Acceleration's director of ad operations says that if you involve the ad trafficker in a campaign from its earliest stages, the results will be phenomenal.

I've read many articles in which the trafficker is referred to as a member of a rare species, a person who spends his or her days performing a monotonous role filled with mundane tasks, and who is condemned to a career of dull operational jobs.

It's true: Traffickers are rare species, but not in the way that conventional wisdom holds. Traffickers are unique individuals who need to be skilled in a vast number of areas to make a difference, and there aren't too many of them around.

They need good technical skills -- including good HTML, Flash and Excel skills -- that are combined with rigorous attention to detail and a logical mind to understand why things don't always perform the way they should. The trafficker, although often undervalued and cut out of the loop, is the person closest to your campaign.

As such, he or she can provide real insight into why your campaign is performing in a particular way and provide an excellent understanding of the type of optimization that should occur. They can understand detail and analyze data, so why are they so often left out of the campaign briefing and strategy stages?

The insight they can provide if involved in a campaign from its earliest stages is phenomenal. A trafficker can provide advice on how a campaign should be run that provides an enormous amount of value for the client, who is paying not only for ad-serving but also for great results.

After all, much of the value of the online advertising medium is that we can really provide insight into users' activity and why certain user behaviors occur. The media planner or account manager is often not privy to this information, which means that agencies and clients alike simply accept campaigns that produce average performance.

Generally, they're so pleased when a good click rate is produced that they don't even think of the many ways that performance could be enhanced. There are a multitude of factors that are omitted that can really enhance performance and ultimate delivery or success of a campaign that traffickers understand the best of all those involved in an online campaign.

Traffickers should be close to clients
Acceleration encourages our traffickers (we call them campaign managers) to get close to the client, advise them and be part of overall strategy development. They work closely with agencies and their clients, and give input on how to maximize campaigns to their fullest.

A trafficker, in our view, should be there to support clients on any technical issues that may arise-- from creative development and creative concepts through to the never-ending saga of publisher and advertiser discrepancies. He or she should engage in publisher relations to educate the smaller publishers without much online advertising experience and give them valuable information that improves their relationships with advertisers and agencies.

A trafficker must work closely with the client on optimization and provide input on what could be damaging to a campaign as well as help clients to tag their sites correctly to optimize on creative. Such a person can also provide important insights into issues where conversion drop offs could be occurring.

So often in this industry we hear about trafficker burn-out and all the pain points associated with the role, but where is the glory it deserves? Credit should be given where it is due-- and I'm not talking about a good pat on the back. Use your traffickers effectively; give them opportunities to get close to clients and to see that they are making a difference-- that alone will be a fitting reward.

Indeed, a trafficker needs to traffic a campaign under relentless turnaround times, but today's technology streamlines trafficking, which can relieve these stresses and give an ad trafficker or campaign manager the time to focus on the detail.

Banishing the myth
Now is the time to banish the myth that the trafficker is nothing more than a low-level operational worker. Good traffickers are intelligent and consultative strategists who are far too often being left out of the picture to the detriment of the agencies and clients they work for. They could provide the most valuable information and insights into online media spend and grow alongside an agency or advertiser.

I often hear complaints that traffickers are hard to come by and that there is a huge gap in the market for finding experienced resources. Ad Operations Management people should be focusing more on training and sharing these valuable trafficking skills. At Acceleration, we focus much of our time on training and often use our campaign managers to train clients and more traffickers to pass on the skills effectively into the market.

Educating people so that we grow the base of resources with this unique skill set is essential. Who best to provide this training but an already proficient ad trafficker? If there is lack of resources in the industry, we only have ourselves to blame-- and perhaps the way that we undervalue our traffickers despite their scarcity.

The trafficker is an essential part of the machinery of online marketing. Undervalue and under use this proficient and insightful marketing professional at your own peril.

Liza Virissimo is director of ad operations at Acceleration. Read full bio.