Author Archives: dwintz1

• How can you “keep it together keep it together kept it together keep it together?”

As if things weren’t stressful enough already in our connected world, add in murder hornets, pandemic, political dysfunction, economic uncertainty, fires, and hurricanes. That’s a cocktail that can pop anyone’s cork. And yet in the words of Kit Ramsey from Bowfinger, we are expected to “keep it together keep it together kept it together keep it together.”

So, how do you handle that stress? I’m happy to share some personal tips.

[Disclaimer: while the views expressed reflect the author’s personal aspirations, he cannot guarantee 100% compliance with his own advice.]

Don’t Send That Email! …sleep on it. I must admit I’ve seen this elsewhere, but good advice, nonetheless. Resist the urge to “fire back” an email at someone whose tone or demeanor you don’t like. These escalations never go well. Instead, sleep on it, or at least let it rest for a couple of hours. Think of the consequences to your action and make sure you get the result you want instead of an escalation chain of angry emails.

We All Live in Glass Houses. A campaign goes haywire, and the finger pointing begins Whether you are in sales, ad ops, editorial etc., before you start casting blame, look to yourself. For example, is targeting activated and applied in the ad server? Is that missing creative hiding somewhere on your desktop? You should be starting with an implementation checklist that you routinely use in making sure YOU are in compliance. It’s not a good idea to start tossing bricks, if your house has a lot of picture windows!

Script it Out. When you have a meeting on your calendar that you know will be contentious, or one in which you are making a big “ask” of individuals, or a meeting that has been scheduled as part of an escalation, script it out. I mean, literally sit at your computer and type out what you would like to have done by who, and when. This helps ensure that even in the heat of the moment, you can get your points across in an orderly and logical manner.

No Multitasking on Video Calls. Simultaneously trying to pay attention to a video meeting, while exchanging texts and answering unrelated emails just ads to the level of stress. And dude, we know what you’re doing! Can’t help yourself? Try folding your hands during the meeting. I know, this comes across as very, very old school, which I am, but if I hear one more time “could you repeat that question”, I mean, really!

Don’t Be Afraid to Apologize. Despite all the good intentions you might have about following the above, you are going to be out of line every once in a while. Maybe that email you sent was misdirected, inaccurate or just snarky. Maybe you shouldn’t have called out that person in front of all their peers. It happens. Helpful hint: it’s not a sign of weakness to apologize. It’s a sign that you are human, and value relationships with other human beings, and since ad operations is really about the intersection between human beings and technology, sometimes it’s just the right thing to do.

• There’s no such thing as guaranteed employment, but digital ad operations comes pretty close. Plus, you get to become a member of a secret society! Cool, right?!

I’ve taught many classes throughout the years on ad operations. At some point in the curriculum I go off script, get on my soapbox and pontificate on why I think this is a great career. There are several reasons for this.

You will never be obsolete. You will live in an environment that keeps changing and will continue to change. It may be hard to see that if your perspective is the here and now, but looking over the last 20 years, here are just some of the innovations we’ve had to adopt and learn.

• Creation of the first publisher-side ad servers
• Adoption of agency 3^rd party ad servers and the “redirect”
• Introduction of contract management systems
• Definition of the ad impression
• Rich media and video
• Digital video pods and commercial ad breaks
• Syndication and media rights management of video
• The rise of programmatic advertising, SSPs, DSPs and header bidding
• Adoption of viewability, verification and demo metrics
• Landscape of OTT devices, which continues to shift
• Dynamic Ad Insertion
• Addressable media

You will be challenged to stretch your intellect and expand your problem-solving capabilities. Your day will fly by. You will never look at the clock and ask, “when will this day be over?” Instead, you will look up, see it’s 6PM and ask, “where did the day go!?”

You are more important than you think. Not a single dollar of contracted revenue can be fulfilled unless you in ad operations do your job. You are gatekeepers, making sure that inventory, pricing and contractual terms will enable your company to achieve its revenue goals.

