Behind The Vine With Trista Jensen

Our mission at Mediavine is to partner with influencers so we can help them build sustainable businesses. It’s our pleasure to provide full service ad management for over 6,000 content creators (and more every day!). Although we might be primarily known in the blogging industry as an “ad company,” the Mediavine team sees ads as only the beginning.

For us, that means taking products like our valuable WordPress plugin Create, as well as our social sharing plugin Grow (formerly Social Pug) and making them available to everyone, whether they monetize with Mediavine ads or not.

We also strive to serve as an educational resource for the industry on all topics relevant to content creators — the fringe benefit of this is getting to hear from all sorts of incredible people through our blog posts and Facebook Live series.

Speaking of that ever-growing list of publishers, it’s time to introduce you to our Lead Launch Engineer Trista Jensen. She is a huge part of getting new publishers started with Mediavine once their application has been approved.

Please welcome Trista, and also her Great Dane Fritzie, to the Mediavine blog!

Tell us your name and where you’re from.

I’m Trista Jensen. I’m from southern Minnesota but live in the Twin Cities now.

What does “Lead Launch Engineer” mean? What do you actually do on any given day?

I co-lead an amazingly talented and quirky group of Support Engineers while focusing on the onboarding of new publishers! I take our publishers from the contract stage to the launching of our ads.

So on any given day I’m sending contracts to new publishers, troubleshooting site setup to make the implementation of our ads as smooth as possible, launching a site with ads, helping with hiring and onboarding of new staff, assisting publishers or new site owners with site sales and evangelizing our support and products to anyone that will listen.

My family really has no idea what I do at “the Mediavine” — just that I love my job.

How long have you been with Mediavine?

Almost 2.5 crazy/awesome years!

How have you seen the company change in that time?

The growth has been non-stop and incredible. We’ve become more agile — it’s not easy to scale that quickly. This company and the founders have done that with as much grace as possible in my opinion. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the dedication to supporting our publishers.

I started when the employee count was between 15-20 people — we’re now at over 80. The publisher growth has been incredible to be part of. When I started we had about 2k publishers, and somehow in the past two years we’ve grown to an awesome 7,300+.

My favorite part of the day is “welcoming” a new publisher into the family. 

Besides employee and publisher growth, the array of technology we offer has changed drastically with Create, Grow, and Trellis on the horizon. The improvements to the script wrapper, video player and the soon-to-be new dashboard are crazy awesome.

The roadmap of this company is so exciting.

What is the one thing you want publishers to know about what goes into the Mediavine technology they use daily?

That there is extreme care and intention behind its planning, creation and implementation.

The founders’ first priority is our publishers. They want to Create — see what I did there 😉 — innovative, well-tested products and features that publishers can trust.

How has the Mediavine ad tech evolved since you arrived? If you could describe the future of Mediavine’s ad tech in 3 words, what would they be?

I don’t think ANYTHING ad tech wise has stayed the same — Mediavine works so tirelessly for continuous improvement.  That’s also the beauty of working in ad tech, you learn 87 new things a day and nothing is ever stagnant.

In three words: Crazy-fast, Optimized, Publisher-Focused

What are the most exciting things you’re working on and how do you see them positively impacting Mediavine publishers?

We’re working on so many internal and external help documents along with improving processes continually. Our support team is like no other I’ve worked with. Our goal is to remain approachable and human — not robotic and cold.

We want to make sure any new features or products we support are easy to understand for all of our publishers.

Do you have any pets? What do they do for fun when you’re working? 

I have Fritzie the Great Dane. She sometimes goes to doggie daycare, other days she snoozes on the couch or woofs at any and all Amazon delivery people. And the UPS man. And the Post Office lady. Basically anyone.

What do you do for fun when you’re not working?

I go to a bunch of Great Dane meetups, help with the Great Dane Rescue events, visit family and read. Brunch or bingo are never turned down. I’m SLOWLY dipping my toes into creating my own blog.

Thanks for joining us on the blog, Trista!