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 value than user generated video or short clips. From an Ad Operations perspective, it then makes sense to investigate these longer video ad opportunities and develop solutions accordingly.
Data and performance. During his presentation, Jonathan Mendez made the point that publishers are actually sitting on a goldmine of data which they haven’t begun to tap yet. He argued that the divide between the value of the media and the CPMs will only continue to grow unless publishers start to think as marketers and start to optimize content and ad opportunities based on the data that they have access to. Throughout the day the conversation turned to the importance of data driving performance be it for a publisher, agency, network or advertiser. One session focused on how publishers can optimize for CPC, CPA and even CPEA (“Cost Per End Action”) campaigns. Another session focused on an overall strategy of working with technology and another on managing the myriad of vendors that agencies find themselves working with. For Ad Operations professionals, it’s important to develop strategies of working with the data to maximize revenue and manage the technology that goes with it.
Ad exchanges are top of mind for everyone. Another theme throughout the day revolved around ad exchanges and the potential impact they will have on Ad Operations. One of our sponsors, Doubleclick, provided additional information about their recent announcements and some of the agencies in attendance spoke of their work on integrating their ad exchanges into their processes. One interesting point from the ad exchange discussion is that ad exchanges seem to make sense, but still haven’t hit enough adoption to have the impact everyone believes they can have on the industry. From an Ad Ops perspective, this looks to be an area where best practices still need to be developed.
The push and pull of the economy is being felt by Ad Ops. Earlier in the year Ad Ops leaders saw cuts or freezes on the staffing for their departments, but as business starts to pick up again, companies are reluctant to staff back up. This is leaving Ad Operations in the tough spot of dealing with growth but not the resources to handle it. This isn’t new to Ad Ops as we’ve been here before. I think it’ll be interesting in upcoming events to see how Ad Operations leaders which has taken a more elevated role within their companies are positioned to address the “doing more with less” conundrum they find themselves in today.
As a final thought, the feedback I’ve received is that the event was successful on many levels. It’s not only important for publishers to hear from other publishers and agencies to hear from agencies, but for everyone as a group to get together and discuss the important topics of the day. This is especially important as Ad Ops takes on responsibilities of so many unknowns – ad exchanges, networks and data management. The best resource for Ad Operations professionals is typically someone else in Ad Operations and we’re glad to be a part of that conversation.
Rob Beeler is Vice President of Content and Media for AdMonsters and is focused on developing event, website and training content related to Ad Operations. Rob has been in Ad Operations for over 10 years.