Operative Blog

I just returned from London and a great dinner with 15-16 of the most interesting digital media players in the UK. Every couple of months Operative will pull together the heads of sales and ad operations from publishers in London or New York, give them our perspective of how things are looking from an ad operations POV, and then sit back and listen. The June 17 dinner was fantastic – we had some of Operative’s most sophisticated Dashboard users (MTVi, Dow Jones and FIMi) as well as some of the most exciting digital publishers in the UK (Virgin, BSkyB, Bauer and News International to name just a few).

I found that the viewpoint in London was similar to that in the US. Order volume has improved in Q2 after a disastrous Q1, but despite an uptick in growth orders are still well below 2008 levels. When I shared the fact that we at Operative has seen placement and campaign volumes picking up again after declining 3 straight months in Nov, Dec and Jan, everyone around the table agreed that Q1 had been the bottom of the market and that things had been turning around since then – albeit slowly in some cases.

The most interesting insight was the visibility into pipelines. In this respect the UK is also much like the US. One head of sales told the room that although orders look good, visibility is still “quarter to quarter”. They said that although Q2 results were up over Q1 and although Q3 looked strong, what was going to happen in Q4 was anyone’s guess. In a slightly different take, a consumer finance website said that at this time in 2008, they had already booked 40% of 2009, whereas pre-bookings for 2010 at this same point are zero. Several publishers said that visibility into holiday bookings was also very low compared to seasons past when many brands would have booked premium inventory over a year in advance.

If you’re reading this, let us know what you’re seeing. Let us know if you’re based in the US, Asia or Europe. Does this sound familiar or are you seeing something completely different?