Leading Operations Online

Challenges with Local and National Advertisers and Agencies

October 16, 2009 analytics creative sales Monique Watford-Prim

Many publishers work with both local and national agencies and advertisers and they both provide unique challenges. Our presentation in Portland offered some insight into how we approach these challenges:

Be a Consultant to Sales. The knowledge you have about your site and its products goes a long way in helping sales reps manage expectations with their clients. Speaking up early not only prevents operational issues, but also helps increase renewal rates. For example, will spending a client’s minimal budget on a few thousand impressions a day in an area that gets hundreds of thousands impressions a day perform well enough to spark a renewal? Probably not. Use your expertise and insight to share knowledge about forecasting, product type, placement and success with sales reps to help the business have long term success.

Build Ads that are Unique to Your Site for Local/National Advertisers. Put a lid on the back and forth with creative that doesn’t meet spec by offering to build ads for the client, especially...

US Leadership Forum provides Valuable Insights

October 5, 2009 Rob Beeler

This past Wednesday, AdMonsters hosted our 8th Leadership Forum in the U.S. at the Desmond Tutu Center in New York. The Leadership Forum is a unique event in that it brings senior Ad Operations leaders from publishers, agencies, networks and vendors together into one room to discuss the topics of the day. With everything going on in online advertising today, there was no shortage of topics to discuss and a lot of information to be shared.

A glimpse into the future of video advertising. Our keynote, Monty Mullig of Digital Valence, gave us a lot to think about related to video. The fact is that it'll be hard for publishers to create a sizable engaged audience that is attractive to advertisers with 3 minute clips. The cost of video production continues to drop and the recommendation is that publishers should start to look at creating longer form video content (like live sports events) and the video ad opportunities should prove to be of much higher...

People & Performance NOT Pages & Prices

September 23, 2009 Networks search Jonathan Mendez

No one will argue that the Display marketplace is an incredibly fragmented and inefficient system. Try as they might this advertiser driven ecosystem has created a few problems long hidden by overinflated CPMs. First are the serious issues in the market’s ability to scale. Second, is the arbitrage and optimization often occurring in conflict and silos. Third and worst of all, the ads suck.

In contrast to Display, Search over a shorter period and having grown-up as a publisher side solution has 2 million active advertisers - all participating in a real time auction based systems based on a single criterion, ad performance. The contrast is startling as are the results – Search spend will double that of display this year.

Enter the Network Paradigm

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Creating Business Policy An Organization Can Grow With

September 11, 2009 policy Beelertest3

If I asked you, right now, to explain your organization's cancellation or make-good policy – could you do it? Do you know who owns it, who is responsible for regular validation and who has the authority to change this policy?

If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then I have some news for you. This responsibility should probably fall to you or your Ad Ops team. This is because your team is probably already involved in the processing of these rules, helping to clean up when the rules are broken or even enforcing some part of these rules. Even if the rules are not written down, someone in your organization knows better and is following some sort of best practices.

How do you get the rest of the company to also follow best practices – how do you roll out a new, improved or modified business policy? Where should you begin?

Whether rolling out a simple cancellation policy or a more complex make-good policy – there are 4 critical steps to follow:

#1: Determine the policy in one simple...

Building a Vertical Network

September 1, 2009 Vertical Networks Grant Hosford

All advertisers want to deliver the right message to the right audience. Of course, they also want reach and creativity, even when targeting a narrow audience. One way leading publishers are expanding their core product offerings is by building vertical networks. Examples run from "Martha's Circle" lifestyle sites to the Alloy Digital Network sites for teens and tweens. eHarmony is staking a claim in this world by building a premium network focused on weddings and wedding planning. Although this is a very specific niche, I believe the planning process we used could be readily applied by anyone considering the vertical approach.

Why Build a Vertical Network? Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. You need a niche that hasn't already been locked up by other publishers. You also need a competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting sites (is your brand high profile?) and to selling the target audience. If your sales team isn't top notch you should wait until it is. Leif Welch, VP of Platform Sales at Adify told us...