The ad tech industry is experiencing a transformative shift. Media entities are navigating a challenging landscape characterized by declining profits and the continuing phaseout of third-party cookies. In these times, self-serve platforms are emerging as a compelling solution, offering significant benefits to both the buy-side and sell-side markets.

However, despite many advantages,  there are still a limited number of self-serve platforms available today and even fewer that provide complete independence from vendor support teams.

Navigating Profit Loss and Cookie Phaseout: A Publisher’s Path Forward

One primary reason publishers seek to regain control within their ad tech stack is the need to address declining profits. The traditional programmatic advertising model, which relies heavily on third-party cookies, is becoming unsustainable. Brand publishers are increasingly returning to direct campaigns, which often necessitates expanding their sales teams — overhead smaller publishers can’t afford.

Signal loss also pushes publishers to explore alternative revenue streams and monetization models. In this landscape, working with multiple intermediaries and not having a clear view of how the publisher’s data is collected and processed becomes especially unsustainable.

Taking Back Control: How Self-Serve Platforms Empower Publishers

Self-serve platforms offer a viable solution by not only enabling publishers to leverage their first-party data more effectively but also tools and capabilities to manage advertising campaigns in a privacy-compliant manner.

Operational efficiency is another critical factor in the success of any advertising campaign. Self-serve platforms streamline the ad buying and selling process, reducing the time and resources required to manage campaigns. Publishers can quickly set up, monitor, and adjust their Prebid configuration in real-time, leading to more effective and timely optimizations.

Fully automated publisher systems handle everything from inventory management to bid optimization to A/B testing, freeing up valuable time and resources.

Breaking Barriers: Self-Serve Solutions for Smaller Publishers

The ad tech industry is characterized by high entry barriers, particularly for smaller media entities. Top SSPs often have stringent minimum requirements not just in terms of traffic volume and geolocation, but also brand safety commitment and privacy integration, forcing smaller and regional publishers to work through agencies.

That’s what makes self-serve platforms so appealing. Publishers can often get around the minimum requirements and obtain direct SSPs while simultaneously working with resellers’ accounts. This allows them to manage both until they secure their own direct accounts.

Smaller media entities can leverage self-serve platforms to manage their ad campaigns independently and plug in their direct SSP accounts without the need for agency intermediaries, something that previously was only accessible to media with their own in-house Prebid.

The pay-as-you-go model, which many self-serve platforms operate on, benefits Tier 2 and Tier 3 publishers by offering a flexible, cost-effective solution that aligns with their often unpredictable traffic levels. A monthly fee often comes with access to a suite of advanced features and tools that might otherwise be out of reach for smaller publishers. However, a scalable, usage-based pricing model ensures that even publishers from less economically robust regions can leverage enterprise-grade technology without being burdened by unsustainable fees.

Why Ad Tech Vendors Are Embracing the Self-Serve Revolution

The trend that has become evident in the last couple of years is that initiatives like The Trade Desk’s OpenPath challenge SSPs’ traditional value propositions by altering the dynamics between the buy-side and sell-side.

The shift is clear: as supply path optimization wars intensify, SSPs are trying to differentiate and are moving towards a SaaS model, positioned as a necessary change to foster more meaningful, strategic, and economically viable partnerships.

Very simply, with ad tech entering the era of disintermediation, ad tech vendors are following suit.

Earlier this year, Setupad launched a fully automated self-serve platform for Prebid. Yieldbird introduced an all-in-one extension for GAM (essentially a self-serve interface). Hashtag Labs, PubWise, and Assertive Yield, to name a few, are all platforms offering exclusively Prebid-as-a-Service products. Not to mention the industry powerhouses Pubmatic’s OpenWrap and Magnite’s Demand Manager and other SSPs with their non-public self-serve offerings.

The Buy-Side Boom: Why Advertisers Are Going Self-Serve

It’s not much different. There’s a lot of demand from programmatic advertisers for self-service buying right now. Advertisers benefit from easy targeting, access to first-party data, and control over their campaigns. And it’s not a secret that advertisers often find their ads missing the target audience (especially SMEs), particularly with a loss of signal.

DSPs like AdLib and AdRoll rebranded themselves into “self-serve DSPs.” Infillion acquired MediaMath, officially admitting the reason for the purchase was to add self-service capabilities to its core business.

The buy-side self-serve industry is dominated by giants like The Trade Desk and DV360, but, just as on the sell side, the customization depth of these platforms varies. Moving towards the self-serve route isn’t just smart due to a growing interest in self-serve advertising, but also because of the wider trend that seeks to exclude DSPs from the supply chain.

Last year, both Magnite and Pubmatic cut out DSPs by launching ClearLine and Activate, respectively, products designed to give advertisers direct access to CTV and online video inventory.

Differentiating your offering comes with a lot of first-mover advantages. For example, accumulating vast amounts of data sooner than competitors is perhaps one of the most valuable for DSPs.

What’s Holding Back Ad Tech’s Self-Serve Evolution?

Although the trend is obvious, the majority of ad tech players still haven’t advanced their offerings or haven’t made it public.

Why? Building a robust platform requires significant upfront investment in technology and infrastructure. Transitioning existing customers to a self-serve model can be challenging, as it requires changing established workflows. Vendors are also afraid to sacrifice the existing revenue shares that bring great profits.

The readiness of the market to adopt a self-service model can significantly impact its success. And big publishers, to no one’s surprise, are very slow to change their ways.

However, with ad tech being as fragmented as it is now, it leaves few options but to advance and differentiate.

The complexity of the UI of the two behemoths in the self-serve space offered by Pubmatic and Magnite opens a lot of room for smaller ad tech vendors to differentiate and offer a compelling solution with flexible pricing. However, one area where you can’t compromise is technological capabilities.

The post How Self-Serve Platforms Are Revolutionizing Ad Tech and Empowering Publishers appeared first on AdMonsters.

“2024 is shaping up to be a crazy year for the advertising industry. Who knows what will come out of cookie deprecation and greater focus on generative AI.” — Terry Guyton-Bradley, Senior Director, Advertising Technology, Fortune.

2023 was a trying year for the programmatic supply chain, at least from a PR point of view.

It began with Bloomberg News saying it had enough of the open markets and to improve its user experience it would eliminate the channel entirely. Then Digiday published a series of articles, saying open programmatic markets are in a tough spot as the “lowest quality” publishers flooded the auctions. Publishers who continued to rely on them saw a decline in CPMs.  

But the real bashing came in June when the ANA released its Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study, claiming that inventory from MFA sites comprised 21% of the open markets.  

Transparency, a perennial issue for the open markets, continued to be a concern, and publishers sought to form direct relationships with SSPs to create a better, more privacy-centric, seamless user experience. 

But despite the challenges, the open markets are still a vital lifeline for publishers that can’t afford to maintain a dedicated sales force, and its revenue is still predicted to grow.

What will the next 12 months look like for the programmatic supply chain? To find out, we asked 4 experts about the issues — good and bad — that the sector will face. They are:

• Terry Guyton-Bradley, Senior Director, Advertising Technology, Fortune
• Justin Wohl, Chief Revenue Officer at Snopes.com and TVTropes.org
• Scott Messer, Principal & Founder, Messer Media 
• Chao Liao, SVP, Insider Advertising

Let’s dig in.

MFA Conversations Continue in 2024

Trend #1: Made For Advertising sites (MFAs) will continue to spark conversations, particularly around how trading desks spend advertiser’s budgets. Despite efforts in the second half of 2023, there is still a lot of confusion around what an MFA site is and whether they’re inherently bad. In 2024, both the buy-side and sell-side will need to work at articulating what they like and don’t like about MFA sites.

