Progress Through Trust, Creativity, and Collaboration

I got hired at Zeta Global around 2012 as a junior engineer on the engineering team. The job was building banner ads, emails, and landing pages, and a lot of it was slicing up Photoshop files that the creative team would hand over and turning them into working HTML.

Responsive design was just starting to take off, and Bootstrap had barely come out. Our process still split every campaign into a desktop version and a separate mobile version, which meant two sets of assets, two QA passes, and two deployment cycles. Multiply that across every campaign the company ran, and you start to see how much wasted effort was built into the workflow. Fixing that fragmentation became the first thing I tackled.

I was at a startup, I was in my twenties, and I wanted to learn everything.

Working across every department

Zeta was still small enough that nobody limited which teams I worked with, so I ended up working with basically every department. Sales needed landing pages, creative needed HTML builds, product needed feedback on what was actually feasible, marketing needed templates, and engineering needed someone who could bridge the gap between design comps and production code.

The engineering team deserves credit here, a lot of talented, smart people who genuinely invested in me. They gave me room to take things on, backed me up when I tried work that wasn't technically my job, and gave me space to be wrong while I figured it out. I owe them a lot for what I learned early in my career and for where I've been able to develop since.

I kept showing up in those rooms because I wanted to understand how the whole company worked, and what I didn't realize at the time was that I was building a mental map of how everything connected, because there wasn't really anyone bridging creative and engineering yet.

Rebuilding the workflow on responsive templates

Desktop products, mobile products, email, and landing pages were all being built separately, often by different people, with no shared components.

I was learning on the job and spending a lot of time outside of work trying to get better. I stayed up in the middle of the night reading about responsive design, Bootstrap, and media queries, the CSS rules that change a layout based on screen size. Ethan Marcotte's book had just come out and people were starting to talk about it, and I'd figure something out at 2am and bring it to the team the next morning. The process we had was still tables and Photoshop slicing, and that's what we were being told to do. Responsive design solved several problems at once. It gave us one codebase instead of separate desktop and mobile builds, one set of templates for email, and one landing page system instead of two, so together we rebuilt everything around that approach.

Honestly, I felt like there wasn't enough time to work on the things I wanted to do, so I was trying to make things easier for myself and for other people. Once the responsive system was in place, I built reusable templates on top of it that anyone could populate without needing an engineer to hand-code each one. Before that, we were doing maybe one campaign every two weeks. After the templates, we were pushing 3-5 a week, and the work that used to take all my time was running on systems instead.

Moving into media operations

With the templates running, I wanted to know how the landing pages actually performed. That drew me into media operations, which meant handling campaign data, working in CAKE (the performance-marketing platform that tracks clicks and conversions for each campaign), and working with sales to understand CPCs (cost per click) and the other performance metrics tied to the assets I used to just build.

The data side turned out to be a full job on its own, covering tracking, reporting, and handoffs between teams. We had interns who needed and wanted an opportunity, so I trained one of them on the analytics workflow, and they ended up owning the reporting entirely.

That became one of the most rewarding parts of the job. It freed me up, and it forced me to learn how to explain something I understood intuitively and how to be patient when someone processes things differently than I do. Working with people closely like that taught me about communication and empathy. Once they had the reporting running, I could start looking at the creative development side, which is where I actually wanted to be.

Training a team across time zones

The company wanted more creative output, so they brought in a team of engineers from India and told me to train them. I walked them through the responsive template system, the QA process, and the campaign workflow. A lot of it was screen-sharing Photoshop files and walking through how to slice them, export them, and plug them into the template system.

When something didn't land the first time, I found a different way to show it.

I tried to give them the same patience my teammates at Zeta had given me. They had room to get things wrong and figure them out, and within a few months they were building and shipping campaigns independently. The responsive template system we'd built drove a 65% increase in mobile conversions. Each handoff freed me for the next thing, which is how I ended up as Creative Development Manager, with a system solid enough that the team could carry it forward without me.

Paying forward the room I was given

At the time, none of this felt like "automation." It felt like solving the problem in front of me. Doing the same work twice was annoying, so I built a system, and being the bottleneck was annoying, so I shared the templates instead of keeping them to myself.

At Zeta it was Photoshop files and Bootstrap templates, and now at Trending Society it's AI pipelines and structured data schemas. The tools changed, and the habit of looking at a workflow and thinking "there has to be a better way to do this" stayed the same. The most valuable thing I picked up in ad tech was a second habit: building something, giving someone the opportunity to own it, and then going to find the next problem. That habit started because my team gave me room to explore work that wasn't technically my job. They gave me the pathway, and I'm grateful for it.