Coinis has grown from a publisher into a global adtech company building its own AI-driven marketing platform. Today, it combines its own infrastructure and technology designed to simplify and scale advertising.
In this interview, Tatiana from AdOperator spoke with Tamara Jelic, VP of Business Development & Communications at Coinis. As a long-standing partner of AdOperator, Coinis offers a unique perspective on how performance marketing is evolving. We discussed the company’s transformation, the realities of running campaigns on platforms like Meta, and what separates sustainable growth from short-term wins. We also explored how shifts in user behavior and creative fatigue are influencing their decisions, which GEOs and verticals are driving results today, and how Coinis builds its product, teams, and culture to stay competitive in a rapidly changing adtech landscape.
Tatiana: For those who may be less familiar with Coinis, how would you describe the company today in a few sentences and numbers?
Tamara: This might come as a surprise to many who know us from more than a decade ago. But the bottom line is: Coinis is an AI marketing platform. To understand what that means, you have to know where we came from, and I'm sure you know the full story. Let me just try to sum it up in a meaningful way.
The company started in 2013 in Podgorica as a publisher, grew into a significant one, then moved into the affiliate world, and from there into running media buying and performance marketing at scale ourselves. Over 13 years, we went from being part of the advertising ecosystem to building the infrastructure on top of it. The AI platform was the natural next step for us. We didn't pivot into adtech, we “just” evolved through it.
With Coinis today, the experience is straightforward: you paste a product URL, the AI reads your site, extracts your brand identity: colors, tone, product catalog, and generates launch-ready creatives across formats. Images, video, UGC-style content, product shots. You can connect everything and launch organic posts on all your social media. Besides this, you can deploy ads directly to Meta. For now, we are fully operational only with Meta, but more networks are coming soon, so I will not spoil the news as they will be out.
Generally, most brands lose money not because their ads are bad, but because they keep running them too long or pull budget from the wrong place at the wrong time. With us, they will be able to hand everything to Coinis and let AI handle those calls, without anyone having to log in and check. One loop, one place, no agency required.
Tatiana: Sounds impressive! And how large is the Coinis team today? Where are your main offices located?
Tamara: 80+ full-time employees across Montenegro, the UAE, Cyprus, the US, and beyond. But the real number is closer to 120 when you include the contractors and specialists we work with globally: developers, creatives, media buyers, and regional experts. It's a genuinely distributed operation, and that spread matters. Our headquarters are in Montenegro, in a beautiful building next to the National Theatre overlooking the city park.
Tatiana: Your role is covering both business development and marketing at the same time. How do those two directions actually interact day to day?
Tamara: Honestly, it works because we built a team that grew with Coinis through all of its stages. These aren't people who came in with a fixed job description, they adapted every time the company did. What that created over time is a team where BD and marketing aren't two separate departments handing things off to each other.
The way I think about it: BD tells you what the market actually needs, and marketing tells you how to speak to it. When those two things are happening in the same room, by the same people, you stop wasting time on messaging that sounds good internally but lands flat externally.
Every partner conversation I have feeds back into how we position the product. Every campaign we run shapes the quality of conversations that walk through the door. One sharpens the other. So for us, this feels like we're not guessing what our market cares about, but we're hearing it directly and responding to it in real time.
Tatiana: A few questions about the events. You’re actively involved in industry conferences. What do you personally get out of them beyond the obvious networking side?
Tamara: Beyond the obvious? Honestly, the feeling you get in a good conversation that no virtual call can replicate. There's something that happens when you're in the same room with someone, you get past the pleasantries, and suddenly you're actually exchanging ideas. Challenging each other. Finishing each other's sentences. That kind of connection doesn't happen on a calendar invite.
I've had conversations at conferences that completely changed how I thought about a market or a product decision, not because someone gave me data, but because we were genuinely thinking out loud together. And I think that's what people underestimate about events. It's not just networking. Its ideas, opinions, “off the record” talks, and many points that help you both personally and professionally.
Tatiana: Do you think live events still matter in affiliate marketing, or is the industry finding other ways to do what conferences used to do?
