As we tick away the final days of 2011, hopefully you’re planning your New Year’s Eve party and not stressing out about yield management in 2012. Over here at AdMonsters, we’re pondering the year to come for the ad operations community, and the first step is to examine what happened in the year past. Not surprising, there’s a lot of articles about RTB and private marketplaces in this collection of the most popular content on the AdMonsters website in 2011, but there are also some insightful pieces exploring developments in mobile and video (as well as mobile video). So before you start worrying too much about 2012, take a stroll down ad ops memory lane – it just may inspire you (or drive you to drink, which is OK because it’s New Year’s!).
iPad and iPhone App Development: Like Pouring Concrete
By Bryan Moffett, VP of Digital Strategy/Ad Operations, National Public Media
NPR was one of a few publishers to have a customized iPad application available at the product launch. The iPad app was a result of five weeks of intense development, but also, six months of learning through a successful app on the iPhone platform. Here are some things to consider when building applications and revenue models for either the iPhone or the iPad.
Is RTB the End of the Road for Display Advertising? 10 Things Publishers Need To Know
By Mark McEachran, Product Manager, Rubicon Project
RTB is more like a tipping point, than the end of the road. Early advertising technology companies created ad servers, audience builders and campaign management systems. These technologies evolved slowly, being reused and slightly retooled to optimize online advertising for particular purposes. Serialized impression exposure with pass-back URLs seemed to be the epitome of monetization. But the tools took a long time to take the leap to parallelized impression exposure and bidding. What was required for that leap was an unprecedented amount of technical coordination amongst buying and selling platforms.
Where Are We With VAST and VPAID?
Mark Trefgarne, CEO and Cofounder, LiveRail: “VAST adoption continues to grow rapidly among the more sophisticated and nimble companies in our space. However there remains a small, but influential number of publishers, networks and vendors that appear either unable, or unwilling to adopt it. Perhaps worse, there remain companies that claim VAST-support publicly, but are unable to deliver it in reality – never has the term ‘false advertising’ been more appropriate. This masks the true level of adoption on the supply side and forces buyers to regularly revert to old-fashioned manual workflows. Without universal adoption the true benefits of a single standard remain elusive – and we’re yet to see agencies put the full force of their influence behind the VAST/VPAID standard.”
By Sara Livingston, Manager of Digital Marketing, SeamlessWeb
“Private exchange” is probably the only buzz word in the industry right now without a TLA. That’s almost a crime considering the huge potential they offer to both publishers and advertisers. Much has already been discussed about their proposed value prop for publishers—greater control over inventory prices and ability to dip their toe into the RTB world while still controlling which advertisers buy inventory, to name a few—however I think the real potential lies in what it can do for advertisers, which is to finally scale RTB, making more high quality inventory accessible via RTB & through DSPs. Before we jump into the potential value for advertisers, it’s worth noting just how much private exchanges and their inception point seem like a bit of a call back to vertical ad nets.
Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood? Sonar’s Proximity-Based Social Connector
By Gavin Dunaway, Editor, US, AdMonsters
While social networks and other online communities open the doors for seemingly infinite sharing and socializing, they also tend to fence actual connection around the Internet realm. Even with mobile-based social networks, the threshold from offline to online has proved an intimidating barrier. Sonar may have knocked it down with one beta swoop.
Mobile Video Advertising: Today and Tomorrow
By James Gaffar, Product Developer for Mobile/Emerging Media, NBCUniversal
Advertisers will become well-versed and begin to develop mobile video creative that is truly scalable while solving fragmentation issues. HTML5 seems to be a viable solution since the majority of smartphone devices and handsets support these experiences. Until then, publishers must continue to facilitate proper creative deployment as well as educate clients on industry best practices.
Iggy Fanlo of adBrite Discusses Online Video Advertising
“Ad exchanges that support both pre-roll video and display campaigns open up a lot of opportunities for advertisers to retarget their creative across both formats. For example, an advertiser can target banners to anyone who watches their full pre-roll ad, or decide to only deliver pre-roll ads to people who have already seen multiple banners.This dual campaign tactic opens another door for online ad exposure, in addition to being scaleable for the advertiser.”
What OpenRTB Means For Ad Operations
Bill Simmons, CTO, DataXu: “Although OpenRTB is primarily about better performance of RTB media for advertisers and publishers, it also brings enormous savings for ad operations. At DataXu, we conducted an internal study of how our campaign managers spend their time. We found that over 30% of the time was invested in managing the synchronization of advertiser requirements with publisher requirements across of all of our supply partners. This time increased as we expanded the breadth of our supply partners. We have heard similar statistics from our supply-side partners who experience a similar workload managing the same issue. OpenRTB will reduce this management time to nearly zero for both buy-side and sell-side systems.”
By Joe Zawadzki, CEO and Founder, MediaMath
DSPs are the dawn of a new era in which CMOs sit down with CEOs and CFOs to manage sales and profitability in real-time. They will be able to walk out of meetings where the CEO says: “We really need to boost sales of this product, profitability of that product, and net present value of that customer segment,” and the CMO says, “done.” They, or their team, log in and change settings, and magic happens across channels, across segments, across the funnel.
Rethinking Ad Operations for the Future
By Ben Barokas, President and Cofounder, AdMeld
For any company that deals in digital advertising, ad operations is where the rubber meets the road. No matter how great the revenue opportunity, no matter how sweet the deal—no one profits until ops moves the ball over the goal line. And the faster, smarter, and more efficiently ops works, the more value is created for everyone. Or not. Sometimes it goes the other way. This was especially true five or more years ago: an era in operations that I affectionately refer to as the dark ages.
Google Beefs Up DFP Mobile: Q&A With Marcel Gordon, Product Manager, DFP Mobile
“We definitely see a lot of value in providing seamless integrations with other Google products, and we think that opening up the DoubleClick Ad Exchange for mobile is going to have a huge impact, but the ‘wow’ features in DFP Mobile are definitely the richer ad formats. For example, we’ve allowed publishers to create full-screen video ads for mobile applications by just dragging and dropping a video into DFP. We handle the transcoding and select the right format to serve. This enables publishers to deliver an ad format that until now has only been available via ad networks.”
The 5 Reasons RTB Is Less Important Than You Think
By Chris O’Hara, SVP of Sales and Marketing, TRAFFIQ
All the hype in the display advertising industry has been around real time bidding for the last several years, and rightly so. Finding audiences with precision (cheaply) is marketing nirvana and, with all of the startup companies willing to work their tails off to make their “platforms” work for advertisers, the promise of media, layered with great technology, and tons of free service was hard to resist. Conference after conference, our industry leadership (well, actually I think it’s just the 30-odd people that speak at every conference) prognosticates on the latest data-driven success story, and ponders the meaning of the famed Kawaja logo vomit map, hoping that their flavor of audience technology gets acquired. But, like the old George Clinton lyric goes, the fish don’t know they are wet. After drinking the RTB Kool-Aid for so long, the real time practitioners may not realize that this fundamental driver of the display advertising ecosystem may not be as important as we all think.
Video, Ad Revenue and the Overburdened Publisher
By Jason Burke, VP of Product, Tremor Video
How many of you know that Morgan Stanley’s advisory services division drives more than 15 percent of that firm’s annual revenue? That should come as no surprise, although it’s still shocking that so few of us use financial advisors. Financial planning is a complex undertaking with trained professionals who do this for their living. What makes someone not trained on the thousands of particulars, think they can do as well? As with the above, the ever-changing video ad landscape is pushing publisher and content owners to work with partners who can guide them through the dozens of options and seemingly organized chaos of video advertising.