Friction Does Not Make Me Hot
This panel was for the hardcore advertising operations managers and workers, something I really know nothing about - or so I thought. Moderated by R. Michael Leo, CEO and President, Operative along with panelists from different sides of the buying process they were to talk about some of the issues facing them today. As technology has made things easier, the people side of Operations is becoming a larger piece of the pie. Combine this with a large percentage of profits coming from advertising and you get a leveraging point where process and system fixes can mean big increases on real profit.
Mai-Wah Cheung, CTO/VP of Technology, Univision Online, Inc. had some great points when she was asked what is wrong today. She noted that expectations are different. TV and radio are easy to geo and demo target, but online has uncertainty and variables. IP location data is only 70% to 80% accurate, cookies get cleaned, people are behind corporate firewalls, etc. WIth TV, the buyers understand what they are buying. But online they see promised numbers and targets and expect 100% of the target. They get better targeting online than with mass media, but they seem to expect perfection. Since we can measure so much online, they know more about what they are not getting.
One of the issues that has been written about lately is what to do about late creative. Publishers want to fine the agencies, but the agencies point to outside forces that are sometimes out of their control and don't always want to pay a fine just because the creative was delivered late. The publishers perspective is that their inventory is fleeting, and if they reserve a space for someone and the creative is not ready, they lose money. You just can't get the time back. Bowen Dwelle, Founder and CEO, AdMonsters said that there is a real cost and the publisher has every right to push back. Alyson Hyder, Director of Media Strategy and Development, DRIVEpm, the only agency person on the panel said that penalties gives responsibility back to the agency and that they need to look at how their client is paying them.
When asked if ad serving is a commodity, the answer was a conditional no. Mai-Wah said no, but then said that anyone can serve ads. But with changing technology the only publishers that can keep up are those with their own ad server. She noted that "DoubleClick could not keep up." Michael B. Stoeckel III, VP, Advertising Innovations and Operations, Fox Interactive Media narrowed the answer to say that an "ad decision maker" component is a commodity, but what you build around it is not.
When asked why they are still using Excel and why they still have not been able to get everything to interface between buyers, agencies, and publishers, the panel agreed that this was a problem. Bowen said that he "wishes a vendor would come up with a solution that magically ties it all together." Here is where I realized I actually did know something about this part of the industry. There was a vendor at the Ad:Tech 1MPACT LA show who I spoke with that had what they all needed and none of them knew about this. Instead of creating something completely new, they decided to leverage the fact that everyone was already using Excel. Their tool merges planning, executing, and analyzing your advertising all in Excel. The session ended without any more audience participation, so I had to tell the panel about this afterward. Maybe I did some good matchmaking today.