Tamara: Yes, they still matter. But I want to be specific about why. The affiliate industry runs on trust. And trust, in this business, is built on track record and personal relationships. You can have the best offer in the market, but if a publisher doesn't know you, doesn't have a feel for who you are and how you operate, they're going to prioritize someone they've met. That's just how it works. Events are where those first impressions happen, and where existing relationships get reinforced in a way that an online call simply can't match.
The second thing, and this is more practical, is “market intelligence”. The affiliate space moves fast. Algorithm changes, platform shifts, regulatory pressure, GEOs opening up or closing down. The people who are ahead of those moves are usually the ones who were in the right room at the right time. Not because someone gave a talk about it. Because someone mentioned it offhand over dinner, and three other people around the table had noticed the same thing. That kind of early signal is genuinely valuable, and you can't get it from a newsletter.
So yes, the deals get signed online, the campaigns run remotely, most of the day-to-day is digital. But the relationships that make those deals possible, and the intelligence that keeps you ahead, still get built in person. That's not nostalgia. That's just how this industry operates.
Tatiana: Seems to have real value! Okay, let’s talk more about Coinis. You changed brand identity and completely relaunched your product. Is there something about Coinis that you feel the industry still hasn't quite figured out?
Tamara: That we built this from the inside. We have a performance marketing team that runs real campaigns. We saw the problems firsthand. Things like the hustle with delivering fresh creatives, the time spent on manual optimization, the problem with uploading thousands of campaigns daily, etc., based on that, we built the tool we needed. That's literally how this transformation came to life. The new Coinis exists because people who live in the advertising space every day pushed for it. So when I hear "I didn't realize you did X", that's usually because people assume we're another AI-first startup that learned advertising from a whitepaper. We didn't. We came from inside the problem.
Tatiana: Coinis operates across both advertiser and publisher sides. Which side is harder to grow right now?
Tamara: I'd push back slightly on the framing of "harder." Every segment has its challenges. The question is whether you see a challenge as a friction point or as a signal telling you something important. My opinion personally? The publisher side takes longer to get right. There are more variables to consider, like traffic quality, vertical alignment, compliance, payout structure, and making sure both sides of the equation are actually set up for success. But when we get that right, everything seems to run smoothly after.
On the other hand, the advertiser side is more direct: there's a clear problem, a clear outcome, and the ROI story is easy to tell. That makes it faster to close but not necessarily easier to retain. The real work in both cases is the same: understanding what someone actually needs and delivering this, or better.
And what advertisers need right now is pretty consistent across the board. They want good creatives without paying a designer, they want their campaigns to run without babysitting them, and they want to know what's working without digging through spreadsheets. That's exactly what the new Coinis is built around. You come in, paste your product URL, the AI generates the creatives, you launch to Meta, and things get easier.
As for those who become our Enterprise clients, they are able to utilize our account infrastructure through the platform. The performance reporting is right there in the same platform, real-time, no exports needed. For an advertiser who's been managing all of that manually or paying an agency to do it, that's a very clear value proposition. The gap between what they're dealing with today and what Coinis gives them is obvious from the first session.
Tatiana: When it comes to scaling on platforms like Meta today, where do advertisers struggle the most?
Tamara: Honestly, the same two things keep coming up, no matter who we talk to. The first is creative. Not the quality of it as most advertisers can make a decent ad. The problem is volume and speed, I guess. We noticed internally that Meta rewards fresh creatives. The moment something starts fatiguing, performance drops, and if you don't have something ready to replace it immediately, you're losing money. Most brands are running behind in this area as they have three or four ads doing all the work and no pipeline behind them. Not to mention that they have to constantly check their competitors and track their winning ads. So there is the creative part.
The other part is the whole infrastructure behind the advertising itself. Spend limits, trust scores, disapprovals — things that have nothing to do with how good your ad is but will stop your campaign cold anyway. A lot of advertisers don't even realise this is the problem until they've wasted significant budget trying to figure out why something that worked last month isn't working now.
