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?

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.

Let me join some of the other survivors of iMedia Austin who by now have shaken off their jetlag, sent all their follow-up emails and started to blog thoughts about last week’s Agency Summit.

Like a couple of others who’ve beaten me to it (Adam Kleinberg and Lorne Brown two great examples), I think the folks at iMedia did another great job. The mix of attendees is always strong, the sessions/panels interesting and the BS quotient tolerable. Most importantly, however, what sets iMedia apart for me is the ability to not just listen to panels but to have quality debates with peers in the industry.

There were several times at the Summit in which the audience became the panel. Adam has already mentioned the infamous one minute match-ups, where for those who haven’t experienced them, every attendee gets basically one minute to tell another attendee their “pitch”. After a minute, the bell rings, mercifully ending the conversation you know you have no interest in continuing, or, more often, giving you a wonderfully unique chance to understand a company and the people behind it.

Another chance to turn the audience into a panel was Operative’s breakfast session on Monday, May 18th, where we had about 80 publishers debating the question in the title of this post. The quandry we put to them was simple, “The good news is that we’re seeing a bottoming out of the downturn and several publishers predicting greater volumes ahead. The bad news is that all of us just spent the last 4 months cutting staff, budgets and resources to the bone. Without resources, how do you grow?” We had some excellent people to help moderate the discussions: Carter Brokaw of Meebo, Steve Patrizi of Linked In, Larry Gelfand of NHL, Lisa Marino from RockYou, Brian Silver of The Travel Ad Network, Joseph Tripp from Cooking.com, Tom O’Regan from TheStreet.com and Marti Funk from SportGenic. All are veteran sales leaders who are facing the same issues.

The discussion was amazing. We’ve summarized it in a whitepaper you can see on our site. I won’t do it justice here, but check it out for insight on what publishers are seeing as obstacles to growth, and some ideas we came up with for how to overcome them.