Operative Blog

For over 10 years, Operative has helped publishers of all sizes assess, select, implement and manage ad servers. We’ve also designed training, delivered technical support, and created custom reports for our clients. Along the way we’ve learned the ins and outs of the leading platforms, including DFP for Small Business, DFP Premium, ADTECH, Open AdStream (OAS), and OpenX Enterprise.

So which ad server do we recommend for your enterprise? The answer, it turns out, entirely depends of your level of experience in ad serving, your “learning curve” appetite, selling strategies and a host of other factors. To learn more, our blog editor Amy Inlow, spoke with Barnaby Edwards, one of our product managers and ad server experts, on how publishers should go about selecting an ad server that’s right for their enterprise.

Amy: Let’s start at the very beginning. What should a publisher think about when selecting an ad server?

Barnaby: The first thing you need to consider is your level of experience. Are you a start-up? Or are you an established publisher who has out-grown your current ad server? Start-ups may do fine with free ad server, such as DFP for Small Business, which offers basic targeting, standard reporting and other features to get the publisher up and running quickly and easily. But it’s just a stepping-stone to a more robust system.

Another consideration: Your future plans. Don’t select an ad server that only supports display ads if your goal is to offer video or mobile ad placement a few years down the road. Migrating all of those tags to the new server will be a complex process, especially with active and planned campaigns to accommodate.

Publishers should also take their selling strategies into account. Do they plan to sell remnant inventory via third-party exchanges? Do they want to sell premium ad bundles? Advanced targeting? Capabilities for all of these things vary from server to server.

And ease-of-use is critical. How much of a learning curve can you handle? Are you okay with a complex implementation? Or do you prefer something that’s more out-of-the-box? The more flexible the system, the better the control you have over your environment. But you’ll need a higher level skill set for running your ad server and making changes.

Amy: Let’s say I’m a publisher who’s just starting out. Which ad servers would you recommend, and why?

Barnaby: DFP for Small Business would be a good choice, especially if you’re a very small publisher who’s just beginning to sell ad space and have just a few premium deals. It’s free, simple, and basic. You can do geotargeting, time of day and placement targeting, run standard reports, and do some campaign optimization. And if you don’t have a direct sales team, its integration with AdSense will be essential to monetize your inventory. Support is a bit of a challenge however, since it’s mostly self-service.

OpenX Enterprise is also a good choice for publishers who are just starting out and want a server that will grow with them for a while. The interface is simple and its workflows are intuitive and Web 2.0 friendly. You can do geo-targeting (by longitude and latitude), retargeting, behavioral targeting, and create and sell audience segments. And it’s integrated with OpenX Market, which is an ad exchange where you can sell remnant inventory.

One of the things I really like about OpenX Enterprise is its Server-Side tagging feature, which essentially lets the publisher create and manage tag with its interface. There’s no need to muck around on the publishers website – or engage development resources – to update tags.

Forecasting is a bit of a drawback with OpenX Enterprise in that you need to build a campaign in order to see the amount of inventory you’ll have available, which is a lot of extra work.

Amy: And let’s go to the opposite extreme – which ad server is best for large publishers?

Barnaby: DFP Premium is the industry standard – and the reason why Google acquired DoubleClick. The ad server is very flexible, offers granular targeting and robust campaign optimization and forecasting capabilities. In fact, it’s designed to handle any requirement a publisher may have.

The forecasting and campaign optimization uses predictive modeling and algorithms that are unique to the publisher, and are really quite advanced. It’s the best bet for publishers who need to deliver great campaign results for their advertisers.

DFP Premium integrates with DoubleClick Ad Exchange, making it easy for publishers to sell their remnant inventory. And it supports Dynamic Optimization, which means prior to delivering an ad, ad server will look at the publisher’s guaranteed campaigns, and test what the impression will garner on the open market and sell it to the buyer with the highest CPM.

DFP Premium’s architecture is open to interpretation, which gives publishers almost unlimited flexibility as to how they categorize their inventory. Publishers go through a process of defining their sites, zones and key-values in order to sell inventory. But, this also means that the learning curve is steep, and that traffickers need a higher level of skill than they would if they were using other ad servers. So publishers really need to think about the level of resources they want to commit to their DFP ad server.

Another issue is what type of machines their ad ops team will use to access the UI. DFP supports Internet Explorer only.

Amy: What if I’m a large publisher and want something that’s more out-of-the-box?

