Operative Blog

Randall Rothenberg takes the stage to tell everyone we are not geeks, we ROCK STARS of interactive media. 

Nothing would be customized or accomplished without Ad Operations. 

We are the guardians of the data and without, there wouldn’t be any revenue.  This is our Woodstock.

Creatives used to be the rock stars- until they realized they needed ad ops to make the ads go live.  The future of this media depends on the skills of everyone in this room.  How do we make the internet flow as smoothly as possible?

I always thought, the idea of adverts was to ‘talk’ to someone, but not expect any reply. Like a big ‘talking at’ to anyone who might listen, see, sense…ignore. It was a big reciprocal recite, an invite, that expected no real R.S.V.P, just some subconscious triggering, that might sway an individuals future purchase.

We had TV, print, radio, all targeting large audiences. Yet with the growth of the internet, and how this has now pervaded the advertising eyeball, there’s the immense possibility to flip this ‘one ad to millions’ ratio.

Rather than one ad targeting 1000’s, you can have a multitude of ads, all occupying that same space, but targeted to an individual.

With the current economic climate, advertising revenues are struggling, and advertisers want more for their money: they want clicks, conversions. Yet it’s often the case, that publishers still struggle with configuring their ad servers to maximise their potential, and give more back to their advertisers. If anything, an ad server can appear to a publisher, like another layer of complexity, that’s used as a pawn within the ongoing clashes between editorial, online production and sales teams.

Perhaps understandably, many publishers through bad early experiences with CPA deals flooding their inventory over one campaign, shy away from looking at how to create more successful click rates, and user defined wants, and prefer the more sedentary impression based selling of sections, much like a magazine or paper. In many ways, this is just a current compromise, and to be fair it does the job, but can it remain ever so?

Perhaps the key to successful future revenue generation and advertising is to change one’s perspective of it.

Rather than viewing it as a static revenue tool, whose only other purpose seems to be to annoy editorial across the board with yet more webspace given over to ad slots and ‘advertisement’ titles, perhaps it’s better viewed as an opportunity to involve an audience, with a medium that’s bidirectional, interactive and non repetitively un reciprocal?

Ad servers allow such a variety of targeting, and integration possibilities, that should allow the website to build up a record of well trodden ‘paths’ and track their users surfing behaviour. So you should be able to give information to those who want it.

Where paths intersect, gives the chance to layer the targeting of just one ad slot, and the possibility to create a multitude of targeted packages that are more likely to be relevant to a user. Just by doing this, the revenue generation potential of just one ad slot, can be increased immensely. Many websites have a vast amount of information about their users, from subscriptions, buying habits etc, but this is very rarely integrated with their ad servers. This is after all, information that won’t cause privacy headaches, since their users submitted this information freely.

By adding a series of dynamically generated keywords into ad server tags, based on variables obtained by subscription information and past buying habits, adverts can track a user’s behaviour, increasing the chance of an ad having a click through.

For instance a shopping site, that can collect checkout information, can then adapt that user’s future ad experience, related on what their shopping habits have been recently. Adverts become relevant for them, and their user demographics can also be used in conjunction with this; local area targeting, gender, family size etc. So one ad slot, can then serve a multitude of targeted ads, to a whole host of different targeted audience segments, for every one impression it serves, rather than one ad for all, per impression.

With advances in flash and video, these targeted adverts can almost be like ‘microworlds’ or ‘mini info opportunities’, that allow a user to configure, adapt, and research various options for a product, or an idea or even argument, depending on a site’s content. All of these interactions can be tracked and harnessed into meaningful data, and used to sharpen up targeting, and ultimately make adverts more relevant and useful to a user.

Perhaps the key to successful online advertising in future is less ads, and more interaction, with better targeting and a good dose of subtlety.

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Blogged by Mark Hudspith

As an integral part of Operative’s managed services team, Mark is one of our most experienced Ad Operations Managers, working with global and local clients utilising multiple adervers and rich media creatives.

