Lyza Haddag
After more than eight years as a media planner in agencies, I made a deliberate shift to the supplier side as a client partner in AdTech at TXT Media. It was not a predictable step up the traditional industry ladder. On paper, it looked lateral. It was expansive.
That transition clarified something fundamental about our industry. Career growth in digital is not linear because the ecosystem itself is not linear. Agencies, brands, platforms, and technology partners operate as interconnected nodes in a complex system. The professionals who understand that system horizontally, not just vertically, are often the ones who create the most durable impact.
In agencies, the work is immediate and client-facing. As a planner, your days are shaped by briefs, media strategies, and tight deadlines. You learn to translate business objectives into actionable plans, balance budgets, negotiate buys, and optimize campaigns in real time. The environment builds agility, commercial awareness, and sharp stakeholder management. These capabilities are foundational and valuable across the industry.
Yet agencies provide a specific vantage point, one that is close to the client and close to activation. That proximity builds strong empathy for brands and a focus on short-cycle wins. It also reflects a broader industry pattern. Digital marketing is often optimized at the campaign level, while structural inefficiencies remain unaddressed. When you operate within one node of the ecosystem, you solve for immediate performance. You improve campaigns, but you rarely redesign the conditions that create recurring friction.
Moving to the supplier side widened my perspective. As a client partner at TXT Media, my role shifted from optimizing one campaign at a time to enabling multiple agencies and clients to unlock sustained value from a platform. The questions changed. Instead of asking how to improve performance for a single brief, I began asking how to design solutions that prevent similar issues across teams.
This shift mirrors a larger evolution in the industry. As AdTech matures, competitive advantage increasingly depends on integration, interoperability, and operational efficiency. Product adoption, roadmap alignment, onboarding design, and data architecture are strategic levers. Working on the supplier side exposes you to those structural dimensions and highlights how infrastructure decisions shape downstream outcomes.
Three lessons stand out from this experience and carry broader implications for anyone building a career in digital.
Understanding the full value chain is a strategic advantage. Agencies, brands, and suppliers operate with different incentives, timelines, and measures of success. Agencies focus on delivery and performance. Brands prioritize governance, measurement consistency, and business impact. Suppliers emphasize scalability, product-market fit, and technical stability. Exposure to multiple environments reveals where friction consistently arises, from mismatched KPIs to fragmented data systems and procurement bottlenecks. Progress depends on professionals who can bridge these perspectives rather than defend one side.
Broader perspective multiplies impact. On the supplier side, influence can extend beyond a single brief. You can shape features, integrations, documentation, and enablement frameworks that eliminate repetitive inefficiencies. The work may feel less visible than a campaign win, but its effect compounds over time. In a landscape defined by complexity, scalable solutions generate exponential value. The industry increasingly rewards those who can strengthen systems, not just execute within them.
Transferable skills are the true currency of career growth. The planning instincts developed in agencies — audience logic, measurement literacy, commercial reasoning, and stakeholder communication — proved invaluable when translating client needs into product priorities. In turn, supplier experience sharpened my systems thinking and long-term orientation. Being fluent in both languages accelerates collaboration and builds trust, particularly as boundaries between media, commerce, and technology continue to blur.
Beyond skill development, there is also a mindset shift. Non-linear moves require humility and adaptability. They demand learning new vocabularies and redefining success metrics. Yet in an industry evolving as rapidly as digital, lateral expansion often accelerates growth more than incremental promotions.
For me, the move was not a detour but a strategic expansion of capability. It positioned me where execution meets infrastructure and where structural decisions shape performance at scale. The most powerful career growth in digital often comes not from climbing higher, but from seeing wider.
(Lyza Haddag is Senior Global Client Partner Director AdTech)