Barnaby: There are some very good options available to you. ADTECH is a premium ad server that on the whole equals DFP Premium in terms of targeting, reporting and trafficking. ADTECH however, offers a simpler, more intuitive user interface and workflow. Its workflows are horizontal, letting you drill down on any particular asset or targeting feature of a campaign.

One of the things I personally like about ADTECH is the way campaigns are trafficked. ADTECH lets you customize the view, so if your campaign doesn’t use any key values, for instance, you can eliminate that step as your build your campaign. This saves a lot of time.

It’s forecasting is simple, but inconvenient. Like OpenX Enterprise, you first need to build a campaign and insert a line item in order to see how much inventory you have available, which is less than idea for forecasting in response to RFPs.

Amy: What if support is really important to me?

Barnaby: Most of the ad servers have a self-service model along with a general contact center for asking questions. You won’t get immediate answers to your questions. Only OpenX offers dedicated support for all its OpenX Enterprise clients.

Publishers do have other options.  Of course there are other ad servers on the market outside of the one’s described previously.  Publishers can also partner with Operative, and we can traffic, serve and manage campaigns for you.

To hear more of Barnaby’s suggestions for selecting the right ad server for your business, register for our upcoming webinar, which will take place on January 26 at noon ET.  Visit www.operative.com/adserver to register. 

About Barnaby Edwards, Product Manager, Operative

Barnaby Edwards is among our top ad serving experts here at Operative. Serving as Product Manager, he is responsible for all Operative.One integrations with ad servers, working to ensure that our software enables customers to seamlessly manage their orders in one place. He knows the ins and outs of all major ad servers, having previously worked on integrations for Donavan Data Systems. Barnaby is also a lifelong Doctor Who fan who runs a fan group in New York City, writes about the show for various fanzines and books, and volunteers at conventions nationwide.

On Monday, November 7, I was fortunate enough to introduce a panel discussion at the IAB Ad Ops Summit on the topic of Consolidation and Operational Efficiency.  The audience consisted of Ad Operations leaders from a variety of different companies – large and small – and as a speaker, I was asked to provide content that would enable attendees to better, and more effectively, lead their organizations.

The panel was asked to address the following question:  Does the consolidation of the industry’s operating systems mean less complexity and more efficiency – or less choice, less competition, less innovation?

For me, there are three questions at the core of this topic:

1. Is consolidation really happening?
2. Should publishers have to choose between efficiency and innovation?
3. What is an operating system?

Is there Consolidation?

There certainly have been a good number of acquisitions in our industry, but innovation is also happening at a rapid pace.

Just look at the data…

For example, the number of IAB vendor members continues to increase.  Whereas there were 25 members in 2005, the number has climbed to 140 in 2011.  And the 2011 number is still higher than the 2010 number which cited 125 members.  Just last week, Brian Morrissey of Digiday mentioned in his “What if the Music stops in ad tech” article, that there are over 200 vendors listed on the LUMA Partners slide, and that’s just the display slide!  Here at Operative, the number of requests to integrate with our platform is three times what they were just two years ago.  These numbers and the activity in the space indicate to me, that consolidation is not happening.  The reality is that for every company that is bought, two to three are being created, and driving the need for solutions that solve very big problems.

So consolidation is just not happening, nor will it in the next five years, which means publishers cannot and should not rely on it to achieve operational efficiency.  In fact, M&A activity within the ad tech market is just getting warmed up.  While many people refer to the proliferation of solutions as fragmentation, a word with negative connotations, what they are really talking about is specialization.  In an industry that is changing as quickly as ours, a lot of individual innovators are required to help address the change.  We just need a way to manage it all, which brings me to my next question.

Everybody calls this Fragmentation. I call it Specialization.

Do YOU Have to Choose Between Innovation and Effectiveness?

The answer is quite simply NO.   You HAVE to do both.  You can NOT choose.

You must be able to run the car and change the engine at the same time if you want to survive in an industry going through this much disruption.  Our industry is complex but it’s not THAT complex relative to other industries.  The question should be how to balance innovation with operational effectiveness?

This may seem impossible to imagine today, but there was a time thirty years ago, when other industries were experiencing major challenges and pains managing their complex supply chains, demand channels and changing market dynamics.  But they overcame those challenges and pains, and they did it with business management software, or what we call them in this space, operating systems or platforms, that integrate with all suppliers, buyers and innovators.  These systems enabled these industries to effectively balance innovation with operational efficiency.