Just like the mythological Pandora created by Zeus who unleashed untold “ills, toils and sickness” on mankind, many in the Ad Ops world are wondering if video advertising isn’t the modern-day equivalent. The story goes that the only thing remaining in the jar (Editor: yes, the ‘box’ was actually a ‘jar’) was Hope. Likewise, video advertising offers the potential for great pitfalls and great promise.

Toils

Make no mistake; it’s a tricky realm to navigate. Setting up video ad serving involves a lot of the same steps that a typical ad server implementation does, but it also adds extra layers of complexity that require knowing what a video player can handle. There are a plethora of options out there to consider when deciding who has the best product for your specific needs. DoubleClick’s rich media product and Brightcove’s video platform are some of the more popular ones we’ve seen our publisher clients use quite successfully. However, cost becomes a concern when you’re looking to get more bang for your CPM bucks.

Hope

Fortunately, publishers are not limited to outsourcing their video operations to third-party providers. Because Adobe Flash® has become the de facto standard for building video players (offering ease of use and flexibility), many are able to develop video solutions in-house that effectively satisfy their video advertising requirements. It all just comes down to the expertise of the developers and their knowledge of what needs to be handled in their players. Here are some important factors to consider:

1) Know what Flash can do for you – Flash is not limited to just serving video. You want to get a 300×250 companion ad working in your player? Flash can do it. Overlays popping up in the middle of video content? Flash can do it. A moving shot of you jumping off rooftops in the middle of the night in a black cape? Err… umm.

2) Know what method you wish to employ in video ads – JavaScript is the most common method due to its use of what’s called “Flash variables” that an ad server uses to pass values for a variety of video player assets. The player can then grab those values and render them for each ad call made. But a programming language called XML is rapidly gaining ground. XML, in a way, allows you to pre-define your own code templates for serving any different combinations of assets.

3) Know how much you want to track – It’s becoming standard to include three-point tracking into players. This allows a publisher and/or advertiser to track the beginning, middle, and end of when a video ad plays. Some have gone even further and track in quartiles. Information like this is valuable to a client who wants to know how much interaction a user is having with their ads.

4) Know your ad server – This stays true whether it’s in banner or video advertising. Clearly defining the ad server architecture that will allow for as much flexible targeting as possible is critical to a successful video integration.

Let’s be clear here – this in no way should discourage you from deploying a third-party video advertising solution; many of them are well proven and have a lot to offer in helping ensure a more captivating advertising experience. The number of options is continuously growing and demonstrates that we’ve come a long way since the original opening of Pandora’s video advertising box. Knowing your requirements and getting the right video expertise will guarantee more “promise” than “pitfalls” when building the best video solution.

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Blogged by Tim Robinson

Operative provides world-class video integration support through its Managed Services Ad Server Support team.  Tim Robinson manages this wildly band of ad serving gurus … they really do eat Javascript for breakfast.

Margins is a buzz word. It is a quest. It is an altar at which many in the industry find themselves worshiping.

In this economic environment, the million dollar question is: can the margins be driven without impact on client satisfaction?  One way to approach driving margins is to knock on the client’s door and ask them for more money. The other approach is to focus on your operational efficiency and control the cost of quality, thereby driving up margins.

In this post we will talk about a few areas that need more focus in the Ad Ops world.

The 50-50-90 rule

Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.

How often does it happen that Sales sells a product that’s overbooked? Or your operations team traffics key words that don’t exist?

Standardization is the key. It makes the process repeatable and prevents mistakes from recurring. Creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Trafficking Guidelines, Process Documents, Workflow diagrams, etc. help initiate and encourage standardization. Updating these documents frequently and training your resources to effectively use them are equally as important as creating the documents.

Honk if you love peace and quiet

Case in point:  in many shops, the situation often occurs that a web developer makes some technical change on the site that Sales or Operations folks have no clue about. Communication is name of the game. Define a clear process and path of communication that will ensure accountability in your organization. This will keep everyone up-to-speed on all developments and changes.

