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.

Operative Survey: The State of the Industry- Digital Operations

For the last 2 weeks, we’ve been working with the team at DM2PRO to survey the digital advertising community about the current state of affairs:

- Growing need for data integration among all players in the ecosystem

- Blurring lines between publisher, agency, brand and network roles and responsibilities

- As we continue to innovate, our inability to adopt those innovations is holding us back!

- Fragmentation is NOT going away….and agencies, publishers, brands, advertisers and networks alike need to stop losing money and bring our systems together to compete effectively. Read more…

Operative partnered with the team from DM2PRO to survey digital publishers and agencies about the people, processes and tools required to run a profitable advertising business.  At DPAC today, we’ve released the findings.  Take a look at some of analysis we’ve gathered.

More than 339 self-identified publishers weighed in during a one-week period, ample enough indication that we’d struck a nerve with our subject matter. While many of them without doubt juggle “cross-media” campaigns with their traditional content channels and the Web, we went a step farther, asking, “What percent of all your current campaigns includes three or more media (e.g. a mobile, video and display component in a single order)?”

For a slight majority of respondents, such campaigns are still a rarity. But, for the other half, they range from 10%-25% for a little more than a fifth of respondents, to greater than half all campaigns for the top 10% of publishers.

To read more survey results, check out the below PDF.

DPAC_Presentation_Sample survey findings

For more information, please click here.

According to the Bain Study “Building Brands Online”, in the next 3 years, brand marketers will spend close to 40% of their budget on cross-platform campaigns (up from roughly 25%).  That’s about $52,000,000,000 being spent on cross platform campaigns in the near future.  Unless you start making changes in your organization to satisfy this new rise in demand, you won’t get a dime of it.

Let’s explore why.

What do these new demands look like for marketers?                            

A marketer looking for ‘cross-platform’ means they want to use multiple advertising platforms or vehicles to convey an advertising message.  For example, a brand like Nike may want to reach women at home, on the move, during recreation and at work.  To do that, Nike needs a number of options to distribute the advertising message: display media, online video, mobile, social media, TV, outdoor, newspaper and magazines.  And, the list continues to get longer.  For example, in the last 2 months, hundreds of publishers scrambled to build their iPad app, knowing that a decent percent of their audience will flee to the digital magazine version of their product. 

Marketers are starting to require multiple touch points in their campaigns, increasingly digital.  The people who spend the money are aware that digital is an accountable, efficient way to build brand equity and are putting pressure on their marketing departments to become more cross-platform as a result.  They are looking to get a single message to a consumer across different digital and non-digital advertising channels.  In fact, according to the Marketing and Media Ecosystem 2010 Booz & Company analysis, 89% of all marketers are developing ideas that cross media platforms, including digital.        

What can media owners and publishers do to keep up with these demands?

Let’s take a break from the macro-level talk and get into the day to day reality of the situation.  The media buyer that you met at a cocktail party nine months ago calls you up. 

“Hey – long time, how are you?… Great, great…Listen, we are doing this thing for my client and they are trying to reach men between the ages of 18-49 that are interested in buying a car.  And um…they are really trying to do this across multiple outlets…something that covers all the standard online ad units, but something that’s custom too.  So, if you could put together something that’s standard, custom, across video, mobile, online, social, that’s targeted to male car buyers between the age of 18 and 49 that live in the north east, that’d be great.  Oh, wait, I need it by this Friday OK?  Thanks, you’re the best.”

Only 1 type of publisher will get this order- the one who CAN execute.  If you can’t scale, you’ll spend all of your time reacting to these requests and looking for data.  This leaves very little time to sell, brainstorm and get creative. 

Translation – you likely won’t get this deal. 

So, what’s holding publishers back from executing cross-platform campaigns?

1.    Technology and data fragmentation is still a huge problem.  A typical publisher uses 30+ systems to run their business.  The data is fragmented, yet absolutely necessary to access to stay competitive in this new market place.  There’s one ad server for video, one for mobile, and one for display.  If you want to include a TV component or a print component, there’s a whole different set of systems to access to see if the inventory even available, and at what price.  If you plan to offer ad space on an iPad app, well you have that to deal with now too. 

2.    Business resources necessary to complete the RFP or contract oftentimes don’t even sit on the same floor- let alone same office. You may have other sales teams within your company that you may need to consult with to get them on board with your client’s ideas.  They are usually removed from your digital business goals, have not been vested in the process of selling to this client, and have their own agendas in mind. 

3.     Ad operations teams are typecast and segmented by the media they implement.  For many publishers, one team traffics standard and display rich media.  Another team traffics mobile or uses an outsourced mobile ad network.  TV and print production teams don’t even sit in the same office as you.  These are not ideal conditions for selling a cross-platform deal.

What can publishers do about it?

1.    Take a leadership role by getting all of your data in one place for Sales.  Plan for the future.  According to the Ecosystem study mentioned above, 67% of media owners said they need to upgrade their supply chain capabilities in 2010.  Part of this investment translates into having one screen to access your inventory, products and rate cards available for video, mobile, display, social and even TV, radio and newspaper.  This needs to happen, regardless of the number of ad servers or execution systems you may use.  Integrate it all into one central place so at the time of proposal, Sales has all the information they need when they get the call from that media buyer. 

