Best line to add to your resume: “I’m a jerk”

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Best line to add to your resume: “I’m a jerk” (September 14, 2026)

BY ROB BEELER

BTW, I have no evidence to support the subject line. In fact, in a world where AI scans resumes, I’d wager it is probably a terrible idea. I’d also say “jerk” wasn’t the word I wanted to use, but alas, I’m going to cave and not have a subject line with the word asshole in it. I will also make the point that this is not a reflection of anything that happened this week at work. 

I’ve done this long enough to be 100% certain that there are times when I’m just being grumpy. I don’t want to talk about late creatives — that’s a you problem, not a me problem. I’ll just have to clean up the mess and, at the end, try to explain again why a campaign that started 15 days late didn’t deliver on a 30-day campaign. 

But there is a part of being a nudge/jerk/pick your word that is, in fact, my job, and it should be part of yours as well. 

It’s actually quite simple: the order-taker part of your job is most likely going away. All that will remain will be the part where you become a stick in the mud and explain that just taking an order was probably not the right thing to do in the first place. 

One of you is already composing your response to this argument.

You’re going to tell me I’ve framed it wrong. Yes, no more order-taking, but “that will free everyone up to be more strategic, more client-facing, more creative, etc.”

Yes, but definitely no. 

In ad ops, I hear second-hand what clients want, and some of it is dumb. You absolutely need — in your pocket, in the back room (not in the client meeting) — someone who is going to tell you that. Al is going to make more stupid faster. If your idea is to keep pace with the acceleration of stupidity… I’m not even going to end that sentence. 

The new world is about efficiency, and you need to be all over that. I just suggest that at least one of the humans you keep in the loop is a pain in the ass. I’m not sure how you train one, but I know that if you hire people who’ve been around the block, they’ll know to drop the niceties and simply say, “That’s not going to work,” just like you need them to.

Here’s what you need to know this week… 

  • By the time you read this, Base.Camp La Jolla, could already be sold out. Really. In the past few weeks, leaders from Condé Nast, Vox Media, Fortune, Formedics, Q.Digital Inc, Black Enterprise, Graham Media Group, Ebony Media, TripAdvisor, and Farm Journal have committed to attend. We can’t guarantee space, but if you still want to attend, this is probably your last chance to raise your hand.

  • BIG NEWS: The agenda for Base.Camp Madrid is live! We’ve packed our three days together with the conversations we know this community wants to have, including where AI is actually taking publishing, what comes next for programmatic and direct, how new revenue streams fit together, and what all of this looks like when you’re the one trying to make it work. We’ve also unveiled our famous Tuesday afternoon activities. Want to join us this November? Let us know.

  • Join us on September 17 at 1 pm ET, Camp.Fire: Business Insider’s Ad Telemetry System! Business Insider has an internal Ad Telemetry dashboard and they are going to share what they have built. This is a publisher- and In View-only event.

  • Finally, save the date for September 24 at 3 pm ET for another Camp.Fire: What’s in your morning report, and who actually reads it? Every rev ops team has a morning reporting or dashboard ritual. Between automated BI alerts, GAM dashboards, and client-side telemetry, daily reports can get bloated, making them hard to read or taking too long, or worse yet ignored by the people receiving them. We’ll come together to compare notes and talk about translating technical telemetry for non-technical executives. This is a publisher- and In View-only event.

Want to get caught up on everything we’ve published? Start here.

Here’s the latest…  

  • Publishers have a content provenance problem, but C2PA is only part of the conversation (by Liz Moorehead)
    Publishers are watching the economic scales of their content tip even more out of their favor. AI “solutions” can ingest, summarize, excerpt, repackage and serve information without ever sending people back to the publishers who created it in the first place. So now we’re all trying to figure out (with admittedly varying degrees of interest) how to tell what came from where, who owns what, and which players are trying to skirt attribution entirely without anyone noticing.

  • Start ’em, sit ’em: The publisher priorities that deserve attention in H2 2026 (with Craig Leshen of adops.com) 
    Publishers are making decisions in a market that feels less predictable than it did a few years ago. Search traffic is under pressure, buyer expectations are sharper, and more of the audience journey is happening inside platforms. For example, Reuters reported that social media and video networks are now go-to news sources for 54% of respondents globally, ahead of news organizations’ own websites and apps at 51%.

  • Programmatic risk: Why elevated exposure is now the baseline (with Confiant’s Danielle Koffler)
    While programmatic has delivered unprecedented scale for publishers over the years, it’s also handed them a supply chain they cannot fully see. Malicious and low-quality ads travel through the same trusted pipes as legitimate demand, and when something harmful reaches a user, it lands under the publisher’s brand, on the publisher’s page.

A full list of our 2026 events we’re involved in, all in one nice little package:

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