Integrating online and offline order management
I’m sitting here at the Operative Dashboard Client Summit at the SoHo House, thinking about several things from the ridiculous to the sublime.
First the ridiculous – the reverse dress code phenomena. I love SoHo House – been a member for 3 years although not sure why they accept a 50 year old sap like me. For the past month they’ve made a VERY big point of forbidding suits and ties. I’m struck by how times have changed so quickly. Not long ago ties were mandatory at NYC clubs, then optional, now forbidden. Most of us here – we’re about 30 in number – are tieless. Scott Maison of AARP is the lone brave soul who came not only with tie but also braces. I admit he is looking sharp and he hasn’t been kicked out yet.
To something a bit more serious. The Operative Dashboard Summits – we do two a year – are our most exciting meetings of the year. Our most important software customers – large media players like NBCU, Reuters, FIM or Dow Jones, as well as rapidly growing sites like AARP, SmartMoney, NPM and Scholastic – come to hear about our roadmap and give feedback on priorities. It’s the best way by far for our development team to validate the direction we should go and ensure we’re investing where our customers want us to invest. The feedback and discussion has been amazing.
The greatest takeaway for me: the future of digital ad order management. Specifically the fact that we are on the cusp of having one integrated system to handle order management for the online and offline worlds. Despite the demand, there is a giant gap here that no one has been able to fill. Operative is spending the most significant portion of our development budget to enable a solution and we unveiled it today. Early stages but exciting. Consensus seemed to be excellent vision, a no-brainer path for someone like Operative to blaze…and many barriers that stand in the way of integrating online and offline worlds. Enabling the technology is the first step, but how about bridging the cultures of the different sales orgs?
I’d love to hear other thoughts about whether the time has come for this to happen.