2.    Centralize ad operations teams and production resources.  Fragmented ad operations teams are unable to help sales drive revenue that comes from cross-platform.  While it would be difficult (today) to have the same ad ops team that implements TV also traffic digital, there are steps you can take to move in the right direction.  Get everyone communicating with each other through one platform.  The carrot is integrating their specific ad system into the platform that everyone uses.  This will make them want to be on that platform.  By merging several departments onto one system, new proposals, orders, demands and alerts from a cross-media sales teams would be visible to everyone. 

How do these steps help publishers deliver cross-media campaigns?

By implementing these steps, Sales will be able react quickly to client demands.  They will also have more data to educate buyers and move upstream in the buying process, getting closer to the people holding the budget.  Executives can get a larger share of wallet from existing and new customers.  Ad operations and production resources can become a strategic partner to ad sales teams and help provide a competitive advantage over other publishers competing for the same dollars.

Of course, this is not easily done.  Someone with influence in your company needs to step in and be the VP of Change.  Someone who has power.  Someone that cares about revenue.  That cares about your brand.  Someone that is forward thinking enough to adapt before it’s too late.  If you can get the right people behind you, integration of data becomes easier, centralization of operations starts to fall into place and the company will start to rally towards a common cause- $52,000,000,000.

For more information, please click here.

The day of ‘seller defined media buys’ will decrease as publishers understand the who, how and where in the context of a media buy.  Sellers need to not only understand the revenue picture but also the value of the audience.  

The question is not WHO owns the data, but WHAT can we use the data for? 

Advertisers and publishers hire vendors to solve their business problems.  The two sources of real data are from advertisers and publishers.  All of data is incomplete. 

Does data equal revenue? 

Are we managing data to get a stronger revenue stream? 

Data ownership is a false paradigm.  It is all about how we USE the data.  We must be respectful of the consumer and prevent legislation at the same time.  If we eliminate data and data usage, it will cause everyone more problems.  Controls are important for both publishers and advertisers.

Advertisers want to buy on frequency and modeling for maximum reach of a targeted audience.  We need a combination of trust and responsibility.  The holding companies want to be transparent and open.  

Big publishers and holding companies are afraid of start-ups who are doing non-ethical things that effect the revenue model for everyone.  But the truth is that big players need to take a lead in the marketplace.  There is a big disagreement between agencies and publishers as far as who can do what with data.   This is a fundamental issue that might not be solved for years.  Right now data is all over the place, no one trusts each other, and advertisers want to buy on an audience basis. 

So, what the value of targeting without context?  

What can publishers do to protect themselves moving forward?  

Don’t work with ad networks. 

Create a business policy on any 3rd party tags. 

Consider search and the influence of site indexing. 

One great way to think about inventory and data, is that we need to evaluate opportunity cost for each partnership.  The first step for everyone has to be transparent throughout the buying and selling process.

For more information, please click here.

Join us Monday, November 16 at the IAB Ad Operations Summit in New York!

For the 3rd year in a row Operative is the Principal Sponsor of the Event, and we are PSYCHED about this year’s agenda.  The theme for the summit is,  ‘The Path to True Operational Efficiency’- one that is SURE to prompt heated debate and controversy as the publisher and agency attendees take a look back at 2009 and hash out the people, processes and technologies that will spawn revenue growth in 2010.

Operative team members Mike Leo, Lorne Brown, Geoff Petkus, Manu Warikoo, Joseph Dressler, and David Ponte will all be in attendance, so come say hi!

If you are not attending the event, we invite you to follow our blog on Monday as the team posts anecdotes, insights and compelling arguments overheard throughout the day.   

 We look forward to the IAB Ad Operations Summit- and stay tuned for NEW Operative announcements!

Our top tips to help Creative Houses and clients get highly creative creatives working!

When you work with a publisher that likes to dazzle their audience with the latest shiny ads and takeovers on a regular basis, you get used to a lot; takeovers, sidekick and pushdown ads that move the entire page around, pagemorphs, floor ads, game banners, synchronised ads,  … you name it, we’ve probably done them, usually delivered with only hours to spare before the campaign starts!

Due to the complexity of the creatives and with so many people being involved, it regularly happens that I end up checking the test pages with one eye on the clock – Murphy’s Law states this will always happen on Friday afternoons. Generally, the creative houses and agencies I work with are often quite small, and have a high rotation of personnel and with it the knowledge and experience.

I remember one problematic campaign, spending days emailing the client about a creative issue, eventually, I ended up talking to ‘Bob’ (altered his name to protect the guilty…), in his converted garden-shed, convinced he was the greatest flash designer ever… 20 minutes later I was still explaining to him about the basics such as button actions. By the time we resolved the issues through many emails, it was green lit, the very day the campaign ended. When we told him it was assigned he replied with “All right!!!” … needless to say we never received another creative from ‘Bob’ again.

