5 Questions for Jennifer Witt of Adconion

Jennifer Witt, Director of North American Ad Operations for Adconion Media Group, will be leading a session at the US Network Operations Forum on third party data providers. In advance of the conference we asked her a few questions about data collection and verification.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about your background and your current role at Adconion.

July will mark my three year anniversary at Adconion. Initially, I was tasked with developing hybrid Business Intelligence/Ad Operations requisitions that drove incremental GP, then transitioned into the Director of North American Ad Ops role to hire out our team in Santa Monica. I've had the privilege of personally hiring and nurturing my team into what I believe is an industry leading ad operations group.

Additionally, as our ad serving, reporting, and contract management systems are proprietary, I've enjoyed participating as a key stakeholder on many of our new and evolving internal products. Coming from a yield management background at Fox Interactive Media and Move.com, I enjoy how working at a smaller network like Adconion enables me to wear multiple hats spanning client meetings, engineering development, trafficking process optimization, and campaign analytics.

Q: When we talk about data collection - are we talking about behavioral, contextual, affinity...?

All of it - data collection can mean anything from integrating with Digital Envoy for geographic data to verification services like AdXpose confirming your urls to purchasing behavioral data from Blue Kai. My presentation will focus on behavioral 3rd party data as it drives significant revenue in the ad network space and presents technical, procedural, and analytical challenges to ad operations.

Q: Who are the players in this space?

For behavioral data, you've got data optimizers, data exchanges/aggregators and direct data suppliers, all of which are potential partners for ad networks. Blue Kai, Acerno, Exelate, AlmondNet, Datalogix, Targusinfo, Experian, and Acxiom are a few of the leaders in the space, but they work together as well as compete, which presents difficult choices when evaluating how many and which partners to use. If you can purchase Datalogix information through an aggregator, what is your incentive to work with them directly?

Then again, if you're obtaining data through an aggregator - how many other people are using this same information? That's just the tip of the optimization iceberg when it comes to data quality, not to mention how ease of integration will affect these choices.

Q: You were kind enough to lead a discussion on verification services at the Leadership Forum in NY recently. How do you think verification services fit in with data collection providers - is there or will there be a connection between the identifying and verifying the audience? Or are we a long way from integration between these two service providers?

Currently verification services use their independence and position as a non-involved third party as a strong marketing tool. Clearly, a company that identifies users demographically believes that their methods and data are accurate and even if they have an in house verification system, I believe agencies would be cautious to take their word at face value.

However, current verification services are concentrated on site lists, ad placement, and geography - not verifying that you are actually hitting a certain gender, demographic, behavior, etc. I think it would be difficult to add "target" verification because the verifying company would require access to all the data (3rd party and internal proprietary) a company is using to indentify that user. Aside from being a hassle technically, companies want to keep their targeting secret sauce targeting, so I think there would be resistance to a move in that direction.

Q: What challenges do you think operations teams face in the current marketplace?

Our industry is so crowded right now - Terry Kawaja maintains a great market landscape slide showing just how many types of companies sit in between advertisers/agencies and publishers - and it's up to 17! You're talking about a lot of information that ad operations may not be privy to on a daily basis. Sales is tasked with understanding the agency landscape, but often times scarce resources lead to little or irregular research into other companies entering the fray until networks are forced by agencies (e.g. verification services) or publishers (e.g. yield optimizers) to educate and integrate. With so many potential partners, many of which require ad server level integration to reap full benefits, ad operations is often a company's best resource for partner evaluation. It's important to make sure there is a balance between macro-level projects and micro-level tasks like trafficking so that knowledge that could only be held by someone in ad ops fosters its full added value. It's easy for an organization to disregard ad operations as a non-revenue generating position if their knowledge in evaluating business development partnerships like 3rd party data and verification services isn't fully embraced.