“MFA is the newest catchphrase in the industry. Sites stacked with ad slots have been around since the beginning of programmatic. All it goes to show is that more effort is needed by trading desks to ensure they are landing on reputable properties. There is nothing automatic about programmatic, and throwing your entire spend into the open markets to achieve scale isn’t going to cut it.” — Terry Guyton-Bradley

“In the 2023 MFA analysis and discussion, I never quite heard enough about the actual content itself, on the MFA sites, just the methods of traffic acquisition and the inventory representation to the buy-side. For further MFA scrutiny and cleanup, I implore the industry to start looking at the difference between buying traffic to sponsored/branded content, for example, versus misleading clickbait MFA.” — Justin Wohl

“There will certainly be more discourse, and more people (not me) complaining that Made For Advertising is a misnomer. Yes SSPs will continue to tout their MFA-free supply and DSPs will announce their ability to anti-target MFAs, but that’s just a lot of smoke and sledgehammers.  MFA is such a complex issue, that I think the Industry will only be able to trim the most egregious edges of MFA.  I encourage buyers to define precisely what they want to avoid, without using the amorphous term of MFA.” — Scott Messer

More Industry Consolidation on the Horizon

Trend #2: Industry consolidation in 2024 seems inevitable, driven by ongoing concerns about inventory quality, the deprecation of third-party cookies, and a demand for greater transparency.

“We’ll continue to see consolidation because it takes money to build the technology needed to be more transparent. Smaller shops are putting themselves on the sales block in order to raise money to continue to innovate.” — Terry Guyton-Bradley 

“Surely [consolidation] will be the case with the cookie-alternative providers, the identity vendors who have been jockeying for superiority since 2020. TTD’s UID2 and LiveRamp’s RampID hold the most promise.” — Justin Wohl

Digital Advertising Will Survive Cookie Deprecation

Trend #3: Despite the fret, the digital advertising ecosystem will survive the deprecation of third-party cookies. What will change is rather than one approach (i.e. cookies) to targeting and measurement, many will be deployed. Google will benefit (naturally), as will Amazon TAM in certain scenarios. Meanwhile, publishers may spend 2024 reorganizing their partnerships and shifting some advertising-related processes to server-side environments for better results.

“I venture to say that the advertising industry is one of those industries that is too big to fail. No one has consolidated around a replacement solution. Agencies are continuing as status quo and publishers are working to find individual solutions that will work for their data environments.  Although Google has hypothetically drawn a line in the sand, they are doing it in a way that will allow them to pull back if the results are not acceptable.  We won’t crash and burn.” — Terry Guyton-Bradley 

“Walled gardens will get stronger and money will depart the open web overall. Cookie deprecation will have its own slow-death effects in many areas, but solutions like Protected Audiences API (PAAPI) are poised to make tectonic shifts that will reshape supply chain topography entirely.” — Scott Messer

“The current distribution of buyers that publishers are familiar with is going to change with third-party cookie loss in Chrome, and the introduction of the Protected Audience API audience. I fully expect Google’s own Ad Exchange to be the emergent winner in Chrome, with AdX taking a much larger share (50%+) of inventory, in that browser, in 2024.” 

“If other SSPs don’t take their demand elsewhere, and start winning larger volumes than they did in 2023 in Safari and Firefox, I expect publishers will begin to lighten their prebid participants, or move more client-side bidders that aren’t driving meaningful contribution into server-only environments like prebid server and/or Amazon TAM.” — Justin Wohl

Programmatic Transaction Models Are Expanding

Trend #4: Programmatic transaction models are expanding, as The Trade Desk’s Open Path illustrates. This transformation is driven by dissatisfaction with the traditional programmatic exchange. As a result, buyers and sellers are looking for new ways to transact. 

“There are three trends that are closely related. The first is the SSPs going directly to buyers, the second is DSPs going directly to publishers, like The Trade Desk and Open Path. The third is publishers offering completely self-serve access to their inventory. We can look at these as three separate trends, but really, they’re tied together. What we’re seeing is that certain sectors of the industry are not happy with the game of programmatic exchange or the current types of setup with programmatic transactions. So they’re trying to create new ways to transact by cutting out intermediaries that may not be adding value.” — Chao Liao

Curated Marketplaces Equal Brand Suitability

Trend #5: With heightened concern over inventory quality, curated marketplaces will be seen as a strategy for ensuring brand suitability. But it’s not a panacea as the Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study makes clear. While 19% of ad spend in the open markets goes to MFA inventory, private marketplaces aren’t far behind at 15%. PMPs still have an element of “buyers beware” that will need to be addressed in 2024.

“Curation is certainly a major theme of 2024, but we won’t see any standards emerge here. Sellers can do a better job providing meaningful curation and measurement, but it’s unreasonable to think that there will be any standards for PMPs developed.” — Scott Messer

Sustainability as a Differentiator

Trend #6: More brands will start to ask about sustainability and the carbon footprint of campaigns in their RFIs in 2024, and the prevalence of MFA inventory will complicate those discussions. According to research by Ebiquity and Scope3, MFA sites generate around 26% more carbon waste than non-MFA sites due to the constant refreshing of ads, and numerous connections to various SSPs and resellers. 

“MFA sites are maximizing ad requests per page view as well as arbitraging traffic and cookies, which generate a lot of carbon. Brands that have set a goal of improving sustainability will be very keen to avoid them as a low-hanging fruit. I don’t necessarily see it as solely the SSP’s job to streamline the supply chain. This needs to be done in collaboration between the sell side and buy side.” — Chao Liao 

SSPs Reduce Scope1, 2, and 3 Emissions

Trend #7: More SSPs will follow OpenX’s lead by looking at their internal operations to see where they can reduce their Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions. 

“This year, people will ask, what does sustainability mean for me as an operator, and how do I improve my operations in terms of efficiency and sustainability? I think a lot of SSPs will look at OpenX as an example in the different ways they improved their sustainability and bottom line.” — Chao Liao

Final Words of Advice

“My advice is for publishers to heed the Ghost of Cookies Past.  Publishers must keep an eye on when and how to switch their deterministic identifiers into private marketplaces. For the past two years, publishers opened the floodgates of IDs in the bid stream, which was great for adoption and testing but is now a growing threat to the balance of seller power. Publishers cannot allow vendors to commoditize deterministic identifiers. These are coveted components of the digital supply chain–and ID owners should be rightly compensated for their investments and relationship with readers.” — Scott Messer

The post What Will the Next 12 Months Look Like for the Programmatic Supply Chain? appeared first on AdMonsters.

At a time when more competition exists amongst streaming media services, Disney Advertising landed on a strategy to accelerate access to Disney+ AVOD inventory when the publisher launched its Disney Campaign Manager.

In 2023, over 4,500 advertisers and 1,000 agencies transacted on Disney Campaign Manager, with many of those brands being first-time streaming advertisers.

For long-standing SVOD-only publishers, the switch to AVOD, or a hybrid model, has begun to pay off.

According to Insider Intelligence/eMarketer, the Disney+ ad-supported streaming option will hit $786.6 million in advertising revenue for 2023 — somewhat higher than the $684.6 million projected for Netflix’s advertising tier. Given that Disney+ has only been operating as a hybrid model for a year, these numbers are impressive.

It’s also clear that viewers, suffering from subscription fatigue, are embracing a TV-like ad experience with ads interspersed throughout their content.

In October, Disney reported that 50% of new subscribers are choosing the ad-supported version of Disney+. An ad-supported tier greatly reduces the subscription cost for consumers, but it also creates a more lucrative business for publishers.

While programmatic is driving much of CTV’s growth, direct deals play a critical in the shift from SVOD to AVOD. Direct provides the best opportunity for publishers to nourish a client-first experience and provide white-glove service, establishing strong relationships with buyers while laying the bricks for data-enabled transactions like PMPs.

