Joe Luna is Manager of Yield and Inventory at Fox News Digital. He works closely with sales, production, and the trafficking groups to identify valuable inventory, set pricing strategies, and help define new ad opportunities. Joe will be presenting “Maximizing Video Revenue” at the AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Memphis. In advance of the event we asked him a few questions about video advertising.
Q: Can you briefly describe what you do in your current role?
Currently I manage the Inventory and pricing teams for foxnews.com
Q: The big story on video has been its potential growth, high value, and higher CPMs. How do you feel the growth of video revenue has been recently? Is it living up to the hype?
In the space as a whole, you’re seeing video grow faster than the dollars chasing it can. However, for specific premium publishers, with original content, the demand for video remains higher than the supply. For those publishers, I expect continued high CPMs.
Q: In your opinion, is it better to serve all advertising from the same ad server or is it better to have different systems for different platforms (display, video, etc)?
As an AdOps guy, it’s always more convenient to serve everything out of the same server. However, when it comes to mobile, video, DMPs, and DSPs (the list goes on), one technology does not exist. So all things considered, multiple platforms are needed.
Plus, companies want to avoid selling their souls to Google.
Q: Inventory, be it video, mobile, display or otherwise continues to be an on going issue for the industry. What do you think makes inventory so challenging (or do you feel it is challenging)?
Inventory remains challenging because of unpredictability. Web traffic, particularly on news sites, behaves in an unpredictable way; sales people, wanting to give every client something custom, make the products unpredictable. And the amount of data that needs to be crunched in response to one line item within one proposal is staggering. (One user, frequency capped, running on video, with a co-ad, in the entertainment section, who is male, and in-market for a new car).
Q: You’ll be covering more in your presentation but could you briefly comment what really makes video inventory different from display?
Video has to be managed differently than traditional display, because the CPMs are higher, the sellout is higher, and the entire experience is evolving from one day to the next.
Q: What Elvis song reminds you most of Ad Operations?
Hound Dog. Because sales people hound us all day long, and they’re just crying all the time.