For three years, Telegraph Media Group was “for sale.” With two deals falling through in 2025 alone, this created uncertainty and fears of redundancy. Simultaneousl, the Advertising Operations team were facing a stagnant programmatic market, double-digit budget growth, and bottlenecks in creative execution.

Others might have waited for a roadmap, but AdOps knew that stagnation was the real risk. So they decided to proactively fill the gap as a lean unit. The challenge was to maintain elite service quality while running two major side-desk pilots – a self-initiated creative services test to prove commercial viability without incremental resources, and being early adopters of AI agents.

The team’s 2025 narrative is a masterclass in resilience and “bottom-up” innovation, proving that technology enhances rather than replaces human intelligence. Identifying a gap in high-yield creative, they ran a two-month pilot that triggered a revolution – the creation of Ad.Studio, the Telegraph’s internal creative solutions agency.

AdOps engineered the full operational framework, pricing and workflows, developed 21 new ad creative features, and democratised access to high-impact creatives by making it accessible to smaller and independent brands. What started as a test helped Telegraph Media Group scale their creative support from 20 to 70 clients year-on-year.

Instead of fearing automation, AdOps leaned in. They built custom AI agents to automate time-consuming tasks, reducing optimisation times per campaign from 25 minutes to two. They built three more agents that saved the team 12 hours per week. Their data-backed success proved that AI allows humans to focus on high-value strategy.

All this meant that the team had more time to act as commercial consultants. They collaborated with Project Brailsford, which focused on marginal gains, to find "hidden" revenue. They successfully migrated their attention measurement and brand uplift studies to DoubleVerify and Celtra while onboarding Scope3 for sustainability measurement.

The team’s proactive "builder" mindset delivered transformative financial and operational results, from uplift from found revenue to savings from in-housing creative production. They proved that campaign management isn’t just about KPIs; their proactive optimisations and recommendations to clients generating real value in incremental upweights. Despite record workloads and key staff leaves, the team maintained a culture of “trust and autonomy”, steering the business through a major technological shift while proving that human intelligence is at the core of every automated success.

Return to Case Studies