On one level, that’s exactly what self-service platforms like Disney’s Campaign Manager provide buyers. It offers premium inventory, campaign management, reporting, and optimization.

“It involves cultivating essential relationships with advertisers and positioning publishers to optimize the monetization of their ad-supported content effectively,” said Yaka Brownlee-Yamaguchi, Director of Customer Success at Disney Advertising.

Securing Incremental Ad Spend with Self Service

For most publishers, it’s not cost-efficient for sales to go through the traditional contract process for transactional or smaller transactions. This makes self-service tech appealing for providing workflow efficiency and capturing incremental revenue.

Disney’s Campaign Manager offers buyers flexibility and accessibility, leading to more frequent transactions and incremental spend.

“The platform empowers clients with autonomy and control over their purchasing journey. This grants them independence regarding making decisions on timing and method of procurement,” said Ella Leung, Director of Self Service Platform Sales at Disney Advertising.

“Clients benefit from accelerated time-to-market, wherein campaigns are planned, constructed, booked, and launched within days, eliminating potential delays associated with direct IOs.”

According to Leung, self-service provides a more personalized experience and turnkey campaigns while clients manage their business independently; it allows buyers to leverage data analytics and customer insights to offer personalized recommendations. As the customer base grows, so does the potential for capturing incremental spend.

Self-Service, a Safe Haven for SMBs

For far too long, the duopoly of Meta and Google has garnered the lion’s share of SMB spend. Many SMBs don’t have the budgets required to get in front of a premium publisher’s audience, and self-service tech helps publishers capture some of that spend.

Self-service advertising platforms have taken off over the past few years with retailers like Walmart and Amazon joining the ranks, as well as social media networks like Snapchat and TikTok, travel platform TripAdvisor, and several publishers like Hearst, Hulu, Soundcloud, Spotify, The Washington Post, and Vox. Self-service platforms are built for simplicity and speed, providing user-friendly interfaces that are easy to use, even for buyers with limited resources or technological backgrounds.

“Self-service has a lower barrier to entry, so it helps level the playing field between SMBs and national brands,” said Brownlee-Yamaguchi. “It can help amplify the brand and reach consumers, and self-service also drives results with automation. Advertisers can set their budgets, allowing them full control over their spending and the ability to allocate resources based on their budget. They can also target niche audiences or specific demographics to maximize the impact of their campaigns.

The platform provides a seamless way for CTV publishers to connect with brands with smaller budgets. “Our self-service platform offers affordability, user-friendly interfaces, customization options, automation, targeted advertising, real-time analytics, direct access to inventory, transparent pricing, and educational resources on reaching targeted audiences effectively,” Brownlee-Yamaguchi added.

Getting Started with Self-Service

For buyers, transitioning to self-service — or just starting — might come with some hiccups. Common drawbacks might include the uncertainties of competitive marketplace challenges, navigating platform updates, and clearly understanding a publisher’s intricacies.

Leung encourages brands unfamiliar with self-service not to hesitate to test and learn. Getting started can feel daunting, especially if a buyer is new to investing in media or a streaming strategy, so starting with a hybrid approach is best.

The post Disney+ Expands AVOD Capabilities with Disney Campaign Manager appeared first on AdMonsters.

For many people it seemed like an allusive fantasy: A single DSP that could interact seamlessly with all DSPs, enabling media buyers to launch and optimize campaigns from a single interface and acquire inventory through whichever platform is best suited to achieve campaign KPIs.

Then came the bankruptcy of MediaMath and the idea of a universal DSP took on new urgency as media buyers were forced to learn new interfaces in a matter of days.

Long before MediaMath shut down, however, Mike Hauptman and Dan Bougourd were intrigued by the idea of a meta DSP. They both joined MediaMath in the company’s early days, but by 2018, they were itching to bring programmatic advertising to the mid-market advertiser.

They pitched the idea of spinning off a new company that would offer a meta DSP built on top of MediaMath to their bosses, who were game. That year they launched AdLib, a DSP designed to bring programmatic advertising to the SMB market through streamlined workflows.

Mike Haupman met with AdMonsters to talk about meta DSPs and the drivers that led them to build and launch one.

AdMonsters: You and Dan are programmatic old-timers. When did you first join MediaMath?

Mike Haupman: I joined MediaMath back in 2010 when the company launched the first self-service DSP. I was the first sales engineer and spent the next seven years building and leading the Global Technology Solutions team. Dan joined a year after me, in a similar role, supporting the expansion into the EMEA region.

Launching AdLib — A Meta DSP

AdMonsters: What made you and Dan decide to launch a new company?

MH: We wanted to make DSP advertising easy. The first tagline of AdLib was, “The Premium DSP for Everyone.” We saw the challenges that media buyers faced trying to access premium ad platforms such as MediaMath and others.

For media buyers at any size agency, it’s a complex business to learn a DSP interface, set up campaigns, and optimize them on an ongoing basis. And doing things like automation and scaling is incredibly resource-intensive. Now increase that complexity by factors when trafficking campaigns across multiple DSPs.

For midsize buyers, those obstacles are formidable. On top of this, they faced additional barriers to entry in the form of commercial commitments and large monthly and annual spend minimums.  These challenges combined to effectively bar midsize marketers from participating in programmatic advertising.

AdMonsters: To encourage widespread participation, you started by building a DSP for midsized marketers on top of MediaMath?

MH: Yes, at the time Dan and I were both intimately familiar with MediaMath’s APIs and customizing them. We wanted to explore new options and scratch our entrepreneurial itch, so we approached the MediaMath founders to see how they felt about us launching a really easy-to-use version of MediaMath. That’s what we did. Today, marketers of all sizes use AdLib as a meta DSP to launch and manage campaigns on top DSPs across all channels & screens

AdMonsters: Talk a little more about the concept of a meta DSP. What is it, and is it your goal to put all of the other DSPs out of business?

MH: Our goal is to work with all of the DSPs, leveraging the best of all worlds on behalf of our clients. 

The industry has talked about a meta DSP for a long time, which is a single interface that allows the user to login and run media across whichever DSP or DSPs are best suited to meet the object of the campaign.

For instance, if it’s a CTV campaign, Beeswax is a great option thanks to its efficient connections to CTV supply. If it’s a performance-based campaign Criteo is the way to go, because that platform is just incredible at driving performance-based programs across display and video.

A big benefit of a meta DSP lies in the opportunity to have a simple workflow tool. The meta DSP serves as the system of record for users, and they use the simple interface to build and manage campaigns, but AdLib, not the user, determines the best DSP to activate the campaign and manages the connections, gathers the reporting, and displays the consolidated results in a dashboard.

AdMonsters: So media buyers are still using multiple DSPs, but doing so through one interface?

MH: That’s right. Media buyers today access multiple DSPs so they can maximize results and minimize the risks of missing key audiences. But ask any of them and they’ll tell you it’s a time-consuming and error-prone process to set up campaigns in each one.

From an AdOps perspective, adoption, trafficking, and workflows are very different. It takes a lot of investment to teach people multiple systems, and employee churn leads to a loss of those investments.

The other challenge a meta DSP addresses is business continuity if a DSP, like MediaMath, goes dark. This is a reality that a lot of media buyers faced this past June.

Dynamically-Allocated Budgets

AdMonsters: How does AdLib determine the best way to allocate budget for a campaign?

MH: We’re building out a concept we call dynamically allocated budgets. Essentially, we look at the DSPs that are delivering the strongest performance per campaign and focus media spend there.

Let’s say a user sets up a campaign with a CPA goal of $10.00. The system will allocate 50% of the budget to one DSP 50% and the other 50% on another. AdLib will then determine over time which DSP or which set of DSPs delivers the best results for that budget. We further fine-tune the performance with media-mix modeling, as well as dark market / light market testing.

The concept of cross-DSP segmentation is something we’re still testing and developing.

