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.

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.

As someone who values human relationships in advertising, Janes finds that the current state of trading inventory is disturbingly devoid of people. He wants to change that and sees self-service as a path forward. After all, digital technologies have ushered in an era of self-service everything … Why not digital ad sales?

Janes is a veteran in ad tech. Along with his Head of Product role at AdButler, he is a member of the Acceptable Ads Committee and multiple IAB Councils. Recently, he sat down with AdMonsters to talk about the importance of direct relationships between publishers and buyers and how to automate that to scale.

AdMonsters: In a LinkedIn post you said, “Shoo programmatic, I don’t like you.” Are you really anti-programmatic? What turned you off of this industry, darling?

RJ: It’s interesting. I do see some value in programmatic in certain instances. But on the whole, we work with a lot of publishers and see how often they run into discrepancies. A lot can go wrong with programmatic, resolving those issues is time-consuming and costly. 

And speaking of costs, I’m not sure what the current numbers are, but at one point it was reported that $.50 out of every dollar paid for inventory was taken by some middle-tech company. 

As a result, we see a growing number of publishers saying they want to work with brands and agencies directly. History tends to repeat itself. Ad tech is no different.

AdMonsters: The whole I/O process was intense and highly manual. I remember all the articles that described how many different steps were involved. Do you see that returning?

RJ: I don’t think we’ll go back to those days. There are so many automated ways of processing an I/O now. Additionally, programmatic is a loose term. Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) and Private Marketplaces (PMPs) are technically programmatic, but they’re also direct deals and direct relationships between a publisher and an ad buyer. I wouldn’t group them in the same category as open market programmatic.  

PG deals work really, really well, as Bloomberg News proves.

AdMonsters: Is your advice to publishers to eschew the open market programmatic altogether?

RJ: If it’s possible, but it isn’t always possible. Small to mid-sized publishers don’t have sales teams or the threshold to support programmatic direct deals, so open programmatic is their only option to sell advertising.

But if a publisher has a sales team, or the ability to implement a self-service dashboard, I think that’s a better way to go. Everything these days is self-service, from booking a hotel room to ordering food. There’s no reason why buying ads on a website can’t be the same way, even for smaller publishers.

In fact, many companies offer this type of dashboard, allowing advertisers to purchase ads using a credit card. Buyers never need to speak with a human. It’s not an open auction, but it’s still automated. 

There’s no getting around programmatic for big publishers because advertisers want to spend their money through a DSP. This is where curated deals come into play.

AdMonsters: What is the advertiser workflow process for the self-service dashboard?

RJ: It varies somewhat from provider to provider. AdButler is an ad server for publishers, and we have a feature that allows publishers to create a dashboard, which in turn lets advertisers sign up, buy inventory directly and pay with a credit card. The buyer uploads the creative, which goes through an approval flow. It also offers a design tool to build a unit that goes live on the site. The benefit is that they never need to talk to somebody on the sales team. 

DanAds offers something similar, except that self-service is their entire business model. AdVendio offers it as well.

AdMonsters: That sounds great if a buyer wants to buy advertising on a handful of publications. What if that buyer wants to spend across dozens or even hundreds of sites?

RJ: That’s the downside. With a DSP the buyer indicates how much to spend, and the DSP goes ahead and spends that money across many different sites. With the self-service model, the buyer must indicate how much they want to spend with each site. Unlike the open auction, buyers know exactly which sites their ads are run on. But they also get more bang for their buck working directly with the publisher. For instance, they can get more nuanced targeting.

From my point of view, we’ve taken relationships and networking out of ad tech and replaced them with computers. I personally think relationships can have a bigger payoff, and I think Bloomberg News has proven it. Since they exited the open markets, they’ve seen a 20% in CPMs.

AdMonsters: This sounds exactly like the retail media market.

RJ: Exactly! Something like 25% of all ad revenue will be spent on retail media, and it’s exactly the same premise. The retailer has an audience, and they can monetize it with a little more nuance for the advertiser. 

The agency will still play an important role in retail media and self-service buying for the large buyer. The buyers tell their agencies how much they want to spend and the audiences they want to reach, and the agencies can execute those buys via dashboards with publishers or retailers. What’s key is the direct relationship is intact; the agency works directly with the retailer or publisher and knows precisely what they’re getting.

Another topic that’s hot right now is hyper-local media. There are companies in the U.S. that work with a lot of local publications, and they sell to local businesses, such as restaurants and mom-and-pop stores. When consumers visit a local publisher, they want to see ads from businesses in their area, and hyper-local media meets that need.