In many cases web masters/developers do not know the importance of proper site tagging – this results in incorrect inventory projections, delivery of campaigns and problems for troubleshooting.  In this scenario, if there is a defined communication and approval process between the relevant stakeholders (i.e., Sales and Operations) it is likely to reduce potential business conflicts up to 40%.

A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning

Late creative, third party discrepancy, inventory management, campaign pacing, etc. are common issues for all publishers. Proactive planning and risk management are key. “We are in a rush and don’t have time to do all of this work!!” is a typical scenario. The approach should be to implement processes that force you to follow certain risk management and planning steps upfront. A simple example of this would be a process that requires an inventory check before selling a product.

In God we trust; all others must bring data!

It’s a dead horse that gets beaten all the time. Collect data around your operations, determine how you measure performance and use it as a feedback loop to improve your processes. Data collection is often difficult — either it’s insufficient or there’s just too much of it and no one is sure about how much of it to trust. Make data “simple” and “connectable” – it is key to ensuring you can effectively use it to make sound business decisions.

Final words:

Some companies have successfully deployed structured workflow management by implementing a unified technology platform (such as Operative Dashboard) to achieve efficiency throughout their operations. Partnering with an expert who can provide a bird’s eye view may bring new perspectives and clarity around ways in which to streamline processes and increase these efficiencies.

Being successful in today’s complex, competitive environment means effectively balancing customer experience with operational efficiency.  We’ll look forward to taking further deep dives into this subject in future posts in response to your comments.

When you consider their importance, it seems surprising that ad tags aren’t shown more love by publishers.  They should be. If a site is properly tagged, it can generate far more revenue than it otherwise would.   Simply put, every subpar ad tag causes a publisher to lose potential revenue.  Here’s why:

Communication between a website and an ad server

Ads that command the highest CPM are those that are best targeted to an audience.  I’m sure Nike, Vonage or any other advertiser will pay more for a campaign that delivers results in the form of clicks and actions and then conversion. The best way for a publisher to ensure that its audience is attracted to the ads being displayed is to use the site content to gauge the interest of each visitor. For sites that require user registration, additional information, such as age and gender, may also be available.

All of this valuable information is useless, however, if it doesn’t make it into the ad server.  Building an advanced ad tag that passes along all relevant information allows the ad server to present the most appropriate ad to the user. Considering that the ad tag is the main source of communication between a website and an ad server, it makes sense that a suitable ad tag is needed in order for the server to perform most effectively.

My content is the best

We all know that not all content is created equal.  What is truly helpful is to be able to identify which content performs best. Knowing the patterns of visitors on a website allows sales teams to best match campaigns to content. For example, ads that appear on pages featuring content that engrosses visitors, such as news articles and movie clips, may not receive as many clicks as those on pages whose content is of a more general nature. The performance of low-click content makes it unsuitable for CPC campaigns.  When the content type is included in the site tag (ex: sect=news or sect=video), the publisher can then decide to exclude these sections from CPC campaigns and utilize them for branding campaigns, which do not require high click rates.  Rather than let the low click-through rate of those sections drag down the average performance of the site, the publisher is able to separate them out and sell the high-click content at a premium.  In this way, the publisher is able to best match content to advertisers and maximize revenue.

Trying to sell – Bump up the appeal

When a website is outfitted with site tags that take into account useful information – such as user details, page position, and site content – the sales team is able to sell more targeted campaigns at higher rates.  Being able to differentiate content allows for more flexibility when selling inventory.

Reports, Reports and more Reports!

Even after an ad serves, an ad tag’s job is not done.  Detailed ad tags are able to enhance reporting capabilities and make delivery reports more robust.  The information contained in the reports is useful to both advertisers and publishers.

Advertisers love detailed reports because they provide the advertiser with the ability to more effectively optimize a campaign.  Many long term campaigns rely on optimization to attain the results that an advertiser is seeking.  Publishers that offer detailed reporting are attractive to advertisers because they are more in control of how their money is being spent.

