How to Hire the Right AdTech Developers for Your Project

Ad fraud, the GDPR, and ITP are not the only problems AdTech companies must tackle today. Many are struggling with challenges tied directly to their core offering — their technology.

Which Problems Are You Currently Facing?

Most AdTech companies encounter some version of the same technological bottlenecks:

• Too many client requests and not enough time to address them.
• Not enough technical resources to expand the core product or build new features and tools.
• A lack of experience, skills, and domain knowledge among in-house developers or an external development team.

What Impact Does This Have on the Business?

The consequences vary by company, but the most common ones include:

• Lack of data ownership
• No control over the product roadmap
• Inability to compete or differentiate from the competition
• Low revenue and profit
• Difficulty winning new clients
• Inability to expand into emerging areas (e.g., CTV, DOOH)
• Client complaints about the lack of performance and features in existing platforms

The Solution: Hiring AdTech Developers

The solution may seem straightforward, but hiring AdTech developers tends to introduce an entirely new set of problems.

There are three main options companies have when bringing in AdTech programmers:

• Hiring in-house AdTech developers.
• Working with an outsourcing or body-leasing company.
• Partnering with a specialized AdTech and MarTech development firm.

Here's a look at the pros and cons of each option.

In-House Developers

Pros

Accountability: There is typically a higher level of accountability when developers work for a company directly.

Cons

Cost: Hiring developers is a lengthy process, meaning productivity is lost during recruiting. Companies also have to continue paying salaries when development is scaled back — for example, while users are testing the software.

HR overhead: Hiring, managing departures, tracking leave, and ensuring the right number of technical resources are available at all times all add risk to project success.

Quality: Without developers who have specific AdTech experience, the result is often a low-quality product while the team works through a steep and lengthy learning curve. AdTech and MarTech are specialized areas of software development, and that specialization takes time to acquire.

Outsourcing and Body-Leasing Companies

Outsourcing (also referred to as body-leasing) companies are generally made up of hundreds or even thousands of designers and programmers who can be engaged by AdTech vendors and agencies to work on their projects.

Offshore outsourcing typically means working across significant time zones, which can affect daytime communication and responsiveness.

Nearshore outsourcing, by contrast, involves working with companies in closer, neighbouring countries. With the right remote-team management tools in place, that kind of collaboration may not differ much from employing developers directly.

Outsourcing development does offer genuine benefits worth considering.

Pros

Cost: In some cases, hiring from an offshore outsourcing company can work out cheaper than hiring directly. That said, nearshore outsourcing options can, in specific situations, end up costing as much as — or more than — direct hiring.

Access to talent: With the growing demand for skilled IT specialists in specific technologies, outsourcing is increasingly a necessity rather than simply a cost-reduction measure. In some domains, it may be the only realistic way to find professionals with the required expertise.

Speed of hiring: Outsourcing eliminates much of the time and administrative effort involved in direct employment. Because the outsourcing firm already has specialists on staff, teams can be available for an immediate start.

No HR burden: Since engagements are billed for actual development time, companies avoid the HR and legal complexity associated with direct hiring — relocations, visas, work permits, and the like.

Cons

Quality: Finding outsourcing companies with genuine experience in designing, building, and maintaining advertising and marketing technology is one of the primary challenges vendors, brands, and agencies face. A lack of domain expertise and understanding of the inner workings of the AdTech ecosystem can compromise project quality significantly. In extreme cases, products never reach release at all.

Time to market: While outsourced developers can be engaged much faster than in-house hires, the actual time to deliver a finished AdTech platform to initial users tends to be considerably longer.

This is a direct consequence of developers — however skilled technically — lacking the specific domain expertise needed to finalize the project. The steep and lengthy learning curve that an outsourcing partner must navigate not only extends time to market but also creates a range of secondary problems that are difficult to anticipate at the outset of the engagement.

Accountability: Large body-leasing companies seldom offer the level of accountability most clients are looking for.

Specialized AdTech Development Partners

A specialized development partner is a firm with deep, focused experience in a specific area of software development. These companies typically offer full-service development resources: designers, project managers, front-end and back-end developers, DevOps, and QA and testing specialists.

Pros

Quality: Working with specialized AdTech engineers tends to produce a significantly higher-quality product compared to in-house or outsourced teams without domain experience. Projects that lack experienced developers who understand how AdTech actually works are at a high risk of failure.

Domain knowledge: Having to explain concepts like frequency capping, CDPs, CRMs, or cookie syncing to a development team immediately puts a project behind schedule. A partner that understands the online advertising and marketing industries — from both a functional and technical perspective — eliminates the need for that education and saves considerable time.

Technical resources: A specialized AdTech development firm brings all the required know-how and resources to manage the complete technical side of the project. This frees up the client team to focus on core business activities — growing the business and acquiring new clients.

Time to market: AdTech and MarTech platforms — DSPs, SSPs, CDPs, CRMs — are inherently feature-rich and require numerous integrations with other systems. An inexperienced development partner will struggle to identify the right core features for an MVP. An experienced one can scope the MVP efficiently, recommend the optimal tech stack (frameworks, infrastructure, and programming languages) during the prototyping phase, and get a working version in front of initial users in the shortest time possible.

Cons

Cost: Eliminating the disadvantages of the two previous options comes at a price. Specialized development partners are typically more expensive than most outsourcing companies. Depending on the client's location, the cost may be comparable to — or even higher than — hiring in-house developers, particularly in high-cost cities like New York, San Francisco, or London.

That said, the investment generally pays off over the long term: the outcome is a product that genuinely meets the business's needs, rather than one that stalls, underperforms, or never ships.

Here's a summary of the main advantages and disadvantages across all three development options:

Choosing the right development approach ultimately comes down to the specific constraints of the project — timeline, budget, and the depth of AdTech domain knowledge required. For most companies building core AdTech infrastructure, domain expertise is the variable that most directly determines whether a product ships successfully, and it's the one most often underestimated at the start of an engagement.