Just what is the state of ad ops? It’s complicated. Literally.
As AdMonsters Publisher Rob Beeler suggests in his executive summary to the State of Ad Ops 2015 (sponsored by Sizmek), complexity is more foe to a digital publisher than competing sites. Indeed, that’s why digital pubs are willing to band together to determine best practices for monetizing an ever-increasing amount of screens, channels, devices, gadgets, widgets, thingamabobs, wackadoodles… You get the idea.
Thought leaders in the ops field across a wide range of digital media (digital-only, digital plus TV, digital and print, etc.) paint an oft-contradictory landscape:
- Around 32% consider about half of their tech partners to be point solutions
- But many see the upside of consolidation: “The less tech vendors we have, the more efficient we seem because we spend less time trying to make systems work together,” said one respondent.
- Still, 60% showed a preference toward best-of-breed technology versus end-to-end solutions, which suggests the persistence of fragmentation.
Cross-screen efforts continue to flummox publishers, with 66% of respondents using multiple creatives with multiple tags to deliver across multiple screens. However, it’s not all slog: the survey shows increased comfort with first-party data management and growing use of second-party data. In addition, publishers are embracing more channels in bolstering their programmatic efforts.
There’s so much information in the State of Ad Ops 2015 that you’ll be forgiven if you need a few sittings to digest it all. We hope this survey illuminates not only the current challenges facing the digital media space at large, but also the spots where publishers are showing increased acuity. At the same time, responses highlight the obstacles looming on the horizon – the issues that will rise to the forefront in 2016.