Publisher support can look like a continual stream of tickets, alerts, code changes, and urgent messages, but I see something more human underneath all of that. Behind every request is a publisher team trying to protect revenue, keep people employed, and stay focused on the work that made their audience show up in the first place.

I’ve been in adtech for over 10 years. When I first joined, my inexperience gave me a healthy respect for how complicated this business can be. Real-time decisions as the browser loads, deterministic audience-building, campaign delivery, and cutting-edge targeting technology all felt like five jobs at once. I spent eight or nine months learning as fast as I could, and trying to keep up with technology that kept moving under my feet.

After returning to the office post COVID, I hit a wall and began looking for a change. When Freestar reached out, the conversations felt effortless, and the bigger mission was clear: help publishers monetize well, maintain a free and open internet, and support the people making a living from work they care about.

I joined Freestar as a senior support engineer at an opportune moment. I was around the 90th employee; the support engineering team had only three people, and the company grew to almost 200 people within about a year. As the business expanded, the need for more leadership grew with it, taking me from associate director into my current role.

Our Support Team Is The Connective Tissue

Today, my team works across Publisher Support, Ad Quality, Data Support, and Trafficking. They all sit under the same umbrella because their work serves one practical goal: to protect publishers’ livelihoods. 

Ad Quality hunts malicious ads, page takeovers, and creative that isn’t brand-appropriate for a publisher’s site. Data Support works with yield and engineering to conduct deeper investigations, maintain clean data pipelines, and ensure accurate, error-free ingests. Trafficking acts as an adops extension for publishers running direct deals with brands and advertisers, helping them capture direct revenue without turning every campaign into another fire drill.

Publisher Support team is the connective tissue of the post-sales operation. Onboarding, customer success, yield, engineering, and our publishers all depend on it. The work ranges from configuration, technical consulting, custom code, and troubleshooting to ad quality enforcement, data investigations, discrepancy checks, and campaign trafficking for publishers.

Automate Away the Drag, but Keep the Care

As many will know, at Freestar our mantra is “Publisher First”, and for me, that has to mean people first. In support, it’s dangerously easy to see a name in a queue and think of that person as another problem. The better habit is to remember the human behind the request, whether that request comes from a publisher, an internal team, or someone trying to protect revenue on the other side.

Automation fits into that same philosophy. I always want my team to stay ahead of the curve, reading where the industry is going before the need becomes urgent. We’ve built tools, scripts, workflows, and internal applications for years, long before the current AI conversation took over the industry.

Not long ago, too many internal tools felt like bubble gum and duct tape, and too much work depended on throwing human beings at painful list-by-list processes. We built automations for line item generation and other laborious tasks that once required too many human hours. Automating those tasks gave people their time back and gave the support team more room to focus on the problems that actually require their expertise. 

Today, we’re focused on improving tools we’ve already built, including an internal troubleshooting browser extension that was first created years ago.

What’s more, the team uses tools such as Gemini, Cursor, and others to code faster, debug faster, build applications, quality-check their own work, and get to the root of troubleshooting issues more quickly. 

The point isn’t to replace expertise, because these are already skilled people with strong judgment. Instead, we let AI handle the easier work, so people have more time for the tasks which need context, critical thinking, urgency, and responsibility. Better tools can make the machine move faster, but the pulse still has to come from people who understand what’s at stake.

Programmatic support will always involve tickets, alerts, code changes, and urgent messages. The work moves quickly, and better automation can help teams keep pace. But the real measure of support is whether the people behind those requests feel understood, protected, and helped, because every technical fix ultimately connects back to a publisher, a business, and a team trying to keep doing meaningful work.