Operative Blog

Geoff Petkus

Right this moment, Operative’s Senior Director of Product, Geoff Petkus, is presenting at the IAB Ad Operations Summit on the IAB working group’s advancements in automating agency and publisher communications. 

Check out the session: The Power of Automation, E-Business Solutions!

Follow Operative Founder and VP Sales, Lorne Brown on Twitter- http://twitter.com/LorneBrown

Follow the IAB on Twitter- http://twitter.com/IAB

The question is not WHO owns the data but who CAN USE the data.  So the truth is that more data leads to more complexity in our business. The vast majority of publishers are still trading on content and not audiences.  But staying ahead of the technology curve allows a publisher to be more aggressive in the innovative marketplace. 

One big problem within digital advertising is that the cost of doing business is 2x or 3x the amount of other mediums (such as print, radio, TV, etc).  We need one electronic system to handle the workflow and inventory…  The fundamental problem is that companies like Procter and Gamble cannot spend $1 billion online without a better understanding of audience measurement. 

Think about search.  Google is successful because they gave the advertiser control.  This is a concept of what needs to change in the display market- let the market decide what it wants to buy.  Display has 95% of all inventory but provides very little control for advertisers. 

Predictions – if you are looking at demand side platforms and buyers are looking to find value, then you will see audience based buys through open marketplaces and there will be less integrated sponsorships (Yahoo).  Data will either liberate us or crush us (WPP). There will be two different planners: the ones in the marketplace and the other will be integration (WPP).  Real time bidding (like a clearing house) will control 60% of the business in 2 years (WPP).

The knowledge is where the data is.  How can Operative become a force and help publishers use this data?  Let us know your thoughts…

Dan Murphy, SVP at Univision Interactive Media and LONG TIME supporter of the IAB, gave an update on the IAB Ad Operations Council.

The joke of the day is that Ad Ops has become a REAL job- where everyone is wearing suits and leaving the jeans and sneakers at home.  According to Dan, both the agency and the publishing sides have value to bring to the table.  6 years ago, the industry was talking about all of the same problems we continue to address today (late creative, intrusive ads, audience measurement, rich media specs and discrepancies).  6 years ago, Ben Reid (when working for About.com) spearheaded the “OARS- Online Ad Reporting Standards” project (ebusiness).  Today, Operative still has a stake in the eBusiness initiative: Geoff Petkus has continued to work with the IAB committees on standards and specs to unite both publisher and agency processes and data models.    

The new IAB audit will go a long way to standardize the industry.  An overwhelming amount of impressions are audited throughout the web, and verification systems will need to help the ecosystem and not hurt the process.  According to a survey Dan initiated, “Ad Ops is 50% more complex than it was 3 years ago”.  Fragmentation is out of control right now because of the different sites and structure in the marketplace.  While innovation and growth are not slowing down, the largest concern for media companies is “Inventory and Yield Management”.  A close second is “Billing Discrepancies.”

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.

Kamal Chadha (CBS Interactive)- Panelist

Tim Messier (The Weather Channel Interactive)- Panelist

Steve Sullivan (Microsoft Advertising)- Moderator

As an industry, we’ve made strides in discrepancy management by implementing guidelines and best practice processes.  But the issue of discrepancies is still catastrophic.  Between human error and mapping line items to placement ID’s, manual processes and lack of automation only continue to perpetuate the impact of discrepancies.

Real life example: Today, the publisher gets the tag from the agency, and inserts the tag into the ad server.  For each tag, there is an associated publisher #.  How do you sync the tags with the publisher #, and report on the two?  Answer: more reporting options.

1. Madison, the CBS Interactive media custom server, collects all line item information.
2. Weather.com uses Solbright and passes a flight ID to the ad server for unique information.
3. Schedule standardized reports that will help you get in front of these issues before billing at the end of the month.
4. The last option is reporting through access to the ad server’s API.  CBS Interactive’s goal is to have an API automatic system that pulls 3rd party numbers every night with an alert function that highlights areas of concern.  There’s a new solution on the market with similar functionality.

Next steps- get the IAB council back together.  Educate the industry on possible solutions such as AdJuster and Operative.One Campaign360. Finally, establish partnerships that will ease the discrepancy pain.

Jeremy Fain, VP of Industry services at IAB takes the stage to discuss… DISCREPANCIES.

Last year’s presentation was called “The War on Discrepancies.”  Why were they happening?  If the ad servers were correct, than what was wrong?  Could it be process?  Click here to read about Best Practices in discrepancy management and actionable processes that can make a positive impact on revenue.  Today’s big conversation is around “system’s integration.”  With SI, we will never reach the future. 

Up next-  a look into the  future.  What is true operational utopia going to look like, considering that our focus is operational excellence.  David Cohen (executive VP) from Universal of McCann, will give us a peak into the agency side of digital operations.

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?

Lots of suits, but not a lot of ties.  We must be at a conference for ad operations.  It is 8:30 in the morning and the crowd is rolling in to get some bagels, fruit and coffee.  As we head into the conference room, blackberry’s are typing and laptops are out.  The seats are like an old stadium as there might be 3 inches between each chair.  The crowd is settling in and the bells are ringing to start the conference.   Lights are down and it begins…

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 .