The churn arithmetic
Junior campaign operations roles have among the highest turnover in digital media — a majority leave inside 18 months. The work is repetitive, the consequences of small errors are high, and the career path out of it is unclear.
Each departure costs a hire cycle, three months of ramp, and a period where your senior people are teaching instead of producing.
What you are actually buying
When you hire to fix an operations backlog, you are buying throughput and paying for it with fixed cost, management attention, and training capacity. Throughput arrives in month four, if the hire works out.
Meanwhile the backlog exists now.
The underlying problem is usually process
Most ops backlogs are not caused by too few hands. They are caused by rework: incomplete briefs that bounce back, missing assets, undocumented conventions that make every build a decision, and QA discovered at the end instead of built in.
Add a person to a process with 30 percent rework and you have added 30 percent more rework.
Sequence that works
Fix the intake first — one complete brief format, enforced. Then templatize the build. Then move the standardized volume to elastic capacity, whether internal or partnered. Hire only for the judgment work that remains, which is a much smaller and much more retainable job.
The team you end up with is smaller, more senior, and considerably happier.