Operative Blog

FFL and Digital Media

Anyone know what time of year it is?  That’s right, it’s fantasy football draft season.  If you’ve played before, you know that draft season is the most stressful time of year.  This is when you have to sit down, look at all the players that are available and decide which ones will help you win a fantasy football championship.  There are many strategies that you can deploy, and the most conventional is to draft running backs- fast, furious and early on.  Why?  They are the steady players that give you consistent point production.  But, fantasy football has changed.  Some NFL teams now use multiple running backs (AKA running back by committee).  Other teams have moved away from running the ball all together and have opted for the exciting air attack.  This opened up opportunities for fantasy owners to structure their teams around additional point contributors like a Quarter Back like Drew Brees or a Wide Receiver like Larry Fitzgerald.  Decisions, decisions. 

How does fantasy football relate back to digital media? 

Well, it’s also technology budgeting season.  Today’s publishers and specialty ad networks feel the stress of making technology decisions for 2011.  They have to sit down, review all the projects they are going to push for and make a stake in the ground that “these are the initiatives that will put us in the best position to win”.  

Many of these projects will fall into 2 categories.  The first category is revenue.  Plain and simple, if that project is successful, it will directly help you make money.  There should be no ambiguity.  Some example projects include:

• Developing custom creative programs to help you attract new brands
• Building a mobile, video or  social media ad server that promotes engagement metrics or gives you a competitive advantage in the market place
• Introducing rich media tools

The second category is around helping companies drive efficiency inside and outside their organization.  Below are some examples of efficiency-focused initiatives:

• Syncing your publisher/partner/network management systems
• Evaluating and deploying reconciliation, reporting and billing tools
• Integrating with proposal , IO and media planning applications

In order to be successful in 2011, media companies need to do both.  You MUST do both.  If you don’t innovate, you won’t attract the big ad dollars.  If you only innovate and forget about the back-end efficiency, you’ll lose all the customers you won or have a ceiling on the amount of customers you can take-on due to inefficiency.  Quite the predicament. 

For most media companies, there are the few factors contributing to this problem:

1. You’ve got 1 engineering team and they are drinking through a fire hose.  I don’t care who you are…if you’re a digital media owner in some capacity, your engineering team has too much on their plate and not enough time.  Furthermore, with all the new technology in the market place, it’s just getting worse and worse.
2. Most publishers, even today, still run their business on excel.  There’s not one platform in place that you can use as a springboard for innovation.  Not one place to connect all these new things that you’re buying or creating.  This is also the reason your operations teams are so busy.  They have to log into 10 different systems to get their jobs done. No wonder there is so much demand for projects that create efficiency.
3. A large percentage of the technology and business leadership within media organizations still promotes a “let’s build it all” type of mentality.  For example, the industry hasn’t matured enough where the role of the CIO is relevant – there’s no one to advise the CEO on best practices on how to get information, drive revenue and scale (all at the same time).

If this sounds familiar and your ability to be successful depends on your engineering team executing, consider some of these ideas:

1. Make a list of all the projects you have on your plate for 2011.  From there, put a “$” next to each one that your sure will help you drive revenue next year.  Then, put an “E” next to the ones that will help your bottom line (efficiency gains, speed to market, etc.).  Getting clarity on what these projects actually “mean” for the business is the first step.  
2. From there, make the decision to partner with a company that can offer an enterprise platform to help you run your day to day business and gain those efficiencies (inventory management, proposals, packaging, trafficking, reporting, financial reconciliation, etc.).  Make sure your partner has an API and SDK to help you innovate.  You’ll find there are companies that can not only help you get deal with a lot of your “E”s, but also enable you to innovate the “$”s.
3. It’s important to ensure that the company’s technology culture has a strategic focus on revenue and strategic value creation.  I ran into one publisher recently who calls his engineering team “Team Money”.  That’s because their engineering leadership has a mentality of selecting projects that will help the company drive new revenue by establishing partnerships with companies that help them achieve greater efficiency.   This is a cultural change and isn’t always easy.  Engage your CEO in this concept – make it a big deal towards hitting the 2011 revenue number.

By focusing your engineering teams on things that are exciting (like drafting quarterbacks and wide receivers) and partnering with a company that can help you innovate and scale (your work horse running back), you’ll be in a better position to be successful in 2011…successful in beating your competition, meeting the new demands of brand advertisers, raising employee satisfaction in your engineering department and keeping both the top and bottom line on the up and up.

Moments ago at the DPAC conference in New York, Operative CEO and President, Mike Leo and Operative Founder, Lorne Brown, announced the release of Operative.One- the business platform that allows media company’s to operate in one integrated, best of breed system.

We invite you to learn more about Operative.One!  Please click here.

Operative Announces Operative.One

Operative.One Campaign360

Are discrepancies STILL keeping you up at night? 

Has your CFO  charged you with the responsibility of driving revenue opportunity within your Ad Ops department in 2010?

Now is the time to alleviate pain.  Create operational efficiencies within your digital organization by implementing tools that will automate the collection, reconciliation and reporting of primary and 3rd party ad server data. 

Visit our booth and ask the team about the benefits of Operative.One Campaign 360.

IAB Ad Ops Summit - Operative Booth

We are announcing a NEW PRODUCT today at the IAB Ad Operations Summit, so come visit our booth OR CLICK HERE to read about it!

No one sets out with a business model that requires giving money back for delivering valuable products.  Yet, that’s effectively what most publishers are doing with Makegoods and over-delivery. Some have acknowledged the seriousness of the issue and have developed a patchwork of tools in Excel to do a better job of campaign management.  However, these are rarely forward looking or timely to respond in business real-time to a poorly performing campaign.

There are many reasons for campaigns to under perform: the product was oversold, the forecast was wrong, trafficking errors were not caught, and, everyone’s favorite, ad serving delivery discrepancies. How serious is this issue? How about at least $400m annually in the US! That’s assuming just 5% of IAB’s estimate for display ad revenue ($3.8B for 1H09) is disputed.  Our anecdotal discussions with publishers indicate that the number may be even higher.

The good news is that much of the loss can be mitigated by actively managing campaigns, early and frequently.  Automation can easily replace the manual routine that most publishers find themselves in: log into third party ad server, export report, pull it into Excel, reconcile with primary ad server data; repeat for every third party ad server; repeat as many times a month as you can – realistically, just once. Oh by the way, account for changed passwords, misaligned data and just try to get the data right, forget about analysis.

For those of you stuck in this resource-sucking treadmill, we have good news.

Today we are announcing Operative.One Campaign360, a product that makes it easy for publishers to centrally manage and proactively monitor campaigns.  It improves virtually every step of the campaign management process:

• “lights out” integration and collection of data from primary and third-party ad server
• Automatic reconciliation of primary and third party line items
• A simple, grid-based UI for manual reconciliation and overrides
• Robust analysis with pre-built graphs and reports for common tasks such as delivery discrepancy, pacing, top 10/bottom 10 campaigns

All the information that you need to do campaign management and billing is in one place, keeping you from having to do hours of leg work to collect the data, reconcile it, and create reports.

In other words, the product does all the heavy lifting and you focus on making sure that you get all the revenue that your sales team worked hard to book.

Based on our experience of 10 years working with publishers, we are really excited about the potential this product has in improving publisher operations. Learn more about the campaign management and discrepencies in our white paper, Making Peace with Discrepancies: Six Steps You Can Take to Proactively Manage Them, learn more about the product and contact us .