Operative Blog

At most agencies, Ad Operations teams are typically brought in only right before a campaign’s launch date.  The media team works with the client and publishers for months to build and finalize a plan, the design team develops the creative, and only AFTER this does the Ad Operations team step in to traffic.  By bringing Ad Operations into the media planning process much earlier, you can create more robust media plans, ensure that launch dates are met, and determine a process that reduces back and forth communication.

1. Most media planning teams are focused on one or only a few clients, but Ad Ops teams typically work with a dozen or more advertisers and execute a variety of types of campaigns.  Ad Ops sees it all—different vendors, types of targeting, audience segmentation, etc.  As a planner, if you explain what kind of campaign you are looking to run and what kind of targeting you want to do, Ad Ops may be able to inform you of better ways to achieve your goals within your ad server. Leverage the experience your Ad Ops team or partner has gained from working on past clients and campaigns…it may help you build a more targeted, customized media plan.

2. Before promising your client the swift implementation of a creative or technology you haven’t worked with before, give your Ad Ops team a call.  For instance, if you are gearing up for a campaign and your client wants to use a new rich media vendor, loop in your operations team.  If Ad Ops has worked with the technology solution before, they may be able to provide feedback based on past experience; like complexity of ad trafficking, how long the implementation process might take, etc.  Working closely with your ad operations team can help you set realistic time lines that meet your needs as well as your advertiser’s.

3. Your Ad Ops team can also be a great resource for building process.  Launch dates can be delayed if information is missing or creative isn’t built correctly.  Ad Ops can help media planners develop tools like trafficking sheets, timelines, specification grids or checklists.  Sometimes simply listing what Ops will need from you (site contacts, URLs, specific trafficking instructions) beforehand will limit the back and forth communication that often delays implementation. 

As you prepare for a busy Q4, consider Ad Ops as a resource for MUCH more than just trafficking.  Don’t be afraid to get on the phone and pick your trafficker’s brain if you have an idea that you are not sure how to execute.  If you view your traffickers as partners, your campaigns and clients will benefit.

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Caitlin O’Reilly, Operations Manager, Operative

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

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.

That seems to be the latest measurement buzz word.  Now…let me ask in a different way. 

Can your Ad Sales and Ad Ops teams scale to achieve the NEW technical demands of media buyers?

In 2010, digital publishers in the US and Europe that are not a top 20 site in their market, will leave more than $500,000,000 of ad revenue on the table.  In fact, if you divide that number into the top 300 publishers on the internet, that’s $1,600,000 per publisher.  Most of that money will go to the big publishers who can get the job done…the ones that can easily execute complicated marketing programs because they have the staff, systems and processes to support them.

In the last 6 months, custom integrations and specialized marketing programs have been in high demand. This has not only become a trendy ad buy in the US, but even more so in the UK because of the market’s ability to be more progressive than most on the creative side.  The end goal is the same- create ‘engagement’ with the consumer. 

For those who don’t know what a custom integration is, don’t worry, you’re not alone.  In fact, these were less than 1% of all digital ad spend only 1 year ago.  Custom integration are media buys that typically come from an agency who is looking for the “big idea” or from a brand/marketer who wants to really create engagement with the consumer.  Things like micro sites, custom video and social media widgets are all non-traditional ways to create engagement with the consumer…a way to be PART of the conversation, not an interrupter.  The first successful custom integration I can remember was a few years ago when you were able to “Friend the King” as a MySpace user to earn points. 

So, OK…big deal right?  How does that lose me $1,600,000 this year?  Well, if you want to offer custom programs, you need to have a certain type of infrastructure to be able to support them.  Most publishers do not have scalable teams or borrowed resources to help execute these types of buys.  In the first 6 months of 2009, almost $1.4B was spent on rich media, digital video, and sponsorship display-related advertising, and according to eMarketer, well over $1B is expected to be spent on social marketing this year. $500MM across digital sounds very reasonable. 

So, what does this mean for the digital publisher?

Challenges for Ad Sales Teams

Sales people are not experienced enough to sell these types of deals.  These buys usually come with a big ticket price and involve multiple decision-makers to sign off.  It also takes an enterprise level seller and a bit of solutioning to pull it off.

Most digital sellers (not all) who started in digital media typically start out as Sales Planners or Sales Assistant roles. This basically means completing RFPs and taking orders from agencies as a full time job.  You can develop poor habits this way.  This is much different than starting your sales career selling traditional media or other “feet on the street” Sales jobs that require you to hunt for your dinner to make a dime. 