What is an Operating System?

Why do we even have to definite what an operating system is?  It’s because everyone calls themselves an operating system nowadays, which is creating more chaos and confusion.  We need to get beyond the hype and understand what it truelly means to have an operating system.

So how do we, in this industry, define what an operating system is?  By technical definition, an operating system:

• Is a program that manages other applications
• Is a Hub
• Integrates with other technologies
• Uses a common language

 

For a company, an operating system is a business tool or central hub that brings it all together.  It allows the company to grow and innovate, while being more efficient.  Our industry still operates in production systems and in order to become more efficient, to embrace innovation and effectively compete in this dynamic market space, we must begin operating in Operating Systems.

Imagine if when you bought a car from a dealer, they had to input the order into each and every robot on the manufacturing line.  That’s inefficient – HIGHLY inefficient, but that’s what we do in this industry, day in and day out, with our excel files and outlook databases.  We need to work differently, and simplify, in order to embrace change.

When I think about the state of our industry and I hear the pains and challenges customers are experiencing, I am reminded of the following quote:

“Nearly all men die of their remedies, not of their illnesses.”

- Jean Baptiste Moliére

This quote reminds me that solutions chosen out of expediency, out of desire to solve just the immediate problem, will quite often lead to longer term problems and pains.  It’s a good reminder to all of us in this industry that we need to think more broadly, and long-term, about how we solve or pains and problems.

Criteria for Choosing an Operating System

So how do we go about selecting an operating system and move beyond the hype?  Well for starters, you don’t want it to compete with you.  The system needs to be agnostic.  Can you imagine entering your business data into Windows, and Microsoft turning around and using it to create a competing business?

In selecting an operating system, be sure to ask yourself:

• Does the vendor compete with me?
• Do they want to replace me?
• Do they want to commoditize me?

The operating system must also be enterprise-wide, so that the entire organization is utilizing it.  This will create efficiencies and enable you to manage the entire yield curve.  And lastly, it must have scale so that it can integrate with other applications.

Operating Systems in Media

So if this is the criteria for selecting an operating system, then who are we left with in our industry?   We do not lack people and innovation to drive operational efficiency and innovation, but there is a lack of companies whose business models provide the infrastructure that enable YOUR efficiency and innovation, and prioritize driving YOUR company’s value above driving their own.   I believe we are left with only a handful of players – Operative, Media Ocean, Oracle and SAP among them.  While there are others on the image below, we do question their scale and ability to support you in the way a true operating system should, as defined above.

We believe the future consists of two main operating systems:  one on the buy-side and one on the sell-side.  And this is one reason we were excited about the MediaOcean announcement a few weeks back.

So how do Ad Ops Professionals Lead the Charge? 

The job of today’s Ad Ops professionals should be to take a step back and ask, what is my approach to building an efficient company that continually innovates?   And the answer to this question is how you lead and become the change your organization needs in order to effectively balance innovation and efficiency, or, to have your cake and eat it too.

At the back of every publisher’s mind is a question: “Does my revenue reflect the true value of my inventory?” In far too many cases the answer is either “no” or “I wish I knew!” So how can publishers feel confident that they’re selling the right inventory to the right buyer at the right price? The answer: productization. To learn more, Amy Inlow, our blog editor, asked product manager Andrew Sullivan to explain what productization is all about.

AI: Let’s start with the basics. What is productization, and why is it important for publishers?

AS: Simply put, productization is deciding exactly what you plan to sell and being consistent about it. Consistency is helpful for your sales teams, your buyers, your inventory managers, your pricing team and your traffickers. If everyone is working with a commonly accepted product catalog with predictable pricing rules then it takes the guesswork out of everyday tasks.

In the end a good productization practice will result in a toolset that the entire organization refers to constantly. It should be a searchable catalog that the sales team uses to build proposals for buyers, the foundation for a comprehensive rate card, an implementation guide for campaign managers and a reference for analytics teams.

The goal is to strike a balance that gives buyers access to the audience they’re looking for on safe, well-defined content, while maintaining a level of structure and control for operations teams to traffic and manage campaigns. But most important, I think, productization lets publishers confidently break out of the constraints imposed on them by their ad servers so they can create products and packages that really reflect buyer demand.

AI: How does productization actually occur?