AdMonsters: What is dark market and light market testing?

MH: Let’s say you start with two markets that are relatively similar in terms of size and demographics. Historically, media buyers run media in both markets with similar budgets and benchmarks. In other words, the buyer tests DSP A and market A and DSP B and market B. After a bit, the buyer compares the results to determine which market got the best lift from its baseline, and ultimately, which DSP drives better performance.

A meta DSP improves on this important process in a few ways. First and foremost, it eliminates the potential of user overlap, as the tests occur in different markets. Second, agencies can assess performance without holdout testing, or using pixels to segment users, which gets really messy really fast. Dark market vs. light market testing is cleaner and delivers a stronger signal without the complexity we normally associate with market comparisons.

AdMonsters: How has MediaMath’s bankruptcy affected your business?

MH: Prior to June we primarily worked with midsize media agencies, but since integrating with more DSPs beyond MediaMath, we have begun working with larger agencies. They’ve been receptive to AdLib because they too are struggling with the fragmentation and the soaring labor costs that are part and parcel of using multiple DSPs for their campaigns.

Publishers Get Audience Extension and Scale with AdLib

AdMonsters: Do publishers use your platform?

MH: Yes, publishers use our platform for audience extension services, which has traditionally been a highly labor-intensive task. There’s a lot of manual labor involved in finding their buyer’s audiences on the open web. A meta DSP automates this for publisher AdOps teams.

We’ve worked with several publishers in audience extension services where no humans were involved whatsoever. These campaigns are simply marked for amplification or extension, and they flow the platform and are activated across the appropriate DSP. Think of it as audience-extension-in-a-box.

AdMonsters: This sounds like a great way to scale campaigns without cookies.

MH: We definitely see a future for first-party data activation.

AdMonsters: And speaking of the future, a meta DSP seems like a good way to future-proof the media buyer’s ad ops.

MH: That’s true. While DSPs may come or go, the trafficker needs to worry about just one interface.

About Mike Hauptman – CEO & Founder – AdLib

Mike is a programmatic marketer with over 17 years of experience solving complex and large-scale technical business challenges for Fortune 500 brands, agencies, and advertisers.

Prior to founding AdLib, Mike was one of the first 100 employees at MediaMath, where he held various roles, including VP of Technical Business Development and Global VP of Platform Integrations.

The post Making Programmatic Easier for All with a Meta DSP appeared first on AdMonsters.

Most publishers we talked to had high revenue expectations for 2020. And marketers were planning on spending big money across digital. But the pandemic changed all of that.

Now that things are starting to pick back up, sellers and buyers have an eye toward the future. What will happen when the cookie crumbles? What will take its place? What will become of mobile attribution? Will OTT and CTV continue to rise? Oh, so many questions.

Well, we put together a collection of predictions from some ad tech executives who wanted to share their vision for how things might shake out in 2021.

Adoption of UDID 2.0 will be embraced by publishers, with asterisks

“Publishers understand that they’ll need to rethink their strategy for a post-third-party cookie world, They’ll need to be able to deliver targeting for their advertisers, which means adopting solutions and frameworks that incorporate modern interpretations of Identity. The Universal ID, backed by a consortium led by the Trade Desk, has gotten a lot of momentum and will surely be adopted by Publishers. However, in a survey conducted by LiveIntent, respondents said email addresses (29%), first-party data collected directly by publishers (25%) and embracing The Trade Desk’s Universal ID 2.0 (22%) are the most important digital assets when trying to replace third-party cookies. This suggests that Universal ID’s adoption will not be a “set it and forget it” scenario for the industry, but rather part of a “balanced meal”. Publishers will still prioritize the collection of first-party assets, including email, in concert with any Universal ID adoption.” — Kerel Cooper, SVP, Global Marketing, LiveIntent

You’ve got identity

“What will replace the cookie in 2021? Email. Yes, email, its enduring value marches on. Email is the de-facto successor to the cookie as the battle rages on between open source identity and proprietary identity, i.e., the walled gardens. Open source would commoditize identity away from the walled gardens, which sounds great in theory. But there are concerns around the quality of this data, who ‘polices’ usage and the potential regulation by legislators.,But we’re looking at a world where open source and proprietary data could live side by side with identity differentiated by direct consumer consent and association to many deterministic signals that can be shared in a secure, privacy-centric way. We’re building something similar with our own identity graph, Verizon Media ConnectID.” — Iván Markman, Chief Business Officer, Verizon Media

Marketers will implement strategic action-based experiences and focus on customer data to drive identity resolution and personalization

“Marketers have been — and will continue — focusing their ad spend on showing action-based outcomes like website traffic, add to cart, absolute shopping and app downloads. This means they are moving away from KPIs like reach and completion rate.  However, the main problem with that focus is that marketers must know identity across media, sites and devices for that to work. To address this, we will see big progress on creating a uniform standard for CTV identification in 2021.” — Tal Chalozin, CTO and co-founder, Innovid

More walls will go up for the fortunate few

“We predicted in 2020 that publishers would see the forest through the trees in putting up walls. Some did, but the bigger players are banking on first-party data alone as their lifeboats. As pubs invest more in context and erect walls around first-party data assets, they will face increasing scrutiny to prove ROI and scale. Walled gardens may work in the short term for the likes of the New York Times but mid to small publishers won’t survive on context alone. This may lead those players to lean in more aggressively to data enrichment and testing multiple identity solutions, proving their flexibility and agility to meet marketer’s needs.” — Andy Monfried, CEO, Lotame

Subscriptions become the ultimate monetization model for apps across verticals

“The growth of subscription-based apps has intensified this year as users look to their mobile devices for a broader array of activities, from entertainment and e-commerce to fitness and finance. This is also being driven by changing user habits that point to the ‘stickiness’ of subscriptions. As subscriptions become a regular expenditure, we’ve seen that Gen Z and millennial consumers, especially, are more willing to pay for a premium app product or supporting brands they love. Recent research conducted by Adjust found that 25 – 34-year-olds spent the most on subscription apps — $25.85 a month — compared to $13.97 for respondents aged 55+. More than a quarter of Millennials and Gen Z consumers also said they have stopped paying for other services in order to buy subscriptions on mobile app services (for example, subscribing to fitness apps over going to the gym).With ad targeting set to get harder on iOS 14, we expect an increasing number of apps will be looking to diversify their monetization models beyond ad revenue in 2021 — and subscriptions will become the ultimate income stream for many publishers and advertisers.” — Katie Madding, CPO, Adjust

Transparency will make or break the advertising industry

“Programmatic advertising has, in the past, been blamed for contributing to the lack of transparency within the advertising industry due to complex supply chains which make it difficult for brands to see where their budgets are being spent. As purse strings continue to tighten in almost all industries, 2021 will be the tipping point for many brands who cannot afford to throw money into supply chains where up to 15% of advertiser spend is left unaccounted for. There are several pitfalls that need addressing and it is becoming ever more apparent that programmatic advertising is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. I expect that self-service advertising, an inherently more transparent system that allows businesses to place their own ads without the assistance of an advertising sales representative, will be the savior as well as the driving force that will enable brands to better understand the supply chain, work with partners they can trust and, most importantly, reduce unnecessary ad spending” — Peo Persson, co-founder and CPO, DanAds

Advertising automation is going to catch on

“Advertising automation is a new category that we started this year. I believe that we, as an industry, have done a fantastic job solving the transactional issues. About 15-20 years ago, everything was done manually.  And then, ten years ago, we came up with real-time bidding, which solved the transactional issue, everything’s being done automatically. You don’t need any human involvement, and, you don’t need to have numerous paperwork, teams, and things like that. So for that, we’ve done a great job. But I believe that we have not innovated for the last ten years as an industry. And this is where I think we got stuck. We’ve done that to solve the transactional issue, and then we built a system to become better about handling it while everybody’s adopting it, and now everything is adopted. What we haven’t solved is the problem that the black box doesn’t look at the overall picture. And now, with advertising automation, we can tell the black box how to look at it. The big problem that we believe needs to be solved is how the marketers plan and the way that programmatic gets executed today. With advertising automation, we give the control back to the advertisers regarding the consumer journey and how to tell your story to bring somebody to conversion.” — Tal Hayek, CEO & Co-Founder, AcuityAds