Consider this scenario:  A publisher  MYSAMPLETAG.COM (fake name) with advanced ad tags is able to target certain ads to a website that features several sections, each with different user demographics.  When the advertiser (lets say  TOYSRUS) examines the detailed delivery report, they notice that creative featuring a puppy performed particularly well on a section of children’s content whose visitors are between the ages of 6 and 11. Armed with this information, the TOYSRUS chooses to run the puppy creative at a higher rotation in that section, increasing the click rate of the campaign. The robust reporting that sophisticated ad tags can offer allows for greater campaign optimization and can enhance the performance of the website.

Let me tell you …

A very good example of the company  that certainly knows the value of an ad tag is NBC Universal’s Local Integrated Media.  Their websites span many different domains and markets and they cater to the tastes of many different audiences. Through their systematic and organized site tags, they are able to provide detailed information which enables them to make the most of the content that they produce.   Their careful attention to their ad tags has helped them make their complex network manageable.

Net-Net

Properly tagging a website is an investment that is well worth making. The returns to be gained from targeted selling and advanced reporting are significant for publishers and should not be overlooked. Targeted selling allows publishers to properly match advertisers to content, ensuring high performance that is valuable to advertisers.  Additionally, advanced reporting allows for improved campaign optimization and boosts performance even more. Every site that is not adequately tagged is not living up to its full potential.

**If you are interested in retagging your web site, or would like to learn more about working with an Operative re-tagging strategy consultant, please contact Greg Carr at 212.206.4762 or gcarr@operative.com.

Glad you’re here and welcome to the inaugural post of our soon-to-be infamous Ad Ops Blog!  Over the next weeks and months (and years and millenniums …), we’ll be discussing ‘everything Ad Ops’ – from processes and best practices that will make your Ad Operations hum, to the latest developments in technology that will make your ads sing … and to boot, we’ll have fascinating interviews with our brilliant operations staff whose experience represents more than 100 years in online advertising (I know, I know … that’s before the Internet, or even before TV, but it’s true and always sounds really cool in the “About Us” section on the company web site).  Seriously, over the last 10 years we’ve had the pleasure of working with literally 100’s of small and large publishers and agencies as an integral part of their Ad Ops team … so, we’ve learned a thing or two about what works and, even more intriguing, we’ve learned what’s a total waste of time and effort.

But wait there’s more! In addition to our own existential musings about the Wonderful World of Ad Ops, we hope to feature some of YOU, our devoted readers, and your unique perspectives and opinions.  After all, what good is having a blog anyway if it’s just going to be a one-way conversation?!  So, at worst we promise not to bore you to death, and at best we hope to provide you with timely and relevant information that you can start using right away.

To quote from a not-so-famous Latin verse:  A cane non magno saepe tenetur aper (“A boar is often held by a not-so-large dog.”)  OK, a slight digression … but the point is that every good solution needs a darned good problem to precede it.  And, what better place to root up a bunch of problems that need solving than in Ad Ops.  So to kick this off, we’ve blame-stormed and come up with some Topics, Considerations & Challenges faced by Ad Ops that we’d like to get your help in selecting for future blogs.  If there are subjects here (or not here) that you would like to see covered, please let us know … second drum roll, please:

