The development of ad management.
The progression of ad-serving technology and its need for regulation paved the way for ad-management software. Generally speaking, ad management is the oversight of serving ad banners in an organized way, making sure each ad is shown on the pages it should be on and receives the proper number of impressions during a campaign. Ad-management software automatically creates reports to maintain site management and provide advertisers with information about the performance of each ad banner. Additionally, it gives advertisers immediate access to see how their ads are performing in order to help them format their campaigns.
Another useful feature of ad management is site management inventory reports for pages with an open ad inventory. This allows ad managers to predict for advertisers that they will have, for example, 10,000 impressions on their finance pages available next week and 15,000 impressions on their automobile pages the following week, saving advertisers the cost of selling advertisements for inventory they do not have.
The comprehensive benefit of complete ad-management software establishes full-service site management to help eliminate charges from advertising middlemen and provide publishers with a way to centralize ad reporting.
Standard implementation
This evolution into highly advanced ad-management systems has encouraged this software to become a standard for companies with a strong web presence. Company dashboards -- utilities that provide a pivotal control panel for launching applications, locating files and examining system resources -- are being more and more predominately integrated with the ad-management software to successfully track online advertising campaigns.
When assimilated into company dashboards, ad-management software supports the execution of a powerful system for administering banner ads, giving publishers the opportunity to fully utilize efficient, reliable and flexible techniques of ad serving. This evolution of ad-management from essential needs to integrated dashboard centers has yielded its ability to automatically analyze business applications and provide metrics to monitor and control advertisement activities.
The future
The convenience of having this integrated dashboard with all the analytics software at the business owner's fingertips ensures that this technology can only become more advanced and widespread in the future. I predict the future of ad management will allow for tremendous integration with offline media, providing simple ad delivery for all media, including search management integration. This interface should soon be able to serve across various channels, allowing for the combination of TV, radio and even print, to be utilized through the same interface we are used to in the online world.
It is my opinion that rich media serving will continue to utilize the sophisticated ad-targeting capabilities and that one-to-one delivery will be based on a consideration set. These features integrated into the dashboard would allow advertisers to deliver to all media, simplifying business methods and making processes more efficient.
On the business management side, I see ad-management software enhancing the simplification of daily tasks for media buyers and planners, including contractual tasks, communication with publishers and a common social interface. Why not take advantage of social networking in an ad-management environment? These benefits could ultimately reach into the financial aspects of the process where statistics would be contracted across an all-inclusive database, integrating with accounting software, extending into workflow efficiencies, billing and budgeting. These capabilities could allow cross-campaign placement serving to show ad-targeting analytics behavior across multiple placements. The possibilities are endless!
This evolution of ad-serving technology into a complete ad-management system answers the telltale question of how to serve ads that yield the highest results. We have come such a long way in the advertising world and I imagine that we will see some excitement going forward, where the marketing holy grail of one-to-one marketing will be reached.
Andreas Roell is CEO/president of Geary Interactive. Read full bio.