AdMonsters: A benefit to open programmatic is that it allows advertisers to scale their campaigns quickly. Can self-service scale in the same way?

RJ: In many ways, self-service works just like a DSP. Take Expedia or Rogers Media here in Canada. Unless buyers have big budgets, Rogers will direct them to self-service. The buyers will log in, upload their creatives, select their audience, etc. It’s the same experience as using a DSP, except that the publisher is in control. There are far fewer companies in the middle.

But not every brand is directed to self-service. If you’re a brand with, say a $500K budget, large publishers will assign a sales rep and maintain a hands-on relationship with the buyer. All others, they’ll direct to their self-service model.

AdMonsters: Do you envision a future where large publishers, like CNN or USA Today, sell 100% of their inventory directly, through a combination of direct deals, programmatic guaranteed and PMPs, and the self-service models you advocate?

RJ: Absolutely. Bloomberg News isn’t as big as CNN, but it has proven that it is possible to do away with open market auctions. They’re a great case study.

Cutting out extraneous intermediaries means the publisher keeps a more significant chunk of the CPMs their inventory earns. For advertisers, it means more of their budgets are spent on actual inventory. 

AdMonsters: Presumably, the targeting data is more reliable as well.

RJ: Yes, any data is more reliable because the advertiser isn’t relying on a third party to say this user is a mom or in the market for a new mortgage. The data is the publisher’s first-party data, so it will perform better. The results data is also more reliable because the publisher can send log-level details to the buyer or agency to incorporate into whichever business intelligence tool they use.

AdMonsters: So what’s old is new again?

RJ: Exactly. I recently read about a wind-powered cargo ship. It’s high-tech because it uses wind turbines to power it across the ocean. But that’s just a new twist on an old concept of using sails to propel a ship to its destination. Mark my words: that is ad tech.

The post The Other Automated Advertising: A Q&A with AdButler’s Rob Janes appeared first on AdMonsters.

The pubs that joined us were what I would classify as mid-sized publishers–their operations teams are relatively small.

It was interesting to learn how the past few months went for publishers and a few common themes that emerged.

First, for many, it was an opportunity for their departments and companies to get organized. When business is slow, or at a full stop, it is the perfect time to reorganize and perhaps work on those projects one can never seem to get to.

For one publisher, the fact that sales wasn’t out selling was a double-edged sword. He recounted how idle salespeople started pulling reports and asking questions that they normally don’t ask.

“How does Google Ad Manager decide which creative to serve?” “How many browsers are there?” “How does frequency capping actually work?” Amazing to have an engaged sales team wanting to learn more. That is, until they start to become junior analysts and want to optimize and optimize and optimize…

It was also clear that the agencies these publishers worked with had used their Q2 and Q3 to think more about their media buys. As business comes back, “custom” is the new standard deal. Publishers are offering more custom packages and buyers are asking for more custom programs.

Bernd Bube, CEO of ADvendio shared some of the trends ADvendio is seeing with their clients and across the marketplace: “Programmatic brings great efficiencies, but there is still a need for sales and a need for a workflow to properly track and deliver on programmatic deals.

In other words in our industry, each step toward automation adds two manual steps to the process.

We talked as a group about the challenges of having a small team and workflow. All heads nodded in agreement when the struggle of creative collection and reporting came up.

“Build it and they will come” isn’t going to work for many publishers.

This led us to a discussion about self serve. Most of the publishers had attempted self serve in the past without much success. One commented that the deals that come in from self serve would sometimes get lost in the shuffle–if no one touches it, who gives it much mind?

The other was a lack of usage on the part of the buy-side. Agencies have grown accustomed to a certain level of service, even if all that effort isn’t needed.

It was at this point where something became clear to me. “Build it and they will come” isn’t going to work for many publishers. Yes, you want that storefront open for someone to buy on their own. But if you’re looking for real revenue gains, self-serve is something you have to sell.

Think about it. Those salespeople who started to actually pull their own reports can actually use the self-serve portal to do it themselves with the client. They can teach the client in the process how to do it. Incremental spend? Let’s do it together (sales and buyer) through the self-serve tools. Need a report? Yes, I can pull it for you, Miss Agency Person, but know the reports are always available to you. 

With that effort, you might just develop a habit and with it, operational efficiency. Operations people should be focused on the custom pieces that everyone wants now. Let’s make the standard stuff flow through quicker.

The post You Gotta Sell Self-Serve 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.