• Late to the dance … a creative love story [Late creatives]
• And what math are you using? [Unraveling the mysteries of primary and third party ad server discrepancies]
• I want it THIS big! [Impact of nonstandard ad units]
• What’s in an ad tag? [Deciphering the anatomy of an ad tag]
• Why I don’t fix my own car [Should you consider partnering with an Ad Ops expert?]
• Recovering from Analysis Paralysis [How to build efficiencies in Ad Ops that work]
• Kaboom! Oh No!! NOT AGAIN!!!! [Top Five Ad Ops disasters to avoid]
• The kid’s menu isn’t always cheapest [Which ad server will provide you the best value?]
• The replacement TV doesn’t work either [Creative houses need more than just "send me a new creative that   works” to make it work]
• My life is a bit complicated [Why bad ad tagging is just money down the drain]
• Just short of the goal line [Tinkering with optimization]
• It sounded really cool when we pitched it [As creatives get more complicated, so does the development and testing]
• Alice doesn’t work here anymore [Ad Ops asked to do more with less during down economic times]
• A little lumpy around the middle [Managing to the ebbs and flows]
• Who’s the new kid? [Effectively on boarding new operations staff]
• Who took my abacus?! [Maintaining and gaining new technology skills]
• There is no good ‘make good’ [How quality translates to dollars]

In our next series of blogs, we’ll take a closer look at many of these topics and attempt to provide helpful discussion of solutions to these new and old challenges faced by Ad Ops.  We encourage you to share with us your thoughts as well … we’ll do our best to address them right here in future posts.  We encourage you bookmark this page, email it to a friend, colleague or associate (as well as add our RSS feed).

Thanks for stopping by and reading this far … we look forward to many interesting discussions to come.

Is this your product catalog?

As I talk to clients and prospects, one of the most common fallacies I run across is the idea is that inventory costs are fixed and cheap. However, when we dig a little deeper we find that isn’t necessarily the case. Many people I work with in digital media feel there is little risk to adding another layer of targeting or packaging capability to their portfolio. The assumption is that if the targeting isn’t used, it doesn’t cost the publisher anything. In other words, more is more.

How did this approach come to be? In my opinion, the roots are in our DNA so it’s especially hard to resist. We are a medium founded on technological advances – it’s natural to keep adding capabilities. In the 90’s header info (geo-targeting, OS and browser targeting) and registration info (gender, HHI, etc.) were major leaps forward. But now we’ve layered on behavioral targeting, re-targeting, performance targeting, keyword phrases, social media profile info etc. and it shows no signs of stopping. Companies like DoubleClick/Google, BlueKai, MediaSix Degrees, Tacoda/Ad.com Quantcast have helped with this proliferation. In part this comes from a renaissance of entrepreneurial companies seeking to meet or exceed the power of Google’s ad-word target benchmarks as focus returns to performance. As always, marketers seek to avoid wasting budget as much as possible. Often publishers are challenged to say no to new capabilities that seemingly all their competitors are adopting.

Well, if we turn everything on but don’t use it, what’s the harm? In a word, clutter. I liken some sites I know to the homes we see on the show Clean House. Verdict: Foolishness! There are two challenges with having a bloated product catalog:

1)      The operational costs to manage. These hidden costs are everywhere – extra time to get complex avails into the plan, extra time explaining (and re-explaining) what a specific capability is to all parties, product sheets, added trafficking time, potential vendor management time, product catalog analysis, campaign reporting, optimization, invoicing, etc.

2)      Distraction from Core Competency. Advertisers buy your site because you have a great audience. The further you winnow out ‘waste’, the further away you get from what makes your site unique and the more your impressions become commoditized.

So is RON the answer? I hope not. The trick is finding your Innovation Fulcrum.

To do this, you’ll want to create the simplest product catalog, baseline the effort and revenue associated with it throughout the selling process, then add in layers until you find the point where the margin becomes unacceptable. This is called the Model T method. You then have two options.

1)      Stop. Create artificial constraints for the overall health of the company

2)      Change the equation – perhaps with a targeting premium or a change of process, an additional layer or two becomes profitable

All participants in the digital ecosystem should be going through this exercise in this climate. Given their position in the company, Ad Operations has an opportunity to take the lead in assessing the right balance of operational complexity and revenue opportunity. Only sites that have a compelling product offering with an internal efficiency will be able to thrive. Taking steps to assess what the right mix of capabilities are for your business will pay for itself for years to come.

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.

