Operative Blog

Recently, an Ad Operations colleague at a publisher contacted me about ad discrepancies.  They started preparing for end of month billing:

• pulling their primary ad server campaign delivery reports
• pulling 3rd party ad server campaign delivery reports
• compressing the data from ad serving sources, and
• sending it all off to Finance for reconciliation. 

The publisher wanted to know, “Where exactly do discrepancies come from?  What causes them?”

After a long discussion about some of the known causes of discrepancies, including:

1. The daisy chain effect
2. Ad blockers
3. Defaulting
4. Multiple definitions of an ‘ad impression’

the publisher then said, “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by the daisy chain effect.”  In an attempt to draw a parallel between online ad discrepancies and real life, I came up with the below scenario.  Enjoy!

…and for those of you that I confused even more- I apologize- it’s not an easy concept to grasp.  For those who would like to carry on a dialog, post a message for me.

————————————————————————————————————————————

The local high school decided to award their students with a treat. The principal called the owner of a concert hall, and finagled a deal for 1000 of his students to go see Britney live. The owner said it was OK to pay him after the show, and the principal said that was fine, he would have his assistant, Mary Pritchard, collect tickets at the door, and Erin Bain, a boy on suspension, count each student as he seated them. Then they would pay the owner an agreed price per student.

That night, Charles McSorley had kids piling up at the concert hall where he worked the door. As each approached him he gave them explicit directions to the box office, right down the hall and to the right, and added a tally of the students to his notebook. Entering the building, the concert goers approached the box office one by one, where Dr. Frank Payne checked their IDs for their age, and sent anyone under 16 to talk to Alex Nevins a little further down the hall to ask if he had any shows available for them to see. The rest were given a ticket to the Britney concert in theater 1, through a door to his left, past the bathrooms and the concessions. The Britney fans flocked to the entrance of theater 1, where Mary Pritchard collected their tickets, and gave them each a form with the instructions to write their name on it and then give it to Dr. Frank Payne on the way out if they liked the show (Payne would then take it upon himself to tell Mary). Finally, Erin Bain escorted each of them to their rows where they could watch the show, thumbing his trusty clicker as each was seated.

The following morning, the crew met up to figure out how well they’d done the night before. Charles had diligently tallied every patron, and said that he had let in 1000 people. Dr. Payne checked the register for the tickets he’d sold, and said that 150 had been turned away to Alex Nevins, and that 840 had been sold tickets to the Britney concert. Mary had kept all of the stubs from the Britney fanatics, and had 750 of them. Erin lifted up his clicker and smiled, having seated 720. Alex, with a shoe-box full of assorted receipts, rattled off three additional shows that he’d sent the youngins to, and how much he was able to talk each into paying. Frank then remembered the happy customers leaving the show, and that three of them had even handed him the form with their name on it. Mary frowned, because Frank had only handed her two of them the night before.

For how many tickets is the principal responsible for paying the concert hall owner?

For more information, please click here.

For the last session of the day, Operative CEO and President, Mike Leo, lead a discussion with Rob Deichert, Senior Vice President, Global Sales Development and Operations, AOL Advertising and Mark Ellis, Executive Vice President, Sales, AOL Advertising.  The panel explored how Sales and Ad Operations  work together to drive revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and continually optimize the consumer’s experience. 

We are in an industry of mass customization.  Everyone and every web site needs something unique and specific and customizeable - but are we there yet?  How do we deliver a custom product but on a mass standpoint?

Question: How does Sales work with Ad Ops? 

Answer: First and foremost, the work starts when the sale happens.  Ad Ops is a major partner, not an obstacle to winning and closing deals.  It’s common that the Sales person always wants to push the envelope with an agency buyer.  This is where Ad Ops has problems- a new custom environment for every agency client. 

Question: Is there one part of customization that would dramatically help? 

Answer: Optimization and billing would have a major impact on making the sales cycle better. 

Question: Does Sales appreciate Ad Ops? 

Answer: Yes (smile).  “All custom = no profit.  And all mass = no innovation.”   The key for any publisher is to find the happy medium because that is how a publisher can advance to the next level. 

Question:  Lets look at an example- AOL’s largest spending customers get the best and brightest opportunities because they have real dollars to spend.  Can we spill less blood than we did 2 years ago, if so, how do you do it? 

Answer:  The major change is that there are definitions for all products (Project Management), like an Operations role.  But in 2009, Ad Operations emerged as a major part of all implementations once a sale happened.  The majority of time though, even today, Ad Ops and Sales are not on the same calls.

Question: How do you manage inventory? 

Answer: The forecasting is more accurate when you add in multiple areas.  There is a balance between very specific sections and the ability to sell the entire site.  Managing inventory is entirely based on the market conditions.  The order of magnitude of creative in online versus TV is so different.  Online averages one piece of creative to 70k users versus a broadcast campaign which over 1 million.

Question: If the agency knew it was easier to do business with a publisher and that made business a lot easier, would the agency move more of the budget to them?  

Answer: Yes, the ability to provide fully baked programs at a strong value creates a much better relationship. 

Question: Is it part of your sales pitch, that “We are better at Ad Ops”? 

Answer: Yes, but it is subtle.  When you don’t have the best product, cheapest price, or largest site, customer service drives a large part of sales. 

Question: What improvements in the sales process have helped the most?  

Answer: One sales person, one person to talk to, one insertion order = huge win.  The online offline combination has a long way to go.  Video and TV will be the first to converge.  Others will follow.

Question: What will be the Big Wins in the next 3 years?  

Answer: The system between agency and publisher with regards to creative and discrepancies. 

“Looks like its cocktail time…”  Mike Leo

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.”

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.

What does TRUE operational efficiency look like?   Buying, selling and executing digital advertising should be a transaction similar to eating out at a restaurant- you don’t HAVE to think about too hard.  As an industry, publishers and agencies spend too much time in petty details and legal issues and THIS needs to change. 

David Cohen of Universal McCann asked 3.5 Questions:

1. Characterize ad ops?  We NEED good people but we LOSE good people.  Others talked about challenging times with too many demands.  There are common sentiments about how this portion of business is perceived. 

2. Greatest improvements?  Better collaboration every day. 

3. Could discrepancies start going down?  Is this one of media’s greatest pains?  Consider the amount of time it takes to analyze the data, the manual processes and paper STILL involved the process.  We still need mutual trust, collaboration and transparency among publishers and agencies.

David shows a chart called the Road to Nirvana (not the band), and all of the pieces that need to change to make the system run a lot smoother.  It starts with something as easy as RFP standardization, and continues to T&C’s.  Late creative is another big issue that needs to be solved. 

2010 is our year.  Simple dialogue can go a long way.  The only constant right now is that the rate of innovation is fast.

David’s prediction for 2015 is that there will be two different camps: High volume vs Premium publishers. 

Total commercial websites will drop dramatically.  In 2015, MSA’s will be signed at the beginning of the year in order to make life much easier.

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.

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 .

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.