Enhanced online shopping experience will be the step-up that is needed for businesses to increase sales revenue

“With e-commerce already having grown by 40% this year as a result of ongoing coronavirus restrictions placed on brick-and-mortar stores, there is no time like the present for brands to focus on their online offering. There are already a number of tools that help with this, for example useful bots used by merchants for upselling or following up with customers if an item is left in the basket and offering free delivery on the order when completed.  This level of automation is only going to grow, as technology gets smarter and is incorporated into the many aspects of the consumer journey.” — Thomas Høgebøl, CEO and co-founder, NoA

Traditional Makes a Comeback

“A successful vaccine, coupled with extreme device fatigue from the last year will lead to revitalized interest in more “traditional” formats such as OOH, DOOH, and audio.  In fact, VIOOH’s annual State of the Nation report found U.S. marketers were planning to include programmatic DOOH in 51% of all digital campaigns in 2021, a figure unheard of a couple years ago.  As data targeting and measurement within these formats advances, advertisers will truly start to realize their power when executed properly. Just look at the history behind the mobile ad growth.  Consumption outpaced spend for a decade as we declared it the “year of mobile” – until we solved measurement and mobile spending exploded. Now consider the fact that consumers post-Covid will add to the existing 60%+ of their waking hours spent out of the home (70%+ pre-Covid).  And compare that to the 4-5% of budgets historically spent on OOH. Big gap to close.” — Craig Benner, CEO, Accretive Media

Buyers will increasingly move from purely programmatic spending to working directly with publishers  – often through an agency

“Indeed, we hear publishers are bulking up their direct sales teams to handle the anticipated inquiries and demand. While digital advertising continues its significant shift from direct to programmatic, fewer players and providers in OTT/CTV make an eminently achievable and likely preferable direct strategy. By buying directly, advertisers open up significantly more customized targeting and pricing tiers to choose the optimal spend for their situation. Buying direct also often provides more robust data, such as enhanced content and demographic data. While some publishers publicly state they offer the same inventory for programmatic deals as they do for direct relationships (and we take them on their word for that), we’ve also heard from other publishers that premium inventory is more likely to be reserved for large, direct buyers.”  — John Hamilton, CEO and Founder, TVDataNow  

Advertisers will require increased agility across all media types

“The agility that digital platforms offer has been especially valuable amid the COVID-19 pandemic as digital advertisers have needed to adjust spend, messaging and creative on a moment’s notice. In 2021, advertisers will continue to move away from rigid/limiting platforms and invest in digital platforms including CTV advertising, not only to reach homebound consumers, but to combine the flexibility and precise targeting capabilities of digital with the impactful storytelling of linear. Agility will be one of the most important pages in a marketer’s playbook in 2021.” — Frost Prioleau, CEO and co-founder, Simpli.fi

More ad spend going towards OTT and CTV

“Looking ahead to 2021, I expect advertisers will continue to navigate the evolving OTT and CTV landscape and experiment with the media mix best suited to their brand. We’ve seen some DTC brands in recent months adding linear TV to their marketing spend and I expect this is a trend that will continue among digitally native brands. I’m curious about the continuing growth of media aggregators that we’re seeing in our video ad serving data and anticipate that we’ll see an increase in ads served directly to premium publishers in the new year. I’ll also be keeping an eye on ad spend levels on live sports broadcasts, where brands have traditionally allocated large portions of ad budgets with great success. 2020 has shaken up that model somewhat. I predict live televised events, in both sports and entertainment, will have strong advertising support in 2021.” — Melinda McLaughlin, CMO, Extreme Reach

The post 12 Digital Media and Advertising Predictions for 2021 appeared first on AdMonsters.

The two teams tend to operate out of their own silos. On one hand, the sales team is pressured with meeting sales goals. On the other hand, ad operations are challenged with executing ad campaigns that meet advertiser goals while also providing an optimal user experience.

But these two sides shouldn’t be in opposition. Publisher success requires cooperation of the two, as neither can achieve their highest goals without the other team’s support. That’s why fostering effective communication across the two teams is critically important, as well as implementing a highly-structured workflow.

Since the pandemic, the relationship between ad ops and sales has become far more collaborative. Now, the two teams are coming together to rethink and revise their processes, client approaches and even their workflows—and often they’re leveraging automation technology to maximize efficiencies.

We recently chatted with publishers—at a Think Tank supported by ADvendio—about the transformation happening within their organizations as a result of the pandemic and how it’s impacting the overall sales process.

Collaboration in Effect

Driven by advertisers’ need for more customization, one of the areas where publishers are starting to experience tighter collaboration is in the pre-sales process.

Sales is paying really close attention to how ad ops function. While it’s producing a way-too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen scenario, at the same time it’s strengthening ops’ ability to stay on top of deals from beginning to end.

“We’re making sure that we’re working with them very closely and staying on top of the proposal through its lifecycle so that we can be there to guide them, make sure it sells through, and we won’t fail at executing it,” shared one publisher. 

This new relationship between sales and ad ops is helping to better facilitate customer demand and workflows. And with that, sales is becoming a more consultative partner to advertisers. 

Revenue professionals talked with us about the way sales now relies on ad ops during the pre-sales process to mine insights that will be useful in demonstrating the value of the products that sales are out there selling in the market. 

“We’re taking a different approach and asking them for the RFP and to explain in one sentence what the client’s goals are, and then we come back with recommendations based on budget levels,” shared one publisher.

The collaborative approach is empowering publisher organizations to be more nimble in finding the right fit for each client instead of focusing on a one size fits all solution. Publishers who were traditionally more conservative and cyclical in their approach to developing new products are now releasing them faster because they’ve gained a better understanding of clients’ needs.

Creative Workflow Gets a Boost

With tighter collaboration comes increased productivity and an opportunity for sales and ad ops to take a step back and think about how they can make their processes and workflows function more smoothly.

One approach some publishers are adopting is automating the creative collections process. “Rather than clients sending things back-and-forth by email, we’re headed towards enabling this process more through self-service. It adds huge value and allows the client to transmit their own creative and manage the whole process,” said one publisher.

When publishers can automate the creative production process and the workflow, then less issues will arise from too many hands in the process. It can save a lot of time when all of the creative is moving through a process of notifications and reminders and then directly to the server, without anyone ever really touching the file.

Reporting and Data Insights Still A Challenge

Other areas where publishers would like to see more automation, especially with a real-time system, is with reporting and analytics.

Since publishers are dealing with more customizations for clients now, reporting has become a big headache when dealing with various client dashboards. The challenge for many publishers has been finding a partner who can not only aggregate reports but provides a holistic view.

The same can be said about getting metrics from various vendors to be able to provide data insights to clients. “We can get individual metrics from different vendors and we’ve tried several approaches for integrating it, but the more automated we can be, then the more we can do with our resources,” shared a publisher.

Being able to connect the dots with vendors and close the gaps would help any publisher do a lot more analytics work that can help sales do a better job.

With everyone working from home over the past six months and having some down time to look deeper into the business, each team across the publisher organization was pulling spreadsheets from within their part of the media business. The craziness of it all led one publisher to build out an automated system to bring these disparate siloed data resources together. 

“I mean, I’ve been preaching about automating stuff for years,” he said. “They finally said, OK, go build this thing out. So it’s been really nice. We have an entire data team that’s picking up all kinds of information. So everybody has been satisfied.”