So how are the explosion of alternate platforms changing the landscape of digital media and what impact is this having on the underlying data? Is there a sea-change going on that is altering the face of online marketing or are platforms evolving independently of each other? These were some of the questions our panel sought to explore in
Advertising Analytics and Contextual Media: Social Media, Mobile, Search, Video Search and HyperTargeting. Couple of people couldn’t make it – we ended up:

• Michael Boland, senior analyst and program director, The Kelsey Group, Moderator
• Paul Edmondson, CEO, YieldBuild
• Dan Halyburton, President, Radio Time
• Dr. A.K. Pradeep, CEO/Founder, NeuroFocus
• Benjamin Reid, VP, Sales Engineering, Operative

We had a number of interesting perspectives from the high tech (NeuroFocus) to traditional media (RadioTime) to networks (YieldBuild) to process and infrastructure (Operative).

And now for something completely different – no fun following Dr. Pradeep. We were treated to a demonstration of the NeuroFocus technology which measures brainwave activity of a test subject viewing advertising. The test person put on a ski hat with 22 electrodes connected to their brain and watched a Mountain Dew commercial. The audience observed in real-time when the user was highly engaged with the creative and when attention fell off. Unclear how this is used in the digital marketing space but certainly an entertaining demonstration.

A lot of conversation revolved around the relatively recent phenomenon of having more data than we collectively know how to manage. This can range from the buy side having multiple exposure, engagement, performance, brand, interaction, conversion, loyalty metrics all captured in a single campaign, to the sell side managing inventory, sales effectiveness, discount management, sell-through, campaign status, discrepancies, page and slot effectiveness, invoicing etc. How do we make sense of it. We all agreed that building better bridges between buyer and seller are important as well as agreeing on shared success metrics. We focused on different routes though – YieldBuild took a network and efficiency-centric view, while RadioTime focused more on organizing an audience to the marketplace. Operative looks at these challenges through the lens of open platforms that foster collaboration and clearly defined processes. We also spent some time on how the offline and online worlds are converging. There are clearly hurdles to be overcome in the internal structure of many org on both buy and sell side but equally important is the fact that the currency and processes each platform employs are dramatically different. As an industry, we will need to either harmonize the metrics and protocols of media sales or build bridges that will span both worlds to facilitate the process for all parties internal and external.

Another great panel I caught was the Advertising Innovation! Broadband, Mobile, In-Video, In-Game, Social Networks, Blogs and Podcasts http://www.digitalhollywood.com/09DHSpring/DH09Sp-Thurs6.html

• Jon Aizen, founder and COO, Dapper
• Matt Britton, founder and CEO, Mr Youth
• Chris Colinsky, Executive Creative Director, WhittmanHart
• Marissa Gluck, founder, Radar Research, Moderator
• John Montgomery, Executive Creative Director, Threshold Interactive
• Pete Vlastelica, founder and CEO, Yardbarker

This was an agency-heavy panel rounded out with some publisher and network representation. The focus was on where and if advertising works in a social network environment. The first consensus is that it’s not about performance, it’s about interaction. This is kind of a new bucket since we’re not really talking about transacting in volume (people are on SN for the connection and tend to stay with the content) or a large branding opportunity. But there are conversations happening between brands and end users. Couple of great takeaways:

Q: Who controls brands? Consumers? Marketers?

A: John Montgomery – Companies create brands. Consumers help SHAPE brands. The process is usually started with some internal ingenuity. Consumers create trends, not brands.

Q – How can publishers position their audiences differently to be part of the conversation?

A: John Montgomery – The better agencies know what’s coming down the pike the better they can plan against it
Matt Britton – more brands are thinking about becoming publishers. No one knows their audience better than publishers. Work with agencies to understand what makes your audience unique

From where I sit, this is just another reason that Ops should be sitting at the table with Sales/Planning and Product on regular basis, helping shape the innovation that can capture new campaigns in a highly competitive marketplace. Ad networks are definitely a key part of the revenue mix but ensuring that your company is driving new ideas that can be executed against flawlessly can make all the difference at the end of the quarter.