Karen Camus, director of digital ad operations, Nine.
For years in this industry, we’ve worn “manual” like a badge of honour. We told ourselves that in the world of direct-sold media “hand-held” service meant high-touch, premium quality.
But let’s be honest: there is nothing premium about a brilliant digital specialist spending four hours squinting at VAST tags or chasing a broken creative asset through a fragmented email chain.
The cost of manual labour
At Nine, I oversee the execution of campaigns across a massive, complex, media footprint. My team is made up of some of the sharpest minds in the business. And yet, for too long, the industry has hired young guns only to turn them into data entry clerks.
We must recognise that true premium execution isn’t defined by the volume of effort required to check a creative spec, transcode tags, or traffic a line item. We’ve been confusing manual labour with value, and it’s time to stop.
AI learnings: why automating the right thing starts with the human
Real sophistication lies in a seamless pathway for digital execution that is wired directly to the advertiser’s goal: speaking meaningfully to our audience. That is the premium standard our clients expect, and we must leverage the technology at our fingertips to protect it.
The admin is the noise, filled with repetitive spec QA and fragmented email chains. This is where the operational friction hits hardest. When we use AI to handle the grunt work of direct sales, such as instant, automated creative validation the moment a file is uploaded, we are protecting the advertiser’s right to a flawless launch.
By offloading these mechanical checks to AI agents, we gain something far more valuable than time: cognitive headspace. This shift allows my team to move from being traffic wardens to delivery strategists. The future of AdOps is about automating the admin so we can finally reclaim the art.
From data gathering to intelligent orchestration
The complexity of today’s digital landscape has outpaced the spreadsheet. A single direct-sold campaign at Nine now breathes across a sophisticated ecosystem: the massive reach of 9Now, the high-impact environments of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian Financial Review, and the premium streaming of Stan and HBO Max.
Historically, simply glimpsing campaign performance across these silos was a manual marathon, hours spent extracting, cleaning, and organising data just to understand the baseline. Today, automating the right thing means moving to intelligent orchestration.
AI removes the manual burden of tracking delivery and replaces it with a unified, ‘full picture’ view. This allows us to ensure an advertiser’s relevance is maintained, whether a viewer is immersed in a live cultural sporting moment like the Australian Open, streaming a primetime tentpole, or engaging with a breaking news exclusive.
The humanity moat
However, let’s be clear: AI operates in a vacuum. It can validate a technical spec in milliseconds, but it cannot understand the “why” behind a brand’s legacy or the subtle nuance of a breaking news cycle.
In direct-sold advertising, clients are buying impressions, but they are also buying our judgment. They are buying the right to have an expert say: “The data suggests a pivot, but my contextual understanding of this premium environment says we stay the course.”
The new AdOps mandate
The goal of automation at Nine is to sharpen the mind. We are building a future where our specialists aren’t masters of platform user interfaces, but masters of the machine.
By using AI to receive the right information at the right speed, we allow our people to do what they do best: lead with empathy, think with context, and own the craft of advertising that resonates human-to-human.
Feature image- Karen Camus, director of digital ad operations, Nine.