This past October was my first opportunity to attend an AdMonsters in Europe and my expectation is that I’d find European ad operation teams dealing with similar issues as we do in the US, but I was excited that perhaps it would present some unique ideas and approaches to these issues. What I didn’t expect was to learn of something I had never heard of before, but that’s exactly what happened. In London, I was introduced to buy-side trading systems.
Perhaps buy-side trading systems aren’t exactly new, but it certainly has become a hot topic in the UK and one I was previously unaware of. Systems like Adazzle and Mediatel’s DELTA are being used by agencies to facilitate placing online ad orders across publishers. For the agencies, such systems promise to alleviate the burden of forcing the online model into legacy systems and the inefficiencies of manually handling insertion orders with many publishers. For agencies, these systems provide an opportunity to buy more media across more publishers and scale this part of their businesses. Scale is one of the number one challenges facing operation teams on both the publisher and agency side and it’s great to see systems look to address this.
These systems however have created significant challenges on the publisher side. At the root level, for a publisher it requires changes throughout the standard workflow process from RFP through billing. The fact that there are multiple buy-side trading system vendors requires an increasing amount of publisher resources. Multiple vendors also creates integration and data exchange hurdles that need to be addressed by ad operation teams already at capacity. Integration issues and overtaxed departments are already top of mind for AdMonster members at our events. These systems will only compound a tough situation and intensify the need for solutions. Revenue is at stake and it has some publishers scrambling.
In other words, the efficiencies on one side of the equation have not translated to the other. For the agencies, publishers and vendors involved, it’s important to establish best practices around these new systems quickly and start to work on a roadmap for all parties to benefit. AdMonsters and IAB UK are hosting a technical forum on December 11th at the IAB UK offices at 14 Macklin Street at 16:00 to bring agencies and publishers together to collaborate and identify key next steps for the systems providers. If you are on the agency or publisher side, this will be a unique opportunity to deep dive into the issues and help shape a direction forward.
Rob Beeler is Vice President of Content and Media for AdMonsters and has worked in Ad Operations for over ten years. Rob started attending AdMonster events in 2004 as a member and will be in New Orleans on March 8th for Publisher Forum US XX
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