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.

Ad Operations Training

Within the Ad Ops community, the turnover of people coming in and leaving can be nonstop.  It might seem like you are always training the newbie.  Training new traffickers can be a daunting task if you approach your employees with an overload of information.  The 5 steps below are guidelines we follow at Operative, that have proved to be incredibly beneficial to traffickers, as well as our customers.

1. Set the stage for what lies ahead

Learning to traffic is like learning a new language.  And with that learning, there can be a fair amount of initial frustration.  To combat this, communicate with your new trafficker throughout the entire training. Provide clear direction.  Take things one step at a time and don’t overwhelm them.  Always encourage questions!  If they don’t feel like they can ask you questions continuously, they will develop bad habits that could negatively affect your campaigns.

2. Reinforce the need for multi-tasking

Without the ability to manage several projects at the same time, your new trafficker will feel the weight of the pressure.  At first, start them off with simple projects like QA’ing creative or setting up a single Ad in the Ad Server.  After they grow comfortable with those tasks, and you are comfortable with their progress, add levels to their trafficking and so on.  Soon enough they will be trafficking a small campaign without even realizing how much they accomplished in a short amount of time.

3. Pay attention to detail

A main component of our day-to-day work as traffickers is spent on the details of a request.  Whether the details are simply the naming convention of a creative or the specific targeting that an entire campaign needs to achieve, the attention to detail is what sets apart traffickers.  When starting out with a new trafficker, reinforce the importance of details.  Slight pressure helps the traffickers learn faster because they are more sensitive to the task at hand.

4. Plan for errors           

Hmmm…errors.  While this is a touchy subject with all traffickers, errors are inevitable and unavoidable because our job function is very hands-on and extremely manual.  The challenge is to make sure to move on after an error is made and learn from your mistakes.  Much like a quarterback in football, throwing an interception is a momentary mistake but you have to get right back up, finish the game, and not dwell on it.

5. Prepare to be ‘last in line’

Lastly, it is critical to alert your trafficker that he or she is the last person on the assembly line of implementing an ad and ensuring it delivers on the web site properly.  What we do is considered the ‘finished product’ and with that, comes the need for increased visibility and accountability.  As traffickers, we need to communicate, juggle tasks, receive instruction, give feedback, and finish the project at hand on time and without error.

Once you complete these tasks, take a step back, see how your new trafficker is doing and then get ready for that next training because there is always someone else is waiting in the wings.

For more information, please click here.

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Patrick Bevilacqua, Operations Manager, Operative

Operative provides outsourced Ad Operations for both agencies and publishers across the globe. Patrick Bevilacqua one of Operative’s senior technical and tactical experts for all things Agency, providing advice to agency clients on a verity of subject matters including campaign and creative performance, troubleshooting, click tracking, reporting and rich media guidance.

The world of creative in online advertising is constantly evolving. It seems that every month we’re reading about new types of creative that can be implemented on a publisher’s web site. While many still use plain images to do their advertising (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!), we are beginning to see that advertiser’s want to directly engage the user…and when they do, it leads to quantifiable results.

While Flash® is still considered ‘Rich Media’ by many, it is quickly becoming ‘standard’ creative in this day and age. Flash® ads are now so common that even as a user myself, I do not feel that it captivates my attention like many of the newer brands of creative – ads such as push-downs, interstitials, and floating ads, while sometimes annoying to the user, also present a better opportunity to capture the user’s attention.

So if you are a publisher and want to get involved in the freshest types of rich media, here are 3 things to know so that you aren’t caught off-guard by the newest creative types.

1. Rich Media Vendors are the way to go.

If you’ve yet to take a dive into the world of rich media, know that there are specialists out there whose core competency is building and serving high-end rich media. Providers such as Pointroll, Media Mind(formerly Eyeblaster) and Eyewonder specialize in this type of work, and can handle any questions you may have about rich media as well as assist you and your advertiser in the creation of your product. Operative has developed partnerships with several of these vendors as well- reach out to us if you would like an introduction!

2. Rich Media creative is served differently than standard creative.

Standard ads are served through an ad tag on your website. These ad tags contain a specific size and directly correlate to a specific position on your page. There is very little complexity here. When delving into a high-end rich media creative, the equation changes. Take a “pushdown” for instance:  This ad is meant to load as a standard ad, but when you mouse over it, it “pushes” the content of your page down as the ad expands to a greater size. To create this type of movement, the code within the ad interacts with the code on your web page, creating this action. Obviously this can be a complicated process, which leads us to…

3. There will be some frustrations!

Most publishers can attest to the struggles obtaining creative in time for an on-time campaign launch. When using rich media, the struggle may increase. As a publisher, if you know you are going to be using rich media, it is best to plan for it! Rich media creative often require extensive testing in a custom set-up test environment (make sure you have one!) before setting the creative live to your actual web page. These ads often do not work the way you expect them to on the first try, so it’s imperative to test them before launch. This, of course, means you’ll need the creative in your hands well before the launch- so make sure you plan ahead for this when scheduling campaigns and working with a creative developer!

Diving head-first into the world of rich media is an exciting step for every publisher…and can lead to increased revenue. But know that a lot of work, and often times, a lot of patience is a part of the package! All in all however, employing rich media on your site can be a tremendous benefit to both you (higher CPMs), and your advertisers (more customers)!

For more information, please click here.

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Blogged by Christopher Lane, Operations Manager

Operative provides outsourced Ad Operations for both agencies and publishers across the globe. Chris Lane is one of Operative’s senior technical and tactical experts for all things Publisher, providing advice to publisher clients on a variety of subject matters including campaign performance to troubleshooting and product optimization.

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.

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.

Gordon McLeod, President, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network

The Evolution of Content

1. Paid content should be free. Once free, always free is a myth.

The hybrid model is the ultimate access with a paid and free model in the same market.  Drive traffic with free but keep the audience with paid.  Try to also think of different levels of pricing to create a lot of value but let the client decide how much they want to pay.  The highest level is also a great driver for the overall brand. 

2.  Platform agnostic

Print, mobile, web, e-reader, etc.  All of these can work with content.  The key is to make sure you understand the consumers on each platform. 

3.  Forget free, build a pay wall (2010)

Don’t literally build a brick wall.  Low traffic, no inventory is terrible.  Transparency and allowing customers to see the value helps attract higher value.  Make it easy for consumers to use your product.  Constant improvement and showing value is critical here.  Hybrid models could be a good fail safe.   Find a way to get new people  to the site to see the value. 

4.  Paid content is easy, charging is hard.

One view of the customer, the value of that customer is tremendous.  Take control of your business so you can set price.  Add in products that are complimentary but maybe not obvious.  Could industry bundles work as a solution? Bundling is the secret to paid content success.  Also, paid content actually adds value to the business.   With paid content, you get a higher premium.   

Book entitled Information Rules.  Best quote, “Technology changes but economic laws do not.”

For more information, please click here.