And what Coinis does is address both. The creative pipeline problem gets solved because the AI is continuously generating and rotating. The idea is to have a system where the ad learns how to get better with time on its own, right? And this is what we are moving towards. And for our Enterprise clients, we solve the infrastructure problem through our partnership with Meta, and we guarantee proper setup and scale starting day 1. When you remove both of those friction points at the same time, scaling on Meta becomes a very different experience.
Tatiana: Coinis is clearly growing and expanding across different markets. What challenges come with managing multiple projects? How to stay focused on scaling?
Tamara: We don't try to manage everything from the center, and that is where I believe most companies go wrong. Each project has a dedicated team with real ownership, real accountability, and the autonomy to move fast. What we do centrally is data. Every team is running on the same performance intelligence, leveraging AI to the maximum to flag what's working and what isn't before it becomes a problem.
Focus, for me personally, comes from being ruthless about prioritization. If you can't clearly define what winning looks like for something this quarter, you're probably running too many things. We've gotten better at killing projects faster, which sounds harsh but is actually the most respectful thing you can do for a team. Stop spreading them thin on something that isn't compounding and let them go deep on what is.
Tatiana: Let's move on. Now I'd like to hear your opinion about adtech trends and market perspectives. What does it actually take to stay competitive as an ad platform right now?
Tamara: Look, everyone will give you a different answer on this, but from where I sit, it comes down to three things. Speed, and I mean real speed, not "we're agile." The AI space is moving faster than any product roadmap can keep up with. If you're not shipping, you're falling behind. It's that simple.
Creative quality. Users feel this immediately. You can have the best campaign management in the world, but if the ads you're generating look like every other AI tool out there, people will leave. The output has to be genuinely good, not just functional.
And finally, trust. This one doesn't get talked about enough. The platforms that lose users don't usually lose them because of a bad feature. They lose them because something broke their confidence. For example, an account issue, a data problem, or something that made them feel unsafe. Once that's gone, it's very hard to get back. We've been in this industry for 13+ years, and that reputation matters to us more than any feature we could ship. You can rebuild a product. You can't easily rebuild trust.
Tatiana: In your opinion, what's one shift in traffic or user behavior that you think most companies haven't caught up with yet?
Tamara: Creative fatigue keeps coming up in this conversation, and that's not a coincidence. It's genuinely the thing we see most consistently across brands of every size right now. The old playbook: find a winner, scale it, ride it for months, and that cycle is now weeks. Sometimes days. The brands winning right now treat creative like a newsroom. Constant production, constant testing, always something new in rotation. Most are still running on the old rhythm. Example: make four ads, pick the best one, and hope it holds. The feed moves faster, users have more options, attention is shorter. The brands that haven't figured that out yet are essentially paying to run experiments for the ones that have.
Tatiana: Based on your experience, which GEOs, verticals, and traffic types tend to show the most sustainable performance today?
Tamara: It depends on what you're asking about. If you're asking about Meta advertising specifically, we're seeing health and beauty on a strong rise among our clients, and eCommerce is performing well broadly. Though the Meta environment deserves a word first: the platform is more competitive and more expensive than it was two years ago, which means creative quality and account infrastructure matter more than ever. Brands that come in without both those things sorted are going to struggle regardless of vertical.
If you're asking about the general affiliate space — Tier-1 markets, the US, UK, Western Europe, are our most stable grounds. Deep relationships, high payouts, consistent performance, even if the scaling headroom is more limited because saturation is real there.
The genuinely exciting growth is in Southeast Asia and Latin America for eCommerce — markets that are still early in affiliate maturity, and we're getting in ahead of the curve. Software and utilities have been a long-term strength — solid LTV, partners who actually understand the product. And mobile apps are something we're watching closely.
There's a wave of AI-powered apps with real retention metrics that need distribution, and affiliate is still underused for them relative to paid social. We see that as a meaningful near-term opportunity. Traffic-wise: mobile-first and intent-driven sources are outperforming across the board. Push and in-app hold up well in emerging markets; search and comparison traffic remains the backbone in Tier-1.