AS: There are a few fundamental aspects to the process. The first is simply segmenting all of the ad slots a publisher has access to so that they can actually be sold. In practice this means starting with ad server tags to make sure they’re following a consistent structure, and documenting clearly how to target any given site, channel, section, page, etc.

On top of that the publisher should take stock of all demo, geo, behavioral and other targeting that is feasible based on their technology stack, and make decisions about which they’re ready to expose to buyers. Are you unable to DMA target in some areas because your mobile ad server doesn’t support it? Does it really pay to allow age targeting on the home page, or is it better to limit that inventory to exclusive sponsorships? Determine the combinations of targeting that make sense for your business on each of your properties, and document those as well.

With those things in place, ongoing productization means maintaining an internally published list of buyer friendly products with documented controls around pricing, targeting, creative specs, buyer limitations – and then as much META information as possible to help sell the inventory.

AI: What are some of the business issues productization helps publishers address?

AS: A big issue is simply knowing all of the ad slots publishers have available to sell. After all, you can’t sell ad slots that you don’t know about. This may seem easy but it can be challenging when new tags are being generated every day, or if the inventory was acquired through partnerships with other publishers or networks, for example.

Another issue is delivering on customer expectations. Sales teams are often too quick to sell products that are driven by the unique requirements of the buyer. For instance, the buyer may ask for audience segmentation, frequency capping, or special creative that aren’t standard offerings. The operations team is left to figure out how to match what’s been sold with what can be delivered, and turn it around in a few weeks or days. This disconnect causes delays, discrepancies, and unhappy buyers. Productization can help eliminate that disconnect by clearly identifying what is available to a sales team. This doesn’t mean that your organization shouldn’t offer the new and bleeding-edge experience buyers want, but when a request comes in that doesn’t match up to existing products, clear product definitions should provide the time and context the publisher needs to really capitalize on the opportunity.

Inventory management also gets a boost from productization. Not only does the structure and consistency of the catalog make inventory management possible, it’s also a way to prevent campaigns with combinations of targets and ad slots that have no chance of delivering in full. Is it worth it to deal with the booking calculations for users of a certain age in a specific DMA on your travel section? If not, don’t sell it.

AI: How will a publisher benefit from productization?

AS: A huge benefit is the sustainable boost in revenue that comes from implementing enterprise-wide sales guidelines. There may be inventory that performs best when sold to particular industries, or through specific sales teams, or when offered through an exchange. Implementing controls that ensure inventory is sold with the whole yield curve in mind is the only way to raise the effective CPM across the board.

Rate card management tools also help publishers boost revenue because they set standard rates for all products by channel, including price goals and minimum floors. They also let publishers ensure that products are sold using the cost method (CPM, CPC, etc.) that delivers the best results.

Another benefit is improved reporting. Productization is instrumental for any critical revenue analytics. The holistic view lets publishers compare how their inventory performs across sales teams and channels. Since all sales teams, including performance and marketing teams, will be working with comparable products, publishers can actually compare apples to apples.

AI:  How does a publisher go about productizing inventory? What are the first steps?

AS: Any publisher doing direct sales today has been doing productization since their first IO was trafficked. Even if they haven’t been thinking about it as productization, all the placement lists, trafficking instructions, rate cards, creative specs and other materials that sit in Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint and people’s heads are the building blocks of a product catalog. The first step is to focus as an organization on the right strategy for the business and get buy-in from stakeholders to participate. From there it’s a matter of deciding on the technical infrastructure for managing the catalog and going through the process.

To really manage a robust enterprise level catalog requires an Advertising Business Management platform that can really bring everything together. It should provide the tools to generate and manage a product catalog, and ideally it will embed that catalog in the sales, trafficking and reconciliation process with hooks into business intelligence and inventory management.

Operative hosted a webinar on this topic Thursday, November 17.  Our guest speaker and presenter was Joanna Bloor, VP of Sales Operations for Pandora.  To obtain a copy of the webinar recording, please send an email to info@operative.com and we will email you the link once it becomes available.

About Andrew Sullivan

Andrew is the mastermind of Operative’s unique, multi-dimensional inventory management solution, as well as the company’s Ad Master Model and Campaign 360, solutions that enable publishers to better manage and optimize their product offerings and solutions set.  In his role as Product Manager, Andrew manages and oversees development for the software; acts as a liaison between sales, account management and development; and is continually designing solutions to meet ongoing publisher challenges.