There is the opportunity for career growth. There are a lot of places to go in ad operations besides planning and trafficking. Inventory and yield management. Data analysis. Project management for ad platforms. In fact, the savviest employers will make sure you rotate from one position to another, which helps build your levels of experience and value.

There is upside that is significant, and unexpected. Whether you call it ad operations, media operations or revenue operations, it’s the lifeblood of any company. And if you are working for a start-up, you’re not exempt from upside. Just ask any early stage employee at Google or Facebook. So, while you’re engaged in a stimulating job and getting paid well, you may find yourself with some unexpected benefits as well.

You are part of a secret society. Ever tried explaining what you do to friends and family? You work with internet businesses and software. You manage campaigns, you work with ad code. You’re involved in managing workflow. You get paid good coin for that. But it’s still a little nebulous to the uninitiated. So be it. You work with peers with a secret language and skill set. A secret society.

For all these reasons, if you are interested in being consistently challenged, are a geek for technology, have a moderate OCD streak, and hate boredom – this is a career that might be for you. It’ll be around as long as you want to be.

• For some things in life, being too fast is not a fulfilling experience. For programmatic, however, faster IS better.

Publishers frequently lay a poor foundation for programmatic, then expect demand partners, manipulation of pricing floors, and pass-backs to do all the work. In today’s world, if you don’t start with a good foundation you’ll always be handicapped. It is extremely difficult to diagnose a problem when you don’t understand the root causes.

The foundation I’m referring to relates to the speed at which content pages and ads load. How often have you been in a situation where someone (editorial, executive management, etc.) says “our pages and ads are taking too long to load.” Without some quantitative data to back it up, it’s just another urban legend. But you CAN quantify that with various tools, charting the ads “journey” starting with page load and ad request, measuring that load in seconds (or milliseconds). Furthermore, comparing that to competitors in your space can be revealing. For example, if it takes your site (or app) 2 seconds to complete an ad call and your competition 200 MILISECONDS that instantly tells that you are operating at a disadvantage.

So why does that even matter?

In case you missed the memo, advertisers think of ad viewability as a requirement. If it doesn’t meet their standards, it’s not worth the pixel its painted on. And what plays a large role in the viewability of ads? Answer: The speed at which they are displayed. In a bidding situation, if a buyer’s DSP thinks the ad is taking too long to load, it won’t recognize it as viewable, and assign a lower bid price to the ad.

Throughout our engagements with publishers, we’ve seen that low viewability is linked to bid prices that are frequently 25% – 50% lower than what their competition is receiving. Guess who gets the higher bids in that scenario? The higher eCPM? The most revenue?  

So take a good look at your foundation. What are the quantifiable metrics for the speed of page and ad loads? How is the placement of the ad code on the page contributing to that speed? Are delays in loading for header bidding causing time outs? If lazy loading is used, is it implemented so the buyer’s standards for viewability are met?

Having laid a good foundation, NOW you are ready to implement and evaluate demand partners, pricing and pass-back strategies.

• Dynamic  Ad Insertion, what could be more straightforward? However, unless you put all your ducks in a row, you’ll be in for a bumpy ride.

There are apps everywhere, podcasts everywhere, video streaming everywhere. As a result, it makes sense to transpose some of the basic functions of ad serving to those platforms by implementing dynamic ad insertion (DAI). This provides businesses with the ability to intersperse content with advertising while consumers are streaming on their devices. As DAI has become more common in ad ops the numerous challenges of executing it need to be highlighted, embraced, and applied in order for a campaign to succeed from start to finish.

The Moving Target Challenge

In digital advertising, we are constantly changing the tires on the bus while it is speeding down the road at 70 miles an hour. Today, we need to deliver targeted advertising to IOs phones and tablets, Android phones and tablets, Apple TV, FireTV, Roku and Web. That’s just for the present combination of devices, next year there will be others. Not only will today’s delivery issues persist but we are going to constantly be figuring out how ad code will work with the next device that launches.