Challenges for Ad Ops and Technology Teams

This part of your Operations isn’t the easiest thing to scale.  It’s hard to predict customer programs and big effort integrations because of the nature of the sale.  These deals can be asked for in a week’s notice (sometimes days) and this puts a lot of pressure on the Ad Ops team.  Custom integration deals can also take months to close due to complexity, so it’s hard to staff for something that “may” be coming soon.

If you don’t have a dedicated team for creative development, you are likely borrowing from other resources.  If that’s the case, there’s no way you can keep up with the demands in the market for these types of buys.  Furthermore, these borrowed resources don’t feel part of the sale.  They are oftentimes being dictated to by Sales people- a sure recipe for disaster.

Keep in mind, this isn’t your typical trafficking request either. Creating these types of ads requires multiple custom developers, project and vendor managers to get the ads live.  These buys take valuable resource time away from other high priority work that needs to get done, putting other campaigns and revenue at risk.

What can you do about all this???  Glad you asked. 

Over the last 3 week, I pooled together some ideas that came from other Sales/Ad Ops Executives in the US and UK. 

If you’re a CRO/EVP/VP of Sales, start looking for enterprise level talent.  You can’t win a complex deal with the same resources as you did a year ago.  This is the type and caliber of sales person that can get to the advertiser or brand, convincing the agency to make a direct introduction.

Move the custom development and key technical resources to the sales department.  It’s just like having Sales Engineers for Sales people at an enterprise software company.  They are involved in the sale from the beginning.  This will result in fewer issues when it comes time to getting the ad up since it was properly scoped from the get go.

Ad Ops needs to create a check and balance system to approve the ads before they are sold and QA them before they go live.  The role of campaign management would then be owned by Ad Ops. 

Free up those key trafficking resources that are very technical, either by automating parts of the process or partnering with another company to provide you ad ops services in your local time zone.

Get your sales forecasting process tight.  If you use Salesforce.com, get your ‘opportunities’ for these types of deals in sync with your booking system.  This will give Ad Ops longer lead times since the opportunity will start in Salesforce.com, and not when the order is about to come in.  It will also give sales a more accurate forecast report since your booking system automatically updates your pipeline in Salesforce.

Want to ask me a question?  Post a comment or email me at lbrown@operative.com

In this afternoon session, Product Manager Andrew Sullivan explores the concept of multi-dimensional inventory for digital publishers.  Decrementing inventory, segmenting audiences, packaging products…..these challenges affect the entire organization and most specifically, the ability to optimize revenue.

What business goals are impacted by your ability/inability to perform multidimensional inventory?

- Selling out of one area of inventory impacts other areas of inventory: this is a tough message to convey to Sales

- Illustrating to sales the full spectrum of inventory they are selling; and reasoning behind why certain pieces of inventory have a higher rate than others

- Ability for sales to communicate the value of their audience to the advertiser/agency

- Packaging strategies…looking at what you can encourage sales to lead with while making good use of the inventory

What systems are you using today to capture and aggregate the inventory?

- Ad server logs

- Excel Sheets

- Rapt

Who interacts with inventory in your organization? What are some of the typical roles?

- Ad Ops Team

- Finance Team

- Analytics Department

- The Exec Team

- The “Ad Product Team”- they focus on product analysis and performance

- Delivery Managers

- Sales reps and Sales planners

- Analytics Teams

What is CRITICAL to your business when solving for MD inventory?

- Compatible with MULTIPLE ad servers

- One data set to have transparency into all the inventory sources

- Quick and easy way to pull the data, aggregate it, and help the product, sales, marketing and ops team make sense of it

- Ability to generate accurate inventory reports

- Flexible rates, packaging

- Not using Excel anymore! It’s too manual and publishers need to move faster!

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.

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 .

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.

When you consider their importance, it seems surprising that ad tags aren’t shown more love by publishers.  They should be. If a site is properly tagged, it can generate far more revenue than it otherwise would.   Simply put, every subpar ad tag causes a publisher to lose potential revenue.  Here’s why:

Communication between a website and an ad server

Ads that command the highest CPM are those that are best targeted to an audience.  I’m sure Nike, Vonage or any other advertiser will pay more for a campaign that delivers results in the form of clicks and actions and then conversion. The best way for a publisher to ensure that its audience is attracted to the ads being displayed is to use the site content to gauge the interest of each visitor. For sites that require user registration, additional information, such as age and gender, may also be available.