Following in the footsteps of media giants like Google and Facebook, many publishers are deploying self-service solutions that enable them to provide clients with low-friction media buying, data targeting and ad-creation tools, providing buyers with greater campaign control and transparency, often through real-time tracking allowing them to optimize on the fly.

There’s also the added advantage of automating repetitive ad operations tasks—like trafficking—freeing up hundreds of hours of manual labor all while improving productivity and efficiency.

In their recent Spotlight Session at PubForum Santa Monica, Peo Persson, Co-Founder and CPO, DanAds, along with Lisen Zethraeus, CMO, guided attendees through the latest trends within Self-Service Ad Operations and showcased how it could make a publisher’s lives a little easier. I caught up with them after their session to dig a little deeper into the information they shared.

Lynne d Johnson: You shared that self-service is really trending right now—Spotify, Hulu and Hearst are all doing it. What are some of the benefits for publishers? 

Peo Persson: In order to maximize the collective potential from direct bookings or direct programmatic bookings, publishers need to streamline their workflow into a fully automated one. 

Using self-service software benefits publishers to be profitable even from small advertisement budgets. We know from our data and analytics that self-service reduces costs for publishers, saving Ad Ops time by up to 90% per order while increasing operational control. Ad Ops can focus more on optimizing ongoing campaigns instead of punching in orders, rewinging creatives and sending reports.

LdJ: We recently saw Tik Tok and Walmart launch self-service ad platforms, receiving marketer backlash for lacking some audience data—negatively impacting targeting. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be, is it? In your presentation, you said, “Data is King.” Can you explain?

PP: In today’s media landscape, we believe publishers and brands must take control of their most valuable assets—data. With self-service, publishers take control of the essential part of the value chain—ad buyers. If we top that with a self-service platform, where the publisher gets full control and ownership of data related to every transaction, we believe the chance of surviving and even thriving, in the future media landscape is much higher.

Our state of mind and software helps publishers sell their first-party data in a controlled way, and we’ve just launched a feature where buyers can utilize their first-party data directly in the self-service platform through our collaboration with LiveRamp.

LdJ: We’re always hearing how automation frees up ad ops time on low-level tasks to open up more time for high-value work. How much time are we really talking about saving? 

PP: Ad ops spends much time manually entering campaign information into Ad Servers, CRM, Billing, and Order management systems. Due to time constraints, not all data is entered into all systems, which would be beneficial for optimization and reporting. The workload today for ad ops is not helpful for publishers, they need to support sales with details in regards to products and combinations of possible placements, and price to sell. 

They need to check and approve all creatives, support sales with information in regards to inventory availability, support sales with change requests on running orders, support sales with live proof and need to support sales with statistics and custom reports. Working with self-service software, all this manul time will be reduced by up to 90%.

 LdJ: How have some of your clients transformed their advertising operations with self-service?

PP: Philips had a big pain point as a brand doing both their own marketing and promoting partners. Their own Pregnancy+ app (25 million users) didn’t have a flexible way to manage advertising content, making it impossible to effectively work with marketing campaigns in multiple markets.

With self-service, Philips allows marketers to create targeted campaigns and manage results and performance, enabling Philips to eliminate fees to agencies, partnerships and affiliates as well as saving costs on direct sales. Self-service helps their external partners to generate revenue opportunities and cost savings with action-driven sponsored placements on their Health & Parenting platforms.

In just one year, working with us, more than 2,400 ad campaigns were created by Philips marketers globally, cost-savings of $5 million achieved, and more than 2600% increase in revenue.

And with our first client Shazam, using GAM for Ad server and our solution for self-service for music label clients, they saved their music sales team and ad ops about 85% workload. 

LdJ: What should a successful relationship with a client look like once a publisher launches a self-service solution?

PP: Having a good setup in place for 1st-and-2nd line support is a great way to create a successful relationship between publisher and client, as it gives your clients confidence that they’re able to receive support if they require it. Showing that you are available to help when they need you builds a good level of trust between publisher and advertiser.

Build scalable ways to communicate with your clients so they feel connected with you as the publisher throughout their user experience. Consider building up email marketing schedules, webinar-style group events for training and in some cases, personalized sendouts to specific advertisers for case studies and other types of feedback.

All in all, if your platform is built to suit your client’s needs and if you show them that you are there to support them if they require it, you will have built a streamlined and efficient self-service system that will allow you to scale your advertising sales enormously.

Visit DanAds to download their presentation from PubForum Santa Monica. 

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