The Testing Challenge.

Think you can implement DAI on an iPhone and just call it a day? Think again. Each device has slightly different characteristics when it comes to requesting the ad call and receiving the ad. This means that 1) you should have all these physical devices on hand 2) all major browsers 3) you should test on all these devices prior to launch 4) you should test on them in a dev environment and then 5) move to production.

The Ad Delivery Challenge

Google and Freewheel provide the ability to support DAI. But just as we’ve seen with digital advertising of years past, third party ad servers support it as well. This means that discrepancy tracking between ad servers and testing of ad code will be extremely important. Nothing says “oh s—.” like disrupting a live stream because of an issue with a video ad.

The Measurement Challenge

As with “traditional” digital advertising, advertisers will want to subject DAI to the same third-party measurement standards as their more common ad units. We have to consider these crucial aspects of measurement throughout including viewability, verification of delivery (did the ads display to the U.S. viewers, or Belarus?), and whether or not your inferred demographic distribution synchs up with measurement as supplied by Nielsen and Comscore. Neglecting these important factors can lead to a very unhappy client.

The Blackout Challenge

For some live events, particularly sports-related, preventing ad display to specific geo markets is a contractual commitment. Know your SCTE markers. Now layer on what we’ve discussed about end-points, testing, ad delivery and measurement to this requirement, and we have another multi-faceted challenge for ad operations.

Whenever I teach classes in media operations I always say, “if you like a business that is always changing, where you constantly need to figure out solutions to new problems, then media operations provides a great career. You will NEVER look the clock at Noon and say ‘when will this day be over’. Instead you will look up at the clock at 6 and say “wtf – how did this day go by so fast!?” For DAI, it’s like that.

• Wait, what?! There’s a print revolution going on? Is it possible that rethinking newspaper operations can help save journalism?

For those of us who have worked in the digital world for decades, efficient ad operations meant improving the way digital ads were managed. What has surprised me over the last 5 years is how many newspapers are rethinking how print advertising will be managed.

Newspapers have historically had a lot on their plate. Managing print display ads. Managing classified ads in several formats. Managing newspaper inserts. Managing the targeting and distribution of ads across a network of publications. Managing the pagination and layout of those systems and the associated print production across several regional plants. Now pile on digital, programmatic and social media as well as subscriber management and the landscape can be overwhelming. We see the consequences of this now, as many newspapers are indeed hamstrung by a plethora of applications.

What happens when you rely on several unique platforms to manage operations? It adds complexity, including the implementation and maintenance of several integrations. Quite often, manual re-entry of data is required. This creates a bloated staffing infrastructure, because of the need for subject matter experts to operate each system. Lastly, it adds expense, because there’s no pricing efficiency – every platform necessitates a discrete negotiation of licenses.

The print revolution I’m referring to is happening behind the scenes. If you can combine CRM, order management for print display and inserts, classified, digital advertising, programmatic, audio, and as a net result save millions of dollars – why wouldn’t you do it? In fact, this is happening across the globe among several newspaper empires because there are now software vendors who legitimately supply all these services in a single package.

What’s the big deal, you say? Why worry about this? Isn’t print in decline?

Hey boomers, get out of your coastal bubbles! There’s still a wide swarth of the country that gets its news and information from print. If operations could save enough money to keep 10 journalists on staff reporting legitimate news – that would be a contribution even an ad operations staffer could feel good about.

What’s missing? The only additional feature I would personally ask for is a filter that scans each digital news story. A filter for sources that are legitimate starting with the name of the publication and reporter. An algorithm that identifies foreign propaganda and screens it out. An algorithm that scores each story based on the use of language and inclusion of basic journalistic precepts which is applied to each news search and social media feed.

Ok, this last part is totally not ad operations but it’s my blog, my editorial comment. In the meantime, I’ll have to focus on what I can influence and control on the operations side. That seems to be going pretty well.