Operative Blog

What IS Operative.One?

Operative.One is the NEW brand for our solutions philosophy- the concept that media companies need to utilize multiple pieces of the value system in order to sell, execute and bill digital advertising (CRM, Ad Servers, Finance/Billing, Audience Targeting, Pricing/Rate Card, etc), and that all of these fragmented solutions need to feel as “one”.  It is Operative’s job to make it feel like one…To help our clients become easier to do business with.  Therefore, the “Operative.One” brand will be the umbrella for all future business solutions.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.