Ad Tags and Stove Pipes

"Data Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Mike Lewis, President and Co-Founder of Ad-Juster, an ad server discrepancy management company.

Whether relaying target coordinates of hostile and friendly forces on a battlefield or passing digital ad tags for 3rd party served campaigns, the points where data changes from one system to another are critical to the success or failure of that transmission. These points are commonly referred to as "hops". Having come from the Defense industry, I'm familiar with disparate, stove-piped data networks which are fraught with hops. As a rule, the more automated the hop, the greater the chance it has of success. This is why I remain so amazed that in an age of transformation in the digital advertising industry, when many ad serving platforms are in their 3rd and 4th generations, the standard operating procedure for passing ad tags from agency to publisher remains email. I've even heard cases of clients receiving tags over instant messenger.

Most local ad serving platforms utilized by digital publishers have started to incorporate sophisticated tools to help ad ops professionals insert cache busting, click tracking and other common modifications. However, there is currently no clear digital path to get these tags into the ad server when issued to them by their agency customers. Ad trafficking personnel are required to cut and paste these tags from messages, emails, or spreadsheets. Most times an entire insertion order worth of individual tags will be pasted into their local ad platform. This is a manual process potentially resulting in human error that is costly in both lost revenue opportunity (unnecessary discrepancy) and time (re-trafficking ads).