Andrew began his career at Operative as a Campaign Manager, trafficking, managing and optimizing campaigns for both publisher and agency clients.  Within a year of joining the company, he was leading the systems integration team, working with some of Operative’s largest clients on software implementations.  Andrew also served as Senior Manager for Strategic Development, where he focused on new product innovation. 

Prior to joining Operative, Andrew worked as an Art Director at Agora Studios.  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Media, Arts and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  

Operative’s Monday Mashup

A compilation of interesting news, articles and stories from the prior week…

AdAge: Welcome to the Beginning of the end of the Fragmented Ad Tech World

2012 will be the year when advertisers and marketers look for a way to simplify the chaos that is becoming digital media.  With technology vendors continually entering the space and new channels evolving, advertisers are going to look for a way to simplify their advertising process.  As Will Margiloff says, “Only the integrated will survive.”

paidContent: Digital will fuel ad sector growth in 2012

ZenithOptimedia forecasts that digital advertising will make up more than 20% of all ad spending in 2012 and will account for half of all ad growth!  In order for publishers to maximize this growth potential, they need to overcome the inefficient processes that are chewing into profit margins and slowing down execution.

AdExchanger: Cross-Platform Display Is Going From Niche to Mainstream In 2012 Says Google’s Mohan

We agree with Google’s Neal Mohan that “advertisers and agencies ideally don’t want a separate buying platform for each type of media — they want a way to buy across all formats.”  Guardian News & Media is a great example of a publisher already taking steps to offer cross-platform buying. 

Wired: Newspaper Shares Tanked in 2011

Declining print advertising and difficulty moving resources from print to digital content are among the reasons for newspaper stocks plummeting in 2011. 2012 is a critical year for newspaper publishers to converge their print and digital operations – profitably.

Digiday: Want to Save Display?  Cut Supply

Interesting call-to-action by Undertone’s CEO, Eric Franchi for publishers to cut online advertising supply in the interest of actually creatÍng more value for publishers and brands alike.  Of course, only those publishers with true control over their assets and end-to-end ad business processes would know where and how to make such change.

Operative’s Monday Mashup

A compilation of interesting news, articles and stories from the prior week…

PaidContent: The Atlantic Gets more than Half of its Ad Revenues from Digital

This marks a modern milestone for The Atlantic and perhaps a first for the digital/print media industry.  Congratulations, The Atlantic!

Media Post: Majority Of Readers Access Digital Magazine Content, Ads

Over half of American magazine readers are accessing content and advertising through digital channels. Is the explosion of tablet, eReader and smart phone adoption creating a tipping point in digital magazine readership?

LA Times: LA Times Makes Exec Changes to Focus on New Media 

Los Angeles Times is focusing more on digital and new media products. It will be interesting to see how these changes will impact their revenue mix in 2012 and beyond. How much revenue will come from print vs. digital? What will be their channel strategy? 

AdExchanger: Industry Reaction: Yahoo! Requiring RMX Seats for DSP Advertisers

Why wouldn’t Yahoo want advertisers using their own system? And we agree with MediaMath’s assessment that it should enable Yahoo to boost direct sales. Just one example of a publisher making moves to minimize the role of the middlemen that eat into profit margins.

AdMonsters: Media Productization:  Realizing the True Value of your Online Inventory

Thanks to the newest member of the AdMonsters team, Gavin Dunaway, for sharing and posting our recent blog post on Media Productization.

Operative’s Monday Mashup

A compilation of interesting news, articles and stories from the prior week…

AdAge:  Pandora Opens Box of Targeted Political Advertising

Operative client Pandora is certainly doing some interesting things on the product and packaging side of their business.  If you missed our webinar on Media Productization Strategies last week, featuring Pandora’s Joanna Bloor, Vice President of Sales Operations, please email info@operative.com and we will be sure to send you the replay.

Adweek: Yelp Files $100M IPO

Congratulations to Yelp on their IPO filing.  We are certain to see some more interesting things from this popular online publisher given the growth in local digital ad revenue that is anticipated over the coming five years.   

ClickZ:  Why Can’t Newspapers Make Money Online?

Are newspapers pricing themselves out of the market?

iMedia Connection:  Beyond Rich Media – Five Unexpectedly Cool Updates to the Banner Ad

The smartest brands today are discarding the old formula for banner advertising – image, tag line, call-to-action, click-through – and bringing a real-time, social media mindset to online advertising.

Mashable: Local Digital Ad Revenue to Hit $37.5B by 2015

This should come as no surprise given the increasing adoption and usage of smart phones and other mobile devices. It’s a good time for Yelp and other such publishers to go public!