So how do you prevent something like that from happening?

-          Your client needs to trust you … that you know your stuff and believe you can explain technical issues to anyone, this will give you direct access with their advertising agencies or creative houses (saving time and avoiding miscommunication).

-          Know who you are speaking to and talk on their level. If people feel you are talking jargon they don’t understand, they will most likely ignore it or pass it along and you’ll get nowhere fast. Make sure you know who you NEED to speak to as well, as you don’t have time to waste, chasing the wrong person.

-          Never send out the same “Here’s the tech spec” email more than once. If the designer didn’t get your explanation the first time, sending exactly the same email will not make them see the light. Call them.

-           Network. You never know when you need a favour from someone when your main contact is not available. I always have a 30 second chat with everyone I speak to and most importantly, NEVER fall out with anyone, as you will find that they are “in a meeting” when you most need them.

My final piece of advice, always remember, when faced with insurmountable odds, the phone is mightier than the email!

Marti Funk (Sportgenic), me, and Steve Patrizi (LinkedIn)

After going attending iMedia in Austin last week and spending lots of time with VPs of Ad Sales & Media Directors, one thing is still clear.  It’s really hard to get in front of an agency to influence an RFP.  It requires effort, research and diligence…and since all those things sound like “work”, too many media sellers take the easy way out; just trying to get on the RFP.  By just trying to get included in the circulation of a document that’s already been co-authored by your competition, you are setting yourself up for certain failure.  Failure may be too strong; you may get a small spend, but most times, you’ll never hear back from them or if you do, you may hear something like, “you weren’t the right fit” or “we went in another direction”…sounds like a interview rejection. 

Now, in defense of media teams everywhere, there are some real obstacles to influencing the agency.  Last Monday morning down in Austin, I attended John Durham’s (Catalyst SF) panel titled, “Trading Places”.  This is where 4 heads of media sales got on stage with 4 heads of media buying to air their issues.  The publishers brought up great points around why its so hard to get in front of and deal with an agency:

1) David Blumenfeld mentioned how “agencies are always looking for that outside the box idea, but make sure it’s inside the spreadsheet.” 

2) My favorite one was the cream cheese incident by Carter Brokaw from Meebo…where you get a meeting with a power person at an agency to join your pitch and the only person there is a junior media buyer asking “where’s the veggie cream cheese?”  They also came to the meeting without a pen or notebook. 

3) And of course, the classic, “We need you guys to really surprise us on this one, get creative and we need a response from you by EOD tomorrow.”

So now what…it’s hard to get a meeting with a decision maker, it’s hard to get the lion share of the budget, it’s hard to influence the RFP and when you do win the biz, it’s hard to keep them coming back.  Here are some thoughts to help you navigate through these erratic waters:

1) Getting a Meeting with a Decision Maker:  people with the “power of the pen” are often getting lots of emails and calls.  Hundreds per day.  Sorting through the clutter is time consuming and usually emails are just skimmed for pockets of interesting ideas.  If you are sending an email or leaving a voice mail, make sure you are giving someone a good reason to call you back.  Find out why their previous campaigns failed, if they post a personal blog and what challenges their clients have had in the past taking products to market. 

That said, you can do all the right things and still not get the meeting, so then what?  Educate your media buyer to sell for you.  I had lunch with Darren Herman from The Media Kitchen yesterday.  “Don’t ignore the media buyer”, he said.  Most of the ideas he takes on are ones that are pitched to him from his media team.  If you don’t think your media buyer can share 3 compelling reasons with their boss on why you should be included, get back in there (and keep it simple, don’t overwhelm them with slideware).

2) Getting ahead of & Influencing the RFP:  I sat in Scot McLernon’s Upstream breakfast last week, also in Austin and this was a big topic.  Lizzie Widhelm, VP of West Coast Sales for Pandora Media sat on the panel and had some interesting ideas.  “Find the opportunities where there are not opportunities already.”  Like, if you wanted to sell to Coke, Pepsi or Gatorade, go to a food an beverage show since that’s where people are trying to figure things out.  “You won’t find many digital media folks there at all.”  Get your idea out early and plant that seed ahead of time at the right levels…by the time an RFP is under way with an Agency, that seed will be planted in cluttered soil and the chances for growth are slim.  

3) Keeping them Coming Back:  Back at an iMedia a couple of years ago, Randy Wooton from Microsoft Advertising Solutions said a “5% increase in customer loyalty can equal a 25-85% increase in overall profit.”  Ad serving language is often times foreign to a sales rep.  Make it easy for your sellers to report back to your client in business friendly terms & have all your data in one place.  This way, when you call on them to become part of the next big idea, you know what happened in the past, where things went wrong and what they could do better.  If you can’t influence the RFP, at least when you get it, having the information at your finger tips around what they paid, if it delivered on time and what you optimized for them during the campaign, can go a long way.

Although some of this may seem like actual “work”, keep in mind pain ripples within AND ouside your organization.   If you are frustrated, chances are, your customer is frustrated too.  Being prepared for meetings and helping to educate them on a consistant basis will often benefit you both.

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.