Let’s take a quick second to congratulate ourselves on sliding into the GDPR era without breaking the internet’s business model. Careful that it’s just a second, though—because now it’s crunch time for the next big development that will implore publishers to investigate the big picture of how they manage their overall business.
Yep, we’re now a year away from the date Google has announced it’ll be shutting down DoubleClick Sales Manager (DSM). And as the GDPR scenario has made clear, one year in digital media can go by terribly quickly. Migrating away from DSM to a new order management system is a heavy undertaking. At times like these, it’s helpful to break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces.
After chatting up a variety of publishers as well as OMS providers, we’ve assembled brief guide for getting through the coming year and into a new OMS without bringing your day-to-day business to a screeching halt. We tip our hat extra graciously to Dan Calamai, Managing Partner at DSM migration specialist Sangora, whose contributions were essential to the assembly of this list.
Understand your business and its needs by running an audit on all the ways your teams use DSM.
This is something you should do before you start talking with OMS partners. Several different teams are touching DSM already, and you’ll need to talk with all of them. Learn which DSM features people absolutely need, which are helpful but not crucial, and which they don’t use.
However, individual people will always have a subjective view. You also need to look at your data, which is a bit more objective. Your data will show your actual deal volume, how many proposals you’re closing among your total proposals, what you’re exporting out of DSM, and other key considerations related to workflow and timeline.
Analyze what you can or should do on your own versus what a new OMS can flip over in an instant. Automation on the provider side can mitigate migration collateral damage on active campaigns as well ones coming in. For example, Placements.io has built technology that fully automates the entire DSM data migration without any effect on current proposals and orders.
Placements.io SVP of Sales Mike Finucane drew an analogy to a hotel business: “There’s no good time to do a renovation because you have guests currently staying at your hotel, past reservations and cancellations, and future reservations. If you have people manually exporting information and keying it into the new system during a migration, you risk the possibility of missing reservations in the process.
“Fully understanding those concerns and the revenue risks associated with possible migration missteps, we thought creating this automated DSM data migration tool would give publishers some extra security and comfort in this process,” he added.
Get sales leadership involved in these conversations early.
DSM historically was more of an ops tool, but now publishers need to break down outdated silos. With DSM going away, you have an opportunity—an imperative, really—to understand your pre-sales process. Between conversations and data, you want a vision of what in DSM works well for your business, and what workflow limitations you have at the moment.
Talk with potential vendors about what their own vision of the future looks like
Does their vision align with your process now, as well as your future road map? Sure, future plans are subject to change for both publisher and vendor. But seeing how your vision aligns now is a good indicator of what your partnership will look like in the future.
When vetting OMS partners, publishers ought to look toward the partner’s commitment to their products, and their commitment to an ongoing dialogue. Consider how often the partner provides release notes. Look into how the partner implements feedback from their publisher clients into their product road map and decision-making process.
Look for strong, built-in integrations with the key partners you work with on a regular basis.
Integrations with ad servers and other systems you use daily (or close to it) should be airtight and should be managed by the OMS.
There’s no good time to do a renovation because you have guests currently staying at your hotel, past reservations and cancellations, and future reservations. If you have people manually exporting information and keying it into the new system during a migration, you risk the possibility of missing reservations in the process.
Integrations with less-critical systems may be a bit of a wild card. As your business changes, you can’t necessarily predict every partner you’ll want to add. For those integrations, your OMS partner needs solid APIs you can connect to as needed.
And this is a good time to ask: Will you (the publisher) or your hypothetical future partner be able to manage the API connections, or will you need to lean on the OMS for support? And can the OMS help you make sense of the data you’re getting in these connections?
Remember that part of why an OMS exists is to help organize and visualize data. Drowning in data is a good way for publishers to get pulled away from developing strategies that can actually help grow their business.