From Self-Service to Self-Manage

Some publishers still shy away from adopting self-service technology, since their clients still require too much hand holding to bring a campaign to life. But those publishers are also seeing an opportunity for using self-serve tech with a self-managed approach. 

The idea of self-managed is based on taking all of that disparate data that’s being aggregated into one place for use by internal teams and making it available to clients as well, in a quick consumable manner.

“I think the self-managed approach is the little things like allowing the client to come in and just do their campaign, do an invoice and allow them to pay by credit card or save their credit card in a wallet. All of those little things that add up,” explained one publisher.

What’s Next?

The next phase of automation for publishers is whether they can create an end-to-end system for clients, with the kind of real-time reporting that we talked about earlier. 

Already, many publishers are implementing self-serve ad platforms to capture SMB ad spend as incremental revenue. Some are even starting to talk about exploring the technology’s capabilities for grabbing larger buys.

To simplify the buying process, some publishers are also toying with the idea of creating a self-service marketplace where buyers can purchase programmatic guaranteed across many publishers.

In the end, stronger collaboration between ad ops and sales and implementing automation are laying the groundwork for streamlining the entire ad sales process across the industry.

The post How the Pandemic Got Ad Ops and Sales to Cozy Up appeared first on AdMonsters.

The old adage, “If you build it, they will come,” wherein those programmatic direct platforms enabled publishers to automate the buying and selling of guaranteed inventory didn’t work out too well for those early adopters who only saw minimal revenue in those days. 

It was slow starting for the self-service ad platform, as buyers were hellbent on using exchanges to cherry-pick their inventory. If buyers could find a seller’s inventory on the open markets, and often for a cheaper price, why would they choose to go to a pub directly?

But 2020 is a very different marketplace, largely shaped by how the global Coronavirus pandemic has altered the landscape. 

In particular, publishers’ sales teams have been focusing on big buys, leaving the occasional smaller buy on the table. Self-service tech is growing as a preferred brand-safe option for capturing that smaller spend, even with thousands of dollars now getting tossed to self-service ad platforms. 

There’s huge optimism for the future of self-service, according to what publishers told us at a recent Think Tank with DanAds.

It’s just not cost-efficient to have a salesperson go through the traditional contract process for transactional or low-spend advertisers, so self-service tech is very appealing for not only capturing incremental revenue but also providing workflow efficiency, one publisher told us.

And while not as sexy as opening up new revenue streams, there’s an additional benefit of automating repetitive ad ops tasks with self-serve tech, freeing up hundreds of hours spent in manual labor filing sales systems, approving creatives, and building reports so that teams can focus on higher-level tasks. 

During the pandemic, some publishers have had to resort to layoffs or furloughs as cost-saving measures. But with self-serve tech, publishers are given the opportunity for sales and ad ops to focus on more qualitative tasks that streamline the business. 

Cracking the Elusive SMB Spend 

Since Facebook and Google still garner the majority of SMB spend, self-service tech is enabling publishers to take a crack at the SMB market. Most of these advertisers don’t have the budgets for these large buys required by some premium publishers, but they want to get their wares in front of those premium audiences. 

We’re now seeing a rise in self-service advertising platforms as another option to the duopoly with growing adoption by retailers like Walmart and Amazon, social media networks like Snapchat and TikTok, and travel platforms like TripAdvisor, as well as a range of pubs like Hearst, Hulu, Soundcloud, Spotify, The Washington Post and Vox.

Like linear TV, Hulu has been an expensive option for advertisers. But this summer, in an effort to garner small and medium-sized ad business, the streamer launched a beta self-service platform with a minimum budget of $500. The tool offers a more simplified package to smaller advertisers, with an option for either a 15 or 30-second spot without a lot of customizations or an audience for targeting. 

“We’re using self-serve to get at small, and medium-sized spend and not have to involve the salespeople. We’re testing that out on Hulu right now and it’s doing pretty good,” a Disney revenue professional shared with us recently.

While most of us were home in the earlier days of the pandemic consuming exorbitant amounts of content, some of us were also creating incredible amounts of creative content. 

On SoundCloud, creators upload their content in hopes of gaining exposure and plays. They rely on SoundCloud’s self-service tool, a perk for the price of their subscription, that enables them to push out their own promotions.

“It’s a completely different revenue channel that we weren’t tapping into before,” said a Soundcloud representative.

Tripadvisor’s Self-Service Ad Platform Becomes Mission Critical

If you attended AdMonsters PubForum Virtual, then you got to hear the keynote by Tripadvisor’s VP Of Global Ad Revenue, Christine Maguire. Tripadvisor was on a path to hit record revenues in 2020, but then the pandemic hit, shattering all of the company’s dreams of reaching their goals. 

Quickly, the travel planning company changed course and started laying the groundwork towards a recovery strategy built on the strength of the relationship they have with their consumers.

Along with leveraging insights from the pandemic-driven shift in consumer travel behaviors to launch new products and better advise marketers on their messaging, Tripadvisor has also seen a rise in engagement with their self-service platform over the past few months with over triple digital quarter over quarter growth as small businesses look for flexibility and control during a time of continued variables.

“As small, medium, and large businesses alike look for efficiencies and focus on investing in performance driving media, easy to use self-serve platforms, like Tripadvisor Media Manager, have become a critical part of the mix providing 24/7 access to our platform and performance dashboards to evolve campaign targeting, creative and budget in real-time,” a media rep for the company told us. 

“Our consumer research tells us that now, more than ever, 95% of our consumers want to hear positive communications from brands. Keeping this in mind, self-service platforms and Tripadvisor Media Manager remove any budgetary barriers from managed service campaigns, allowing access to our audience at any investment level,” they added. 

For large scale media companies, like Tripadvisor, self-service platforms have created an opportunity to help brands engage with users while providing operational efficiencies during a time of reduced workforces.

Freeing up Man Hours

Self-service ad platforms aren’t only for publishers looking to capture incremental revenue, they also help to create workflow efficiencies.

Ad ops teams are spending way too much time manually entering campaign data into disparate systems, like ad servers, CRM, billing and order management systems. This can negatively impact optimization and reporting, as not all data is being entered into each of the systems.  

As well, there can be a lot of back-and-forth with clients running forecasts. For smaller buys, it’s a big headache. But when a self-service tool reduces the manual time spent by ad ops and sales, along with the back-and-forth with clients, by automating the ad buying process, it definitely pays off. 

We’ve heard that companies like Hearst and Shazam reported reducing 90-95% of the manual labor that goes into the buying process. Now that reclaimed time can be used for improving other processes and focusing on strategy.

Planning for Recovery and the Future

Opening up the gates to SMB spend and managing workflow efficiency is just the tip of what a publisher can do with a self-service advertising platform. 

With first-party data being all the rage now with the pandemic changing the way advertisers spend, along with privacy restrictions and limitations on cross-tracking users on Chrome and iOS coming soon, it’s also appealing that pubs can use their own first-party data within a self-service platform to sell unique audience offerings to advertisers. 

It’s an audience that marketers can reach in a brand-safe way, and pubs can produce new content and products to sustain it.

The post Pandemic Pushes Self-Service Ad Platform Adoption Forward appeared first on AdMonsters.

The Coronavirus completely altered everything—the way we live and how we work. And as the pandemic ravaged across the globe, it practically decimated digital advertising in its wake.

With ad spend indefinitely on pause, publishers went into a panicked frenzy as they searched for ways to dramatically reduce costs. 

It wasn’t long before the ax would drop and layoffs, furloughs, and hiring freezes would take their toll across the industry. Then came the budget cuts, completely terminating any new projects that were already in motion for the year. To further reduce costs, some pubs even decided that now was an opportune time to go about the business of vendor consolidation.

