Before I joined StackAdapt I had no adtech experience, so there was a ton to learn about this industry. Thinking back to my experience with that learning curve, one exercise that I found really helpful in ramping up was what I call Intensive Reading of Industry Publications (I guess I can use IRIP as its acronym). I believe this methodology can be helpful for not just ad tech, but for anyone diving into a new domain in general.

How to do Intensive Reading of Industry Publications (IRIP)

The concept of IRIP is really quite simple:

1. Pick a reputable industry publication, such as newsletter
2. Every day, select one article from this publication
3. Challenge yourself to understand 100% of that article

There are a few key points here.

First, I make sure the publication I choose is a reputable, well-recognized one, so I know the concepts are fresh, terminologies are accurate, and the topics are relevant. After all, I do this IRIP exercise because I am learning about something that I know little about, so the quality of my learning material sets the bar for the quality of the content I input into my mind. Just like if I were learning English, reading The New York Times vs. reading tabloid articles would make me pick up different things. (By the way, the word “reading” is in the name of this exercise, but watching webinars works just as well.)

Specific to ad tech, Ad Age, Digiday, Emarketer, AdExchanger all have great newsletters.

Second, one article per day worked well for me, and I found no need to do more. This is quite a time-consuming exercise, so I felt like setting the daily goal to one was a good way to set myself up for success.

Third, it’s really important to aim to 100% understand the article. This means looking up every term — and if I need to learn three other industry jargons to understand this one, look those up too. This means getting to the bottom of every industry trend mentioned — and if that requires lots of context of a tech stack or business model, dive into it too. And this means looking up every company or key person discussed — and if I don’t know why they matter, I need to. I would keep going after anything I still don’t understand, until I feel like I can 100% confidently paraphrase the entire article.

Why IRIP works

I often think about this exercise as “learning to speak the language” of a new industry, and I think it works well because language matters. With the IRIP exercise, I build up the “vocabulary” and “grammar” of the industry, and once I am able to put domain knowledge concepts into the mental map of the new terrain, learning accelerates significantly.

An analogy I like to use for this is, doing my daily industry publication article reading — with the “100% understand” goal in mind — is like doing a Depth First Search (DFS) in a graph of knowledge. As discussed before, I challenge myself to understand 100% of what gets in front of me that day, and I go deep until there is no more unknowns left. I believe this DFS-like, Intensive Reading method works better than “Extensive Reading” or — you guessed it — Breadth First Search (BFS). My reason is, unlike learning a new foreign language in school, as professionals we are often learning for the sake of production. “Hit the ground running”, as you must have heard. So I find that DFS can be more applicable in my job than BFS. To use an adtech example, if I take some time to deep dive into everything I need to learn about Publisher-Direct Deals, then I can start working on relevant projects right away, even if I haven’t read anything about other types of deals — which I can get to later.

Etymology

Throughout this article you may have noticed I keep referencing the analogy of learning a foreign language. I actually got the inspiration of this Intensive Reading of Industry Publications (IRIP) method from “Intensive Reading”, which was actually an English-as-second language (ESL) exercise I did a lot as an ESL learner. 🙂