Consider that custom-coding integrations with new platforms and partners may not be a top priority for the OMS, unless several of their other clients also want to integrate with it. So, in these conversations with potential OMS partners, ask about their ability to push and pull data from their existing integrations, and about the frequency with which they do it.
Also ask about which new integrations are on their road map, what the timing on those integrations is like, and whether they can take an integration that’s important to you and bump it up in their list of priorities. For smaller publishers, it may be important to be nimble and to integrate new tech often. For larger pubs, these tech partnerships may be more stable and less prone to change.
Pick a migration strategy
- A straight DSM migration. You’re just taking the features you’d been using in DSM and carrying them over to a new system.
- A complete overhaul of your workflow. This is an opportunity to update your process. However you initially configured DSM might have reflected your business at that time. Now you can step back and think about how you’ll need to configure an OMS to reflect your business today.
- Something in between a straight DSM migration and a total overhaul. Keep in mind that among other order management systems in the marketplace, the bigger players are generally more robust than DSM. Your DSM replacement options will likely have features DSM didn’t, including more nuanced UIs and data visualization. Some of those features may bring value to your business. You can consider what you had and were comfortable with in DSM, and then look at how a new OMS partner can add to that.
Name a point person as the integration owner.
Yeah, GDPR really crept up on us, right? The digital media industry had more than a year to deal with it, but the problem is, ops people always have smaller fires to put out, and dealing with those problems as they arise can be incredibly time-consuming. Someone needs to keep tabs on an ongoing process like migrating away from DSM.
Consider naming a single point person to keep things organized. This is probably not a full-time role, but it will require steady work over the course of several months. If your whole business gets off track, you risk not closing the loop before DSM’s July 31, 2019, end date. And if you miss it, you’re going to have a lot more spreadsheets flying around.
Your ad business isn’t going to stop just because your OMS is going away. You don’t want to find yourself manually tracking all of those numbers, as if it were 2007 again.
Consider how much training the ops team will need from your OMS support staff.
Again—ops always has something urgent to fix. The process of learning a new OMS should be easy and intuitive for them. OMS support’s time may be better spent with publisher leadership than with boots-on-the-ground staff.
Sales, ops and finance leadership should be educated on the value and insights they’ll be getting from the new OMS. Leadership can take those insights, work them into their holistic business strategies, and pass necessary information down the chain of command.
Time Management
Okay, so when you break it down into discrete pieces, an order management migration feels a lot more… well, manageable. But how long should publishers take to focus on each of those steps? That’s a whole other dimension to this process. You have 12 months. Here’s how you might want to divide up the time:
Map your workflow to learn how you use DSM and where you could be more efficient. You should be doing this now, and ideally you should have had conversations about where the budget will come from. Your DSM budget as it stands might be tied together with your DFP budget. You’ll need to make sure you’ve set aside the budget for a new OMS partner.
Remember that part of why an OMS exists is to help organize and visualize data. Drowning in data is a good way for publishers to get pulled away from developing strategies that can actually help grow their business.
Budget at least three to four months for the migration. That may be a safe estimate for a small or mid-sized publisher business, but it’s short for a large org. A straight rip-and-replace migration might be handled quickly (think 45 days or less), but other more complicated overhauls could take far longer—sometimes even a year. Beyond that, consider the time you’ll need to train your teams on the new system—6 to 10 weeks is a fair estimate.
By Q3 2018, you should be having conversations with potential partners. It’s important to get ahead of the ball here, because a ton of publishers are in the same boat. Whenever you choose your ideal OMS partner, that company could potentially have 15 or 20 other publishers all queueing up to be implemented along with you. A tech partner’s own professional services are finite. The longer you wait, the more you risk competing for your chosen partner’s resources.
If you’d been having trouble visualizing the DSM migration process, hopefully it’s clearer now. However, keep in mind this is all easier said than done. This process will involve a lot of conversations, and a close look at a lot of data. If at this point it sounds like you have some catching up to do, catch up. As we’ve just seen with GDPR, winging it at the 11th hour is not an acceptable option.