Tatiana: Thanks, this is what interests our readers, among other things. And how do you see AI reshaping adtech over the next few years?
Tamara: The honest answer is that most of what people still call "AI in adtech" is just automation with a better name. Bid adjustments, creative rotation, budget shifts — that's table stakes now. If that's your AI story in 2026, you're already behind.
What's actually happening, and what I think most companies haven't fully reckoned with, is that AI is moving from doing the work to making the calls. Not just running the campaign but deciding which creative direction to push, which audience to go after, when something is fatigued before the numbers tell you it is. That requires real learning from real performance data, and that's where the gap between platforms will become very visible very quickly. You can't shortcut that with a good UI.
Where I think this lands in the next few years is simple: marketing stops being something you manage and becomes something that runs. Brands set the direction, AI handles everything underneath. The people and platforms that get there first won't just have a product advantage, they'll have a data advantage that compounds every single day. That's what we're building toward at Coinis.
Tatiana: The company seems to put a lot into building team culture. What does that actually look like in practice?
Tamara: Team culture at Coinis sits somewhere between a startup and a corporation. We’ve kept the energy and closeness of a small team even as we’ve grown to a huge international team, but we’ve also built the structure that lets us deliver at scale.
What really defines us is a shared obsession with adtech. Everyone here is genuinely excited about the space, and that enthusiasm is the glue that holds the team together.
The principle we lead with is a lot of freedom paired with a lot of responsibility. We don’t micromanage. People are trusted to work in the way that suits them best, but they’re also expected to own their outcomes. That balance only works if the people you hire are capable and accountable, and ours are.
We also try to be kind without being soft. We tell each other the truth, we don’t expect everyone to agree all the time, and we genuinely believe ideas get better when they’re challenged. Harmony for its own sake isn’t the goal: making each other and the work sharper is.
Our HQ in Podgorica reflects all of this. It’s designed to give people room to focus when they need to, and space to hang out, play, and actually enjoy being around each other the rest of the time. Relationships matter to us, and the office is built around that.
Tatiana: A few more personal questions in conclusion. What do you genuinely enjoy doing outside of work, what helps you reset?
Tamara: Honestly, I didn't expect this one, but I'll take it :) Outside of work I'm pretty simple. Family, close friends, people who knew me before any of this. I sing, which surprises most people who only know me in a professional context. I work out. And I've made a real effort to protect the part of me that still has the dreams I had as a kid, however corny that sounds. I think you lose something important when you let that go.
One thing that's become genuinely meaningful to me is mentoring young people, kids, and students who are trying to figure out what they want to build their lives around. We have programs at Coinis where I get to be part of that, and it's one of the things I look forward to most. Not because I have all the answers, but because I remember what it felt like to need someone to tell you that the thing you care about is worth pursuing. If I can be that person for even a few of them, that matters more to me than most things on my CV.
I love this job — genuinely. But I've learned that the best ideas come when you step away from the screen. My version of that is simple: people I love, music, movement. Nothing complicated. It just keeps everything in balance.
Tatiana: What is your dream for Coinis? Where do you want Coinis to be in 3–5 years?
Tamara: The platform that made serious advertising accessible to any brand, regardless of size. Right now, great creative and great media buying are largely gated behind agency fees, and let's be honest, we are talking about how our appetite for instant solutions has grown in the past year. And what we want to do is to close that gap entirely.
Personally, I want to see Coinis as the number one AI marketing platform used by world-renowned brands to create content and ads that I would actually stop scrolling for. That's the bar. Not technically impressive, not industry-recognised, but ads that are genuinely good enough that I'd watch them. If we get there, everything else follows.
A big thank you to Tamara personally and the Coinis team for taking the time to share their perspective and insights with AdOperator. It was a very interesting conversation about the realities of modern adtech, performance marketing, and the growing role of AI in shaping the industry. We appreciate the openness, thoughtful answers, and the opportunity to discuss not only technology and business, but also the people and ideas behind Coinis.