The Upside of the Pandemic

It probably doesn’t seem like there would be an upside to this tale, but when most office employers told their employees to work-from-home following the government-sanctioned stay-at-home orders, publishers briskly began developing revenue diversification strategies and soon realized that with just a few minor adjustments they could actually be highly productive and more efficient. This, even with the challenges that come with mixing the worlds of work and home.

As one publisher told us during a recent Think Tank roundtable discussion about planning for tomorrow’s very different ad market, hosted by DanAds: “One thing we’ve learned from this is, especially with ad operations, is that we can be as productive with not everyone in the same area. That’s been a big positive. I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to a place where everyone has to be in the same office.”

Companies aren’t only struggling financially, they’re also facing the ethical question of whether to open up offices or instead set their employees up with the proper remote work tools so that they can work from home more effectively. One thing is for sure though, at least according to the publishers we spoke with, media companies will be considerably more liberal with work from home policies post-pandemic.

We often hear people say they’re now working twice as much, or even harder than they did from their office cubicles. Since ad ops and revenue folks possess a range of skills, many discovered that as business slowed they were able to stretch across their companies into other roles like marketing and sales. And while many pubs found themselves doubling down and turning things over quicker, others talked about simply going for a lower bar.

Ad Spend Takes a Hit, Recovers Slowly

It was in the early days of COVID-19 when publishers were their most fearful. They watched in angst as countless direct deals—already in the pipeline—pretty much evaporated, one after the other, right before their eyes. Forecasts were reshaped swiftly, as the losses kept racking up.

There was also this issue of monumentally higher page views, spurred by consumers’ heavy focus on Coronavirus related news. Unfortunately, the increase in pandemic-related news resulted in brand safety issues for advertisers thereby significantly reducing CPMs for publishers. 

So it wasn’t just the paused ad spend hitting pubs below the belt, it was also a matter of COVID-and-BLM-related blocklists prohibiting them from monetizing one of the most significant increases in traffic—ever.  

Making up for these losses, news publishers went full throttle on subscription revenue models. They lifted paywalls from pandemic-based news leading to a halo effect on readers deciding to pony up for paid content. 

Fortunately, for publishers whose primary business isn’t news, a positive shift started waving through the marketplace when programmatic ad spend, especially in the open marketplace, finally began rebounding in May.

“It seems like death by a thousand cuts for programmatic,” noted one publisher, “but as long as it’s good for the company, it’s fine. It seems like the future of programmatic is going to recover, but it’s not going to recover as much as we need it to, to keep it as a core.” 

Now with direct deals on pause and guaranteed deals budgets moving much slower than usual, everything remains uncertain for most of the publishers who participated in the Think Tank. But still, as some publishers pointed out, recovery is going to be very industry-specific and situational.

“The first few months of the pandemic really sucked,” exclaimed one publisher. “Direct campaigns got put on hold, but now there’s definitely a rebound in programmatic. And we’re starting to see the direct campaigns that were deferred combing back. Overall, I’m pretty hopeful. I think the ad market is just looking for a reason to explode.”

Sales Teams Focus on the Big Buy

The nature of sales is greatly changing too. 

A number of sales teams are focused primarily on incremental custom buys. And customization has increasingly become a factor in winning over guaranteed spend. It’s just that publishers don’t see bookings coming in as quickly nor as early as they did pre-pandemic. 

Of course, it means much more work for ad ops—from running forecasts to invoicing and campaign creation and even the amount of work involved in interfacing with clients. Let’s not forget to include the intricacies related to reporting and billing. 

Other publishers are reporting that their sales teams are shifting their attention chiefly toward big-budget deals. With sales tied up with big deals, it’s leaving an open door to utilizing automation and self-service tools to capture smaller budgets and SMB spend. 

“Our sales team is specifically tasked with only going after larger buys, they don’t want to involve sales or planning in anything under $150K,” another publisher told us. “So we’re looking for a way to capture the occasional smaller buy. There’s a lot of programmatic options for that, but not everybody’s going to have a DSP.”

Self-service to the Rescue

With sales teams banking on landing bigger fish, self-service technology is suddenly becoming a primary tool for those publishers seeking to mitigate losses by grabbing up as much spend as they can from smaller budgets.

Self-service tools are like the Swiss Army Knife of ad tech. They offer smaller media buyers an opportunity to buy a more simplified package that doesn’t involve a lot of customizations or audience targeting. 

Pubs can provide buyers with low-friction media buying, data targeting and ad-creation tools, empowering buyers with greater campaign control and transparency, often through real-time tracking enabling them to optimize on the fly.

It’s a win-win. Advertisers get to make buys at their own discretion and publishers garner incremental revenue without having to do as much work. 

“It’s actually cost-inefficient to have a salesperson go through the traditional contract process with transactional or low-spend advertisers,” remarked one publisher, “so technologies like RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and self-service are very appealing not only for capturing incremental revenue but also providing workflow efficiency.”

For instance, one publisher found that when they implemented a self-service tool, 95% of the back-and-forth involved in the client process was immediately eliminated, freeing up ad ops’ time to optimize campaigns instead of manually entering in info. 

Even though the road ahead still appears murky, pubs who’ve decided to employ self-service tech are gradually realizing the cost-saving benefit that could catapult them out of the economic abyss toward the bright lights of recovery.

The post Pubs Extol the Upside of the Pandemic appeared first on AdMonsters.

Back in April 2019, Christine Maguire joined Tripadvisor in a newly created role to lead the company’s global media strategy and operations, and to better leverage the company’s international consumer demand and to drive revenue through new digital advertising solutions.

She came to Tripadvisor from leading the business strategy and operations at Condé Nast for four years. From her experience, she has brought a wide range of knowledge across channels such as programmatic, social and branded content.

In only a short period, she transformed the company’s approach to building value-added media solutions and data-driven advertising, helping advertisers of different verticals reach the high-value travel and dining consumer on a platform with more than 460 million monthly users.

Then COVID-19 hit. And the world of travel came undone.

It wasn’t the end of all things for Tripadvisor. But it was definitely time to change course—slightly. Fortunately, Maguire was prepared.

On August 26, in her Publisher Forum Virtual Keynote, Recovery Is a Journey, she’ll share her company’s experience with managing continuity and planning for recovery while providing the ticket to leading and rebuilding amid a pandemic.

We couldn’t wait until then. So we reached out to Maguire to learn more about how her background prepared her to fearlessly lead her team toward a revival, as well as what role first-party data will play in the future of advertising.

Lynne d Johnson: You started your career in accounting and then brought your financial experience over to the media side. What lessons in your experience most prepared you for helping Tripadvisor to weather the crisis brought on by the pandemic?

Christine Maguire: I’ve most certainly had an interesting journey in where I started my career and where I am today, but nothing can prepare anyone for what we’ve seen happen to the economy, travel landscape, and our business specifically over the last few months.

My financial background has definitely served me very well over the course of my career, from a startup like VEVO to a legacy publisher like Conde Nast. My teams and I have had an immense amount of business challenges to overcome in my past and this pandemic is by far the most extreme and sudden, but the practices are the same. My current team has had to digest that our world has changed overnight with travel completely halted. Nearly every one of our employees had to abruptly begin working from home while battling a highly contagious pandemic, and fighting for social justice.

Leadership is probably the most important aspect to lean into as the business is tested and pivoted, dramatically adjusting priorities.

In reaction to the pandemic’s impact on the economy, specifically our business, we had to immediately go into action mode to weather the uncertain storm. After being in hyper-growth mode to maximize the media business, I had to put my finance and operations hat on quickly to manage costs, reimagine a streamlined and consolidated global organization, while managing the changing dynamics in the marketplace due to the pandemic.

