What's ahead and how you can get involved.
To begin, during the next several months, the MRC (Media Rating Council) will be leading an initiative to further understand how the IAB can evolve the de rigeur guidelines and/or the auditing process. At the same time, the IAB is embarking on an educational road show for publishers and agencies (albeit those larger ones at the fat end of the long tail of organizations responsible for the buying and selling of online media). Both of these initiatives are designed to help publishers and agencies understand their roles in addressing the sources and solutions to the ongoing discrepancy issue.
When the IAB comes knocking on your door to request your help to help them help us all, please let them in. When you do, appoint a senior person from your organization who can lead the initiative (rather than passing it down to junior folk who just don't have the end-to-end experience) from the agency. While it may be an at-times tedious and thankless task (please send this person to a spa at the end), his or her help isolating technical or functional snafus in the ad creation and trafficking workflow process will save your organization dozens or even hundreds of hours in the future.
If you're not part of the top 10 to 15 agencies the IAB is soliciting feedback from first, but you're still coming across this issue during your day-to-day, you can still help.
- Make sure that your trafficking team understands the importance of their job function to ensure a seamless workflow of ad tags and publisher confirmations of tag implementation. With more ad dollars in the space and more late-night trafficking chores, it's easy to overlook some of the finer details. As my high school band teacher was fond of saying, practice may make perfect, but it can also make permanent.
- Build time, if you haven't already, into your media and/or project plans to work with your publishers to run publisher and ad server reports to nip the potential problem in the bud at the "trim-tab" stage of a campaign before those small problems spiral into a ship running into an iceberg at campaign end.
- If you're working with an IAB member publisher, the organization's annual member meeting is November 29, 2006. Let your sales contacts know that now is a great time to be hashing this issue out such that constructive discourse can happen at the highest levels of the publishing community (apologies to any publishers in advance if I have derailed your plans for that day).
As a publisher, if you come across this discrepancy issue, talk to your peers in the industry who have been through the rigors of the MRC accreditation process to see if they have any lessons learned to share with your organization. For those who have been through it, it's no secret to our entire industry that turnover is high and fresh blood is low, and some of the people who were part of the process at the start may no longer be holding the keys. Devote time at least once a quarter to bring sales and operations together in one room to discuss the key steps in the delivery system for successfully non-discrepant ad campaigns.
And as an ad serving company (publisher or third party), make sure that you're reminding your clients of the best practices you developed when putting together the systems that we all use to manage online advertising, and that you are sharing appropriate information across the chasm with your competitors. With Atlas now releasing its own publisher ad serving system, it will only be a matter of time before the questions of credibility with "all-in" systems are elevated again. ("Of course our numbers match because we use the same platform" vs. "Do you want your numbers to match in a closed system?" ). Personally, I'd love to see the major ad serving companies get together for an "ad serving best practices day" where all of the third party companies are able to speak with a unified voice regarding certain "gotchas" within each respective system of ad delivery. The ad ops people on the ad serving side of the equation know where the impression bodies are buried when it comes to cache-busting, robot and spider sniffing, and tag implementation, and there are only so many ways we can call a poodle a dog and not the other way around. After all, it's the agencies and the publishers that keep the ad serving companies in business.
As our friend Ferris Bueller once quipped, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it." During the slowdown from 2001-2003, we collectively had enough bandwidth to address this issue before the mountains of cash started flowing into the digital space again, but we didn't. Before the next 12 months go by with double digit growth of advertising dollars into our sector, let's not see that growth hampered by the 10 percent (or more) disparity we so desperately need to address.
Eric Porres is partner and COO of Underscore Marketing. Read full bio.