What do you think is the most widely used software program in the business of online advertising? Some would say it is the virtually commoditized ad server. While ad servers are ubiquitous, the market is still very fragmented. Publishers and agencies use a variety of ad servers including DoubleClick, Open Ad Stream, Accipiter, Zedo, and home-grown systems. But the one piece of mission critical technology at the heart of day-to-day media operations is Microsoft Excel.
Everyone in our space, from Sales, to Operations, to Finance relies on Microsoft Excel to execute. Whether completing an RFP, creating a proposal, forecasting inventory, managing campaign health, compensating third-party delivery, or reconciling your monthly billings, this tool has become vital to our business. Excel skills are a MUST in terms of crunching the numbers and making that data understandable throughout the organization.
To complete an online advertising buy and execute on the insertion order, publishers and agencies require real-time analysis from multiple data systems. Our use of Excel is similar to that of other industries, yet the magnitude of targeted information and the speed at which it is required far outweighs that of any other corporate medium. The industry verticals with the most consistent, ongoing reporting pressures that require increased capabilities from spreadsheet software are pharmaceutical and healthcare.
Today, for any vertical that needs normalized data on an ongoing basis, there are elaborate and sometimes expensive tools that enable the viewing and alteration of data by dozens of users or more. Our industry may be one of the few remaining industries that has similar requirements but is still heavily reliant on Excel.
In online ad operations the fragmented data is not brought together and aggregated for our benefit. Transparency into metrics such as inventory, campaign reporting, third-party data, and incoming sales is instrumental in predicting growth, scaling for increased business, and forecasting market demand. Excel may be useful as a start and end point but does not cater to the decision making process in between. The middle is where we need enhanced tools to facilitate better business decisions, allowing publishers and agencies to differentiate themselves from their competition.
In an industry that is as data-driven as ours, it is remarkable that such a system has not yet been implemented. Even the most rudimentary manufacturing verticals all employ some kind of CRM software to manage their data. For example, consider the simplest manufactured item in your household. Compare the software used during its manufacturing cycle with the faxed insertion orders and re-keyed data of our industry, and you'll be surprised to learn that the toaster on your counter comes from a far more hi-tech business-decision making environment than the rich media advertisement on this page.
The fact is that the typical publisher in our industry employs as many as 13 different software systems to complete one transaction. The fragmentation of the data makes it hard for publishers to stick to what they do best-- selling and innovating. To get that high-level view, publishers need a solution that provides a detailed view into their site or network's yield, sale forecasts, historical data, campaign delivery and other actionable data on a real-time basis.
Is Microsoft Excel the most powerful ad management software? Unfortunately, for must publishers today, it is. While you can seamlessly migrate from one ad server to another, or switch out your rich media technologies within minutes, Microsoft Excel remains the one tool at the crux of day-to-day media advertising operations. In the coming years, our industry will start to adopt REAL enterprise solutions that integrate the processes and data points from multiple technologies, and specific point solutions will be left to achieve what they do best: Microsoft Excel to manage financials, ad servers to serve ads, and rich media providers to deliver new formats.
It's time for our industry to start borrowing best practices from other trades by adopting enterprise-style software to manage the true complexity of our business.
Mike Leo is CEO of Operative. Read full bio.
