Ad Operations is still underappreciated

Every time I learn about an exhausted ad ops person giving up, I always wonder why. Yet few in ad tech write about it, at least not in non-ironic or funny ways. But as a maker of advertising software in 2015, ad ops are my user. So if they’re sometimes frustrated, I have to wonder why.

There is a lot of ad technology out there, and in the multi billion dollar online advertising media industry, understanding the possibilities and running effective search and display ad campaigns today is a sophisticated discipline in and of itself.

Programmatic ad ops is no joke

In particular, if you’re doing programmatic media buying in 2015 in display, you’re either doing amazing ad ops and leveraging a good mix of display/mobile/video advertising, analytics, data management, and optimization tech, or you’re buying a media product from a rep. Increasingly, it’s a mix of the two.

For example, in the programmatic real-time bidding ecosystem of 2015, direct and preferred deal mechanisms supported by most of the major ad exchanges are a more effective and frictionless means to transact what were once manually trafficked ad campaigns, where tags or campaign creative assets are Emailed from one ad ops team to another, campaign by campaign, and result from a direct buyer/rep relationship and resulting I/Os— a practise not altogether gone as premium content integrations like page takeovers and deeper/native data and content integrations continue to demonstrate.

But at the same time, with these new more efficient RTB deal mechanics, new challenges arise. Matching and mapping buyer demand to seller across many different sellers and multiple exchanges is still a challenge for buyers, as traffic composition and volume expectations aren’t always properly communicated from seller to buyer during deal negotiation, or don’t match up when configured — you’ve got to debug. Or, conversely, buyers cherry pick by running re-targeting campaigns and sellers are surprised when the demand is low for the anticipated volume and deal priority.

And as more display ad media executions move to leveraging these RTB/programmatic capabilities for efficiency — as they inevitably will — the challenges will continue to come. And they can be pretty different from the older ones from the trafficking world. For example, forecasting isn’t dead, it’s just going to mean something very different for sellers selling various different types of connected display media in the world.

And richer creative and content integrations, previously reserved to the less efficient trafficking methods, could be executed more effectively with programmatic tools — but there, knowledge of environment and context are far greater than in your run-of-the-mill display RTB impression request, scarcer in scale, have a higher per unit value (CPM/RPM/xPM), and a greater complexity.

These are important challenges, and we in ad tech are collectively getting better at removing the friction — but there’s still some there. And because the challenges will keep coming, the challenges of tomorrow are not going to be the challenges of today. That means ad tech is radically evolving.

It’s also exactly why ad ops are radically evolving, as they’re responsible for the deep understanding of how to go from high-level campaign strategy to media and execution tactics, interpret analytics continuously, optimize and leverage machine-assisted optimization, leverage the data ingestion/egress APIs, and ultimately use and tweak various technology products to sing and dance together to make the difference. That’s the new ad ops of 2015.

What does this mean for ad networks and media agencies and trading desks brands, and advertisers transacting in paid display media?

The short answer: if you’re not already doing it, it might be a good idea to invest in ad tech and ad ops.

An important consequence of this is that because actors become more aware of underlying brand and advertiser outcomes, they are more concerned by these, and thus disintermediation and continued elimination of useless middle men happens. Networks adding value with good ad ops and tech are not dead, just those not adding any, or arbitering the markets without adding any (it turns out this can get really out of hand).

After all, ad tech is designed to act in the interest of ad ops, and ad ops should be running campaigns that are in the interest of the advertisers and brands that they are ultimately agents for, not for any middlemen just looking to deliver budget. Again, this doesn’t mean that buying from network reps is dead, just that an informed buyer will ensure that the mix of media products she’s buying speaks to a campaign strategy that makes sense to the advertiser.