While that sprint of work was extremely tough, the hard work really began after our recent workforce reduction earlier this year, as we needed to rebuild our operating model, go-to-market plans, and priorities for the future of travel. I’m so proud of the team I have in place and how they have stepped up to this challenge, seeing it as a real opportunity to chart a new path for travel, Tripadvisor, and our media business.

LdJ: So it was 2019 when you joined Tripadvisor and the forecast for ad revenue was excellent for 2020. You launched a self-serve platform to attract SMBs and there were a lot of new ad products you guys had in the works to diversify revenue and start selling beyond the confines of tourism. Did you have to make a strategic pivot once we encountered COVID-19? 

CM: I was recruited to Tripadvisor to modernize the company’s media solutions and capabilities, bring in new talent and disciplines, accelerate programmatic and non-endemic revenue, and set the foundation for long-term success. Over the course of 2019, I led a team that did just that, which was not an easy feat for a large, mature business. We went through reorganizations, launched over 10 new products and solutions, grew programmatic revenue triple digits year-over-year, integrated new disciplines, and began to take our solutions to non-tourism clients and agencies.  In Q1, we were seeing the fruits of our labor, bookings 25% up year-over-year, the highest growth the company had seen in a few years.

Then COVID-19 hit us hard in early March where all the revenue began to either get paused, canceled or pushed out to future quarters.  While we had begun to make amazing progress in the non-tourism space, the majority of our revenue share is still travel. And travel, hospitality, and leisure industries have been the most challenged with hotels at near 100% vacancy, planes grounded, and restaurants empty.  We immediately shifted focus to support our partners through these uncertain and unparalleled times.

Large brand-safe platforms, like Tripadvisor, with high-intent audiences and an immense amount of first-party data, will be the future. 

I’m extremely proud of my team and my colleagues across the broader company in the way we were able to rally and pivot our focus to create new initiatives and programs for our partners, first to give them insights during a time of chaos and second, advising them how to build back better as we all planned together for a new tourism future.

For example, we began immediate support for our clients who were desperate for analytics and insights about the hospitality and travel industry during a time of significant decline, helping them understand consumer demand and traveler behavior patterns. We instituted weekly global webinars called COVID-19 Insights Series—to share our data and insights with a human-first, consultative approach with our clients, all of this during a time where we were all working from home and separated. But despite being apart, it was truly amazing to see this team come together.

LdJ: What role do you think data will play in the future of advertising, especially as the third-party cookie nears its final days?

CM: Large brand-safe platforms, like Tripadvisor, with high-intent audiences and an immense amount of first-party data, will be the future.  Google phasing out third-party cookies will increase the importance and the reliance on first-party cookies.

Fortunately, this is a great advantage we bring to the table as we have been focused on growing our members for the past few years, and with that comes a wealth of data.

We currently have over 100 million members and growing which puts us at an advantage against the non-walled gardens due to the sheer scale. We also built a homegrown audience manager which enables real-time targeting and creates a compliant environment with more efficient return on investment for advertisers.

LdJ: We don’t see many females in a role like yours. What advice would you give to other women who have executive or C-suite aspirations within digital media and advertising? Did you have allies or mentors who helped you along the way?

CM: I’m a first-generation Irish American, from a working-class family, and the first person in my immediate family to enter corporate America. I definitely pay tribute to my upbringing for my work ethic and determination, which has played a big role in my success.

I also contribute a lot of my success to the grind, actually doing the job before I had it, to the point where I’ll admit to struggling to balance professional success I sought with personal fulfillment. It is a constant work-in-progress for me and probably one of my biggest struggles currently during this pandemic, working within a consolidated organization, and the consistent volatility in the travel and media landscape.

I have too many phenomenal leaders, mentors, and allies to name but they have been instrumental in helping me find ways to strike that balance. When they give me guidance, it typically doesn’t have anything to do with work but advice and ways to hold myself accountable for prioritizing the personal goals I have, as much as my professional ones.

One piece of work advice I received a long time ago from my former boss, mentor, and friend was to make big promises, and keep them!  I live by that in everything I do, which has allowed me to gain a lot of trust and credibility in all the roles I’ve held.

When interviewing at Tripadvisor, global sales was part of the remit which I hadn’t led before. When contemplating if it was something I could succeed in, my CRO mentors gave me so much confidence, reminding me that failure is not an option for me and the experience and skills I have are the tough part—sales leadership is about putting it to work.

While mentors and allies are a very important part in how I continue to grow, the opposing position usually fuels me to new levels as well. If I’m told I can’t or shouldn’t be doing something, you better believe I will get it done!

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Well, what an interesting time for fast-rising TikTok to introduce a self-serve advertising platform aimed at meeting the demands of SMBs. In addition to the platform’s now-famous creative capabilities, SMBs will get advanced targeting and flexible budgeting allowing for campaign pausing.

I caught up with the TikTok collective to learn more about the unique features of the platform including targeting; understand the purpose of its new Business Accounts; and get the low-down on TikTok’s bold offer of $100 million in advertising credits to help SMBs in their pandemic rebuilding efforts.

Sadly, I’m an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy, so we conducted the interview by email and I’m presenting it as an article rather than a mind-blowing, effects-laden short video with a hoppin’ soundtrack. Also, this is what happened when I tried to use TikTok:

@gavinjdunawayTikTok has self-serve platform♬ Cars – Gary Numan

TikTok is like SnapChat and those things disappear, right? Asking for a friend.

GAVIN DUNAWAY: Why does TikTok think this a good moment to cater to the small- and medium-sized business market?

TIKTOK: Over the past year, we’ve seen larger brands see great success engaging with the TikTok community. With the right tools in place to make advertising easier and more efficient on TikTok, we’re excited to open these opportunities to small business

SMBs are the lifeblood of our communities, and where we’re placing our support. This is an important time in our communities and with small businesses coming out of COVID, we want to be there to help them rebuild.

GD: TikTok doesn’t seem as oriented toward direct-response/costumer-acquisition messaging as other social networks; what’s the appeal then for SMB advertisers?

TT: The introduction of new tools and features designed for small businesses will make it easier to get started, such as fast setup, flexible business, and creative tools to easily design engaging creatives. SMBs require a different approach. Our new self-serve platform will help them get started and manage their entire campaigns from start to finish—creative to execution

An added benefit is they manage their campaigns on their own time and we’ve designed these new tools to make it as easy as possible to get up and running on the TikTok platform.

GD: What targeting aspects do you think will be most valuable to SMBs?

TT: We are providing a series of optimized and intelligent targeting methods that enables businesses to get discovered by new, engaged audiences. Advertisers can customize their preferred target audiences with demographic, device and other options.

GD: TikTok is also introducing “Business Accounts” that will provide additional insight into ad performance and user engagement—Could you give us an idea (maybe an example) of what that might entail?

TT: Business Accounts will have access to an overview and insights on analytics like weekly and monthly views, follower growth, and trending videos. Additionally, Business Accounts can display on their profile pages a website link and a one-click “contact via email” button, enhancing direct connections with audience. We will continue exploring ways to enhance product experience and bring new features and value to our partners.

GD: The $100 million ad-credit giveaway in your “Back to Business” program is pretty bold—can you give us a better idea of how it works? Is there a minimum amount of spend or matching?

TT: Small businesses are the lifeblood of our community, and we want to be there with them and to provide support as they weather these challenging times. TikTok’s Back-to-Business is available globally, and small businesses can apply for the credit and get started by visiting https://www.tiktok.com/business/en.

We are offering this program to small and medium-sized businesses around the world. This includes both new advertisers to TikTok for Business and those who already have an active account.

We are supporting eligible SMB advertisers in two ways:

• Eligible advertisers can claim a one-time free ad credit worth $300 USD to be used by December 31, 2020;
• Any additional spending will be matched 1-to-1 with free ad credit, up to 2,000 USD per business.

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