Operative Blog: What is Media Productization? How Can Publishers Leverage it to Realize the True Value of Their Inventory?

Our blog editor asked Operative Product Manager, Andrew Sullivan, what we mean when we talk about media productization and how publishers can extract the true value of their online inventory.

Paidcontent:  Study shows iPad Owners Drive 88 Percent of Worldwide Web Traffic from Tablet

Greater adoption of tablet devices means the more we will see publishers focus business operations on digital vs. traditional print products.  Look to 2012 to be a BIG year for this shift to take place.

Paidcontent:  Atlanta Journal Constitution Adds iPad Digital Combo Site Still Free

Atlanta Journal Constitution, a division of Cox Enterprises, has developed an interesting way to bundle digital/print subscriptions together, and to drive usage of digital apps and editions.

Operative’s Monday Mashup

A compilation of interesting news, articles and stories from the prior week…

Mashable: New Yorker, Wired and More Coming Free to Kindle Fire for 3 Months

With the Kindle targeting middle America, this move by Conde Nast and other magazine publishers is sure to boost their online magazine readership/subscriptions.  Tablets and mobile devices are one of the major driving forces behind print and digital media convergence, so as more and more consumers begin utilizing these devices to consume content, the more we will see offline and online media consolidation.

Digiday:  What if the Music Stops in Ad Tech

Exactly our point too, @bmorrissey!  We’ve been talking about this for the past year now beginning with our“Who’s Guarding Your Hen House” blog last February, and most recently in our post about the MediaBank and Donovan Data Systems merger, with respect to the ad tech “middle men”, e.g. ad networks and exchanges, and other point solutions that CLAIM to add value to the publisher but are merely shaving their profit margins.  Publishers MUST step back and take a look at their long-term business plans, as well as their current infrastructure and processes, to see if the two map and if the latter is sustainable to achieve the long-term goals and objectives.  If the answer is NO–which in many cases we suspect it is because we’ve been throwing band aids on a much larger, deeply rooted problem–then it’s time to reevaluate the entire technology stack and create one that is sustainable and will enable profitability.

IAB: IAB Announces Industry Adoption of Impression Exchange Solution to Combat Billing Obstacles

DoubleClick has had an Impression Exchange solution in place for at least a year to do early discrepancy detections.  Currently, it only integrates with DFA and Atlas, but with this announcement, we’re sure publishers and agencies will be happy to know that the list of vendors integrating with IES is increasing.

Paidcontent: AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are Officially Ad Sales Allies

How will this “alliance” pan out?  At least someone (or a few rather) are taking a stance against the behemoth Google.  As stated in our September 19 Mashup post, we believe if there is a content play in here somewhere, this “alliance” may make sense. It seems as if there are still a lot of details to be ironed out, such as how and why a sales person – at say Microsoft – would want to sell his/her competitors (Yahoo and/or AOL) inventory?  And how much additional value will each company generate by cutting out the ad networks?  At the end of the day, brands still need to reach their target audience for the best price possible.  Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL will need to ensure they are delivering more value to the brands if this alliance is going to work.  If all three had a central “hub” they could hook into to view one another’s available inventory, in real-time, and package that inventory in a unique way that delivers more value to the brand, this concept could work.  Alignment of goals and operations is still key here and it seems there are many details that are yet to be flushed out!

Ad Operations Online: IAB Drives Mobile Marketplace Forward

MRAID, or Mobile Rich Ad Interfaces Definitions, should help to accelerate the mobile advertising industry and remove the complexities of having to recode mobile rich ads numerous times for different devices.  It’s great to see IAB attempting to streamline the mobile technologies necessary to create the mobile rich media experience just as much as they are streamlining the video technologies necessary to create the best video ad serving experience. 

AdWeek:  Google to Penalize Sites with Too Many Ads

Right, because it’s Google’s job to determine what content should be above the fold, how many advertisements should be on a page, etc.  Isn’t that the publishers and advertisers decision? 

Operative Blog: Innovation or Efficiency? You CAN Have Your Cake AND Eat it Too.

Last week Mike Leo introduced a panel at the IAB Ad Ops Summit that was asked to address the following question:  Does the consolidation of the industry’s operating systems mean less complexity and more efficiency – or less choice, less competition, less innovation?  Our response: Why choose between innovation and efficiency when you can have both with an operating system?