Ad management companies complain that media planners don't take the time to learn how new technologies can save time and money. Underscore Marketing's president explains.

Ad management companies go to great lengths to understand the mind of the agency planner. That ad server you log into every day contains features and processes that are the result of thousands of man-hours' worth of research and development: all designed to help you save time and money. Trouble is, many agencies don't take the time to let ad management companies help them streamline media planning and buying, ad trafficking and reporting processes.

Leading the pack of complaints from the client side about online campaigns is that they take too long to plan and too long to execute. One would think that, given this, agencies would be scrambling to realize efficiencies and use technology to work past the bumps in the road. Often, however, that's not the case.

Streamlining network buys
How many times have people at your agency had this conversation?

Planner: Hi, Webmaster. This is Marty. We've got five new network buys launching this month, and we need to insert tracking pixels for each network on your shopping cart pages. I've just emailed them to you.  How long before we can get them up?

Webmaster: Well, Marty, I'm running a half dozen chron jobs right now. It might be a few days before we can get these live.

This conversation takes place several times over the length of the average quarterly buy. After the initial conversation takes place, it might be a matter of just weeks or even days before it takes place again. Three weeks into the campaign, an agency might have decided to cut three ad networks from the buy and replace them with two or three new ones, and Marty might be prompting the webmaster to take tracking pixels down and add new ones, adding to an already-confusing situation the webmaster needs to address in between games of World of Warcraft. 

Many times, the webmaster gets it wrong, necessitating follow-up phone calls, emails and delayed campaign launches.

The major ad servers have a wonderfully simple solution to all this. Place their tags on critical pages of your client's website and upload the network tags through your own ad server. The ad server then manages which tags should fire at the appropriate moment. This can save your agency a ton of time and effort during the trafficking process, shaving hours off your management time.

The 80/20 Rule
The prevailing wisdom at ad management companies is that agencies often take advantage of basic training only. That is, planners usually take only training courses that give them the bare-bones skills to get campaigns live and perform basic optimization and reporting tasks. But the advanced training sessions are the ones that really teach agency staffers how to save time and money, as well as how to use ad management strategically to the benefit of agency clients.

This represents another reflection of the old 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the agencies are only using 20 percent of their ad server's features. An informal poll of people I know at the major ad serving companies indicates that agencies are failing to take advantage of not only the tracking pixel management features I outlined above, but also advanced optimization, audience segmentation and targeting features.

Does anyone else think this is a crying shame?

Invest now, reap rewards immediately
There's no excuse for an agency to be staffed by people who aren't power users of their ad management tool of choice. All it takes is a minimal investment of time and perhaps some cash. Even if your ad management contract calls for some nominal fee for planners to attend advanced training sessions, the expense in time and money is well worth it.

I've never sat in an ad serving training session without feeling the cogs turn in my brain. While many agency folks might think ad serving training is boring, I always leave these sessions with at least half a dozen new ways of applying the technology to help my clients. Whether it's segmentation options I was unaware of, or process streamlining made possible by advancements in ad management technology, training sessions have a knack for causing light bulbs to light up.

My advice for any agency managers reading this today is to poll the folks in your organization on the last time they went to an ad management training session. Odds are, you'll find some people who haven't attended since boot camp.

Send them off to take advantage of the advanced stuff. You'll quickly reap the rewards. It's likely they'll discover something that can shave a few dozen hours off one of your assignments, and your department will be more efficient and knowledgeable as the result of the experience.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.