which is so interesting because it does, it's like double sided, double edged sword. It places the ad ops person at a much more central and strategic role within the company. But I can also imagine that it is very stressful, it is a lot of pressure. It could lead to tremendous burnout if that's not what somebody thought they were signing up for. So I'm curious what you're seeing with people as they respond to this shift?

Melissa: Well, and I would even go back to see point A, right? That I said earlier about companies, they don't understand what ad ops does. If they don't understand what ad ops does and ad ops job just got this much more complicated, getting the ad ops or revenue ops professional, to be able to explain that to the organization. I talk to people all the time that are like, "My organization doesn't get it." Right? We just feel that a survey and they can't get this through to the organization. And the fact is, it's not an ad ops thing, it's an organizational thing. And the challenge that organizations are facing is they don't know that. So ad ops people are facing. So you talk to people about who's handling data and identity in your company? Sometimes it's the ad ops person. Sometimes it's the analytics person. Sometimes it's the product person. Oftentimes it's no one. And in some cases it's across team. That's super hard, right? To deal with. Now, that's not exactly what you asked, what I'm seeing...

Kathleen: No, but I think actually, I just want to pick that apart a second.

Melissa: Yeah, please.

Kathleen: Because that's really interesting. And like I said, it does present a massive opportunity, particularly for somebody who wants to rise into more of a leadership role, to be able to fill that vacuum and to be the person who is leading the company forward to deal with that challenge. But I think doing that successfully, at least from what you said, it sounds like it requires two things. It requires the technical knowledge to be able to really understand what the path forward should look like. And then it requires the communication skills and the leadership kind of DNA to be able to bring others on board and bring them with you. And so it almost feels like there's a place in the industry for somebody to help with that, to create the deck that ad ops people can use and to do a training for them on how to present to the leadership about these. I don't know, like, it does sound like there's a big opportunity here to make ad ops much more strategically placed within the organization than it has been in the past.

Melissa: I do. I agree with you on that. And I think there have been a little bit like deck sharing and note sharing at least, right? But I think the biggest hurdle there... So I do think it's a good opportunity for somebody to rise that occasion. The challenge is the organization needs to understand that there's something to be risen to and that now they need a chief data strategy officer or whatever the role is, right? I'm just picking the highest sea level. They need to know that they need that they didn't know they need, right? They didn't know they needed that. So getting them to understand they need it and then how I could help you fill that, right? I think that's the easier next step, although it's still a big step.

Kathleen: No, but it reminds me of when I used to work for another company and I was responsible for marketing and we had a big conference and whenever, anybody who's ever done conference or event marketing generally knows that one thing you do is you create the convince your boss letter that you give to people who want to come and are trying to get budget for it. And so it feels like we need to convince your boss letter for why this is important that can be shared within the industry. Almost like I like to call these things like manifestos, let's write it all out, put the emotion behind it, explain why it's important and then get everybody to go to their boss and be like, "Hey, pay attention."

Melissa: This is a thing we should do. Yeah. And I think especially if you have a larger and I don't mean to sound like a negative Nancy about it, but it's because I truly believe the data strategies is a cross-functional thing. Now, there's probably an owner. There should be an owner, right? But it impacts analytics and your data warehousing and your advertising and lots and your marketing and lots of other things. So, I mean, that's a tough thing, right? You got to convince the right person. Who then has to help convince these other people. And that it's all super important. I tell you, I was shocked. I mentioned that survey and in the survey it was like, "Oh, our analytics team is responsible for our data strategy." And I thought, "Really? The analytics team?" I mean, I get that they're sitting on top of the data, but the whole strategy about how you make money.

Kathleen: Right. Their job is usually like what comes out of the data? Not...

Melissa: Yeah. I was super surprised, but I think that's a vacuum. I think that in those cases, I don't know these companies specifically, but I think that that's potentially because there's not anybody else to pick it up. This is why ad ops sends up on again, because nobody else is picking it up. Somebody needs to help, right? And somebody needs to do something about it, so.

Kathleen: So when you think back on your career, because you've had a, like you said, you were there. I feel like when you talked about you were at a company that didn't even have a web property, right? Like you've really seen the full evolution of ad ops and you think back on how it evolved, is there a person or a couple of people who've had a real influence on you and your career development?