All of this valuable information is useless, however, if it doesn’t make it into the ad server.  Building an advanced ad tag that passes along all relevant information allows the ad server to present the most appropriate ad to the user. Considering that the ad tag is the main source of communication between a website and an ad server, it makes sense that a suitable ad tag is needed in order for the server to perform most effectively.

My content is the best

We all know that not all content is created equal.  What is truly helpful is to be able to identify which content performs best. Knowing the patterns of visitors on a website allows sales teams to best match campaigns to content. For example, ads that appear on pages featuring content that engrosses visitors, such as news articles and movie clips, may not receive as many clicks as those on pages whose content is of a more general nature. The performance of low-click content makes it unsuitable for CPC campaigns.  When the content type is included in the site tag (ex: sect=news or sect=video), the publisher can then decide to exclude these sections from CPC campaigns and utilize them for branding campaigns, which do not require high click rates.  Rather than let the low click-through rate of those sections drag down the average performance of the site, the publisher is able to separate them out and sell the high-click content at a premium.  In this way, the publisher is able to best match content to advertisers and maximize revenue.

Trying to sell – Bump up the appeal

When a website is outfitted with site tags that take into account useful information – such as user details, page position, and site content – the sales team is able to sell more targeted campaigns at higher rates.  Being able to differentiate content allows for more flexibility when selling inventory.

Reports, Reports and more Reports!

Even after an ad serves, an ad tag’s job is not done.  Detailed ad tags are able to enhance reporting capabilities and make delivery reports more robust.  The information contained in the reports is useful to both advertisers and publishers.

Advertisers love detailed reports because they provide the advertiser with the ability to more effectively optimize a campaign.  Many long term campaigns rely on optimization to attain the results that an advertiser is seeking.  Publishers that offer detailed reporting are attractive to advertisers because they are more in control of how their money is being spent.

Consider this scenario:  A publisher  MYSAMPLETAG.COM (fake name) with advanced ad tags is able to target certain ads to a website that features several sections, each with different user demographics.  When the advertiser (lets say  TOYSRUS) examines the detailed delivery report, they notice that creative featuring a puppy performed particularly well on a section of children’s content whose visitors are between the ages of 6 and 11. Armed with this information, the TOYSRUS chooses to run the puppy creative at a higher rotation in that section, increasing the click rate of the campaign. The robust reporting that sophisticated ad tags can offer allows for greater campaign optimization and can enhance the performance of the website.

Let me tell you …

A very good example of the company  that certainly knows the value of an ad tag is NBC Universal’s Local Integrated Media.  Their websites span many different domains and markets and they cater to the tastes of many different audiences. Through their systematic and organized site tags, they are able to provide detailed information which enables them to make the most of the content that they produce.   Their careful attention to their ad tags has helped them make their complex network manageable.

Net-Net

Properly tagging a website is an investment that is well worth making. The returns to be gained from targeted selling and advanced reporting are significant for publishers and should not be overlooked. Targeted selling allows publishers to properly match advertisers to content, ensuring high performance that is valuable to advertisers.  Additionally, advanced reporting allows for improved campaign optimization and boosts performance even more. Every site that is not adequately tagged is not living up to its full potential.

**If you are interested in retagging your web site, or would like to learn more about working with an Operative re-tagging strategy consultant, please contact Greg Carr at 212.206.4762 or gcarr@operative.com.

Right now, in a breakout session during the Operative Dashboard Client Summit, a handful of publishers are discussing challenges around campaign management, and more importantly, 3rd party discrepancies. 

What’s the pain associated with 3rd party discrepancies?

1. Publishers LOSE REVENUE

2. They are forced to issue make-goods

3. End of month billing takes DAYS (not a simple process to reconcile)

4. Battling back and forth with the agency is time consuming and can effect the overall business relationship

Overall, the group feels that catching delivery discrepancies between the primary ad server and 3rd party ad server is cumbersome, and quite frankly, there’s no bandwidth to proactively catch these before it’s too late.  One publisher said, “If we over-deliver, we live with it. If we under-deliver, then we serve more impressions.”  Another stated that end of month billing and reconciling of these discrepancies can take “up to 2 weeks for the Finance team.” 

While real-time campaign management (or daily campaign management) isn’t totally realistic, what IS the solution?  How can publishers do a better job of catching discrepancies and  reducing the amount of revenue lost? 

Send us your thoughts on how YOUR organization is managing campaigns and 3rd party discrepancies.