Doner, one of the leading independent agencies in the country, recently saw a 30-percent efficiency improvement in digital campaign management, according to Adweek. If you could cut 30 percent of the time currently wasted on all the low-value tasks that need to take place just to get campaigns live, wouldn't you make that a priority?
The digital marketing industry has been suffering from fundamental and critical operational problems for many years. While the complexity of this market increased exponentially since we started serving GIF banners back in the '90s, the underlying technology that should have been supporting this natural evolvement has by and large fallen behind.
The sad thing about it is that so many of us, high-profile industry pundits and hands-on executers alike, are just used to the existing situation and do not expect anything to improve. Instead of directing all our attention to the next marketing gimmick like augmented reality, we should reevaluate our years-old technology choices and have a fresh look at our internal processes and the way we work with our counterparts.
Just as Doner discovered, it is possible to dramatically improve agency productivity and scalability. The keys to doing so include: streamlined processes and improved communications, along with best-of-breed solutions and actionable analytics. Here are a few examples of ways to improve agency productivity:
Streamlined processes and improved communications
Utilize bulk creation of standard banners. Campaign trafficking is highly labor intensive and typically includes many repetitive manual tasks that can be eliminated. For example, traffickers often spend hours uploading creative assets for standard banners and preparing them for serving. To reduce the time spent on this step to minutes, create standard banners automatically by identifying the pairs of Flash and image assets based on common asset naming conventions.
Automate collection of live ad screenshots. Another repetitive task that wastes even more time for agencies and publishers -- up to days per campaign -- is getting live ad screenshots (or tear-sheets) for the client. At least two companies -- The Media Trust (MTC) and DoubleVerify -- offer various campaign auditing services including semi-automated screen-grabbing features. New to the market is Eyeblaster's AdSnap, which automatically locates and snaps four versions of each live ad while it's served, verifying for marketers where, when, and even if an ad was delivered. Spending endless hours on manual ad verification is no longer necessary.
Adopt quick creative versioning and live update tools. One of the worst bottlenecks in the campaign process is creative versioning; producing all the ad versions needed to address various publisher specifications and targeting/ optimization scenarios. In addition, keeping live ads updated to reflect real-time changes in messaging or creative are typically very time-consuming and prone to problems. Several solutions in the market today simplify creative versioning and optimization including Tumri's AdPod, Teracent's Darwin, and Eyeblaster's Smart Versioning, which allow anyone to quickly and easily optimize and change creative in real time, updating ad versions with dynamic data, targeted variations, or localized languages.
Simplify campaign publishing. Publishing placement tags to publishers is one of the messiest campaign processes and probably one of the root causes of the discrepancies between publisher and third-party server delivery data from vendors like Doubleclick, Eyeblaster, and Atlas. Media agency traffickers need to guess publisher serving parameters and end up emailing back and forth 10 different types of code per placement, causing wide confusion and mistakes. With new technology it is possible to generate code automatically based on saved publisher preferences on site or section level. Tags are provided in an evergreen online page that also provides the full context of the campaign to help avoid confusion.
Best-of-breed solutions and actionable analytics
One of the clear advantages of digital marketing is that it's highly traceable. Ironically, that also makes it extremely complicated to manage. Getting all the tools and data sources to work together is a daunting task even if you can pick and choose every tool in this setup based on your individual needs. If you make technology choices that limit your flexibility to create a best-of-breed solution you're shooting yourself in the leg. Once data is available, it is still extremely challenging to collate and process everything and make sense of it.
Select flexible technologies to integrate search and display. You should not give up your freedom to choose the best bid management tool for your needs just because you want to analyze the relationship between your search and display campaigns. It is possible today to bridge the gap between search and display using any bid management tool.
Connect your billing and campaign management solutions. One agency insider once told me that 90 percent of the problems handled by his agency's finance department are related to digital. Connecting the agency billing system with the campaign management and serving platforms can help avoid so many problems, from repetitive data entry to billing discrepancies. It is now much easier than in the past to do that with companies like DDS, Mediabank, Advantage, and Strata, to name a few.
Bottom line, digital should be simple and instead of spending hours on activities that don't impact performance or ROI, marketers need to focus on core competencies such as planning, strategy, and analytics. It's time to reset online advertising and discover ways to operate more efficiently and save as much as 30 percent of time on digital campaign management.
Eldad Persky is VP of product planning for Eyeblaster.
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