The media audience isn't the only thing that's fragmenting -- your operations technologies are too. See how adopting a unified approach can help make you more responsive to clients' advertising needs.
Digital advertising, fragmentation and engagement
The growth of digital advertising is undeniable. IDC predicts internet-based advertising will double to $51.1 billion by 2012. At the heart of this growth lies the departure of clicks and impressions as the primary means of measuring digital ad campaign success, and the emergence of consumer engagement with brands as the quantitative and qualitative metric driving advertising revenue and spend.
The web has become a trove of advertising -- a virtual destination where ad formats such as rich media and online video, and distribution channels such as social and vertical networks and in-game advertising thrive. As a result, advertisers demand forward-thinking proposals and ad campaigns from their publisher partners. Publishers must achieve maximum brand engagement while simultaneously reaching a niche audience. Unfortunately, what keeps publishers from successfully competing in the ever-evolving digital advertising landscape is technology fragmentation.
Today, publishers use multiple technologies to handle the vital aspects of their digital advertising business. Prior to joining Operative, I oversaw the sales force for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. One of our biggest sales challenges stemmed from the fact that the data needed to complete an ad sales proposal resided in various systems used by different teams. Essentially, this fragmentation made vital data inaccessible and slowed our ad sales efforts.
This is a well-known challenge many publishers identify with. Tools used to sell, traffic, bill and serve digital ads -- such as CRM systems, ad servers, ad networks and ad inventory management systems -- are preventing publishers from quickly responding to agencies/advertisers with compelling ad campaigns. The fragmentation of technology keeps publishers from properly analyzing business intelligence, determining ad inventory availability and ensuring pricing models are consistent and competitive.
To counteract this technology fragmentation, publishers usually adopt three methods to effectively run the business driving their digital ad efforts: ad servers, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
In an industry built on technology innovation, these methods themselves will not help publishers overcome fragmentation challenges as they aim for digital advertising success. Yet, publishers can achieve digital advertising success by adopting a centralized approach to ad operations. Once the back-end is effectively managed, publishers can focus on selling engagement and making business decisions based on well-rounded business intelligence.
Ad servers
Ad servers are loosely defined as computer programs that store online ads and deliver (or serve) them to websites visitors. Ad servers perform multiple tasks, such as delivering an ad to a pre-defined audience, rotating ads on your website based on priority and other algorithms, housing campaign creatives, keeping track of impression numbers and clicks of a specific ad campaign and generating reports that help publishers determine a campaign’s success. They seem to understand products, placements, ad units, audience, targeting and website structure; they also provide ad delivery and inventory forecast numbers. But can ad servers help publishers automate the back-end processes driving their digital advertising efforts?
While they clearly serve a vital purpose in the advertising lifecycle, ad servers lack the notion of a process. Additionally, ad servers do not easily integrate with other ad tools and systems such as billing systems, other ad servers or ad networks, CRM tools and business intelligence systems. Ad servers connect publishers’ sales models to their ad serving structures -- which can prove very limiting in the long run. They are unable to provide the real-time data transparency among sales, finance, marketing and revenue management groups -- all teams that play essential roles in achieving digital advertising goals. As engagement emerges as a critical measurement in digital advertising, ad servers fail to help publishers package inventory or recommend sales strategies nor do they predict metrics that can help advertisers and agencies meet stated objectives aimed at capturing their audiences of interest. The ad server will remain a critical part of a publisher’s ad sales business, but should not be leveraged to achieve and analyze advertising goals across the entire organization.