Impressions from the desk of…jennifer hill, vP ad operations
The current state of online advertising is complex, ever changing, and focused on user consent more than ever before. Publishers are likely managing more than one ad server while simultaneously working to stay compliant with data privacy regulations. On the sales side, publishers are challenged to find the right balance between direct and programmatic offerings while also being tasked to locate new monetization opportunities across all of their web, mobile app, video, and email/newsletter properties.
What does this mean for OAO’s Managed Services and Ad Products teams in supporting publishers and their advertising monetization efforts?
Here at OAO we work with a wide variety of publishers and help to guide them through the intricacies of online advertising. Whether a publisher is new to digital advertising or is a seasoned veteran in ad sales, media planning, and inventory management, our Managed Services teams can assist our publisher clients in better understanding their audience data and inventory allocations across direct and programmatic channels. Our Managed Services teams consist of experienced ad ops professionals who are not only experts in ad serving technology and campaign management, but who are also positioned to learn and understand the nuances of how ad ops fits within the context of our publishers’ sales and business operations. We can help our clients with their planning of direct and programmatic campaigns by reviewing inventory forecasts and by understanding their site and the campaigns currently active in the system. We also work closely with publishers to help establish or fine tune workflow efficiencies and build trust amongst our teams. This can come in the form of designing a better way to communicate campaign instructions with customized information, or through working within already established ticketing systems that our publishers are comfortable utilizing. Moreover, regular communication and scheduled check-ins ensure timely and accurate campaign launches.
What used to be a straight forward insertion order for a direct sale can now be layered with various data partners, viewability platforms, audience metrics, and multiple geographic specifications - to name a few. It can seem overwhelming to make sense of it all: notepads containing hundreds of 3rd party creative tags and pixels, spreadsheets of flighting and targeting instructions, PDFs, cloud based links, email attachments, Slack messages, and so on. At OAO we are responsible for helping to sort through the noise and are tasked with getting campaigns live in as seamless and straightforward a way as possible for our clients. Our Managed Services teams receive campaign instructions and assets, organize the information and communicate back to our clients with any comments or concerns, such as missing items, and then begin to build out the campaign for live flighting. The teams are responsible for testing and QAing creatives and for confirming that a campaign is ready to go live once it gets to that point. Post launch, our teams utilize several tools to help monitor campaign delivery, performance, and discrepancies.
From the programmatic side, our teams are well versed in working with a wide variety of programmatic partners and inventory platforms. We understand the complementary role that direct sales and programmatic advertising can have for publishers, and our teams often help guide the placement and eventual yield that programmatic advertising can bring, while optimizing and adjusting where needed.
Our Ad Products team works alongside our internal teams and our client teams to help QA direct and programmatic deals, whether that be handling a creative rendering issue, answering a programmatic set up question, or tackling a specific issue in a mobile application. The team troubleshoots site tagging issues and unravels reporting discrepancies as some of the more baseline duties. Ad Products at OAO is also heavily involved in the scoping of new products and more custom ad product executions such as creative templates, native ads, video ad serving and dynamic ad insertion on Desktop, Mobile Web, CTV and Mobile App platforms.
The role of Ad Products at OAO can be extremely tactical, digging deep into the advertising tagging schema of a mobile application, or observing programmatic delivery across specific CTV platforms in order to identify issues with new builds and releases that need to be resolved. It can be digging into a site’s code and header bidding setup to help figure out why delivery may or may not be happening as intended. On the other hand, the role can also be very consultative by helping a publisher think through the steps and technology needed to get dynamic ad insertion working or how to work with CTV environments - and their specific limitations that are inherent to this type of advertising at this time. Our overall role is to be as ad server agnostic as we can be and to find creative solutions to complex problems that our publisher partners face in the current advertising space.
Keeping up with the global privacy regulations with an understanding of user consent - and the specific parameters and conditions that need to be met - is a big focus across the industry. GDPR, LGPD, CCPA, COPPA, ADPPA, CMPs, and so many more acronyms are part of our everyday lives. Our Ad Products team has spent a great deal of time studying and documenting the various regulatory nuances to help guide our publisher development teams toward consent compliance. It is a complex topic, and privacy regulation does not exist in a static world, but we can help navigate some of the ad tagging items to help publishers move toward compliance.
The depth and breadth of experience that our teams bring to the table, complemented with the deep relationships that are fostered between our teams and clients, are integral to successfully executing high volume campaigns with the accuracy and reliability that our publishers expect and deserve. Seasonality is also a reality, and our teams adjust for inevitable ups and downs in sales volumes that happen over time for all of our publisher clients. OAO’s Managed Services and Ad Products teams are uniquely positioned to guide and assist publishers with a variety of complex challenges. With a solid track record of expertise and high quality service, we look at our clients as partners and enjoy the learnings that come from these long standing relationships.
It is true that nothing seems to be getting any simpler in the online advertising space. However, by partnering with skilled and reliable ad ops professionals, publishers will be positioned for much greater success in protecting and scaling their advertising revenue than if they were to go it alone.