Melissa: So I will say yes, not in the ad op space, but the two people that hired me in my first job out of college. So Steven Henson and Liz Haut, they were hiring for somebody with experience and I didn't have it, but I had a great cover letter. And they always, this was when I was at Kelley Blue Book, they always gave me the opportunities. And they're the ones that helped, Steven specifically allowed me to move into ad operations. But another, somebody I worked with who's a great friend of mine is Amy Hedrick. And she had a vision and she was responsible for bringing the ad sales and how she had a vision how I could help fill this role and succeed at it. And so she's the one that actually tagged me as a potential for that role. So yeah, those are the important, some of them, there's lots of important people in my life. But when I think about my career and some really pivotal terms, those three were super involved.

Kathleen: Yeah. I love that. All right. We're going to switch gears because I have these two questions I always ask people. I want to know what you're going to say. One is, the industry changes so much and we talked about that and just how important it is to kind of like keep learning and how do you keep learning? What are your favorite sources for staying on top of everything?

Melissa: Yeah. So it's hard because who has time to read stuff. But so I keep up with the trades. I try to give them a good look-see once a week, at least.

Kathleen: Any particular?

Melissa: I try to cover the spectrum honestly. And in our Beeler.Tech newsletter, we highlight some of the content that we like and we work together as a team to come up with that content, right? So it's important that we're all reading and checking things out. I also use Google alerts to help me keep track of where things are that are popping, that I might be interested in. And when you asked about the sources, Google alerts, right? You can end up finding sources all over the world.

Kathleen: That's so true.

Melissa: So I think that's been helpful for me and then really leveraging the Beeler.Tech community, right? So we have a publishers only slack and because I help with this community, I'm in that slack. So the hot things that come up, people post articles about it or blog post from Google or whatever the thing is. Things that are happening at companies that impact publisher, right? Like those kinds of things come up. And if it's not an article, at least you get a tidbit to kind of understand and then you can go dig in. But so those are kind of my three go-tos.

Kathleen: Okay.

Melissa: But, man, it's hard to keep up.

Kathleen: It is hard. I mean, doesn't matter what industry you're in, I think we all have the same problem these days of like too many meetings, too little time, too few hours in the day.

Melissa: No kidding.

Kathleen: How about ad ops leaders? I always profile people who are doing great work in ad ops and I'm wondering if there's anybody out there who you think I haven't spoken to yet who's an amazing ad ops leader who should be the next guest on this podcast.

Melissa: Yeah. So I'm glad you said people you haven't spoken to yet. Because a lot of the people that I might mark you've already spoken to and honestly there're tons and tons, I could give you a whole list of them. But a couple people that I feel like I don't hear their names pop up as much. So Midge Brown, who I've known for years and years and years and she heads up things over at Healthgrades now. So she's moved her way through the career.

Melissa: And I find her to be strategic and insightful and we became networking friends and we've become friends since then. And then Janelle Faulk, who's been at Bloomberg for quite a while and she heads up global ad operations there, but she also is involved in their global DEI program. I think it's the global DEI program. And Janelle, I just had her on the panel a couple of weeks ago. She's a kindred soul when it comes to leadership and thinking through and team building and how do you work that all out. So those are the two I'm going to say, but I could give you a long list outside of this.

Kathleen: Those sound like really good ones. And I love that they're both women. So that's awesome. All right. Well, if somebody is interested in learning more about you or connecting with you online, what's the best way for them to do that?

Melissa: So you can certainly learn about me on LinkedIn. I try to do as much posting as I can, but feel free to connect with me, shoot me a note, whatever, whatever is the thing. And then you can always just email me, you can email melissa [@] parttwoconsulting.com.

Kathleen: All right.

Melissa: And for the kids in the Beeler.Tech community, they know how to find me, you can find me on Slack or my Beeler.Tech email.

Kathleen: Direct access. So if you're not in the community, apparently you need to get in it so that you can slack Melissa. All right. Well, this has been great. And I have enjoyed this so much. I feel like this one was a long time in coming, so I'm really glad we made it happen.

Melissa: Thank you for having me.

Kathleen: Yeah, of course. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this, I would love it if you'd head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast or review because that's how other people find us. And if you want to learn more or hear other interviews of leading ad ops experts, head to clean.io to our resources center and you can see other Ad Ops All Stars interviews as well as resources on protecting your user experience, your revenue and your brand. That is it for this week. Thank you, Melissa, for joining me. I'm so glad we made it happen.

Melissa: Thank you so much, Kathleen. I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.

Kathleen: Same.