The digital media and ad tech industry is in a unique position right now, as next year will bring about true privacy changes impacting core business models. Industry experts are left with many unknowns, including the question of whether a recession might still be in their rearview mirrors, tailing right behind them. 

At PubForum New Orleans, AdMonsters gathered a group of digital media executives for a roundtable discussion about the uncertainties facing the industry and how to navigate the winding landscape. Identity solutions and privacy are top priorities for many publishers as the third-party cookie begins to phase out.

Q4 Qualms With a Dose of Cookieless Malaise

Since 2018, the most prevalent topic in digital media and ad tech has been what will happen when the nail finally hits the coffin of the third-party tracking cookie. Now, with the 2024 phase-out timeline on the books, things are getting real. Publishers are no longer simply talking about solutions, but putting real strategies and testing in place to figure out the future of addressability at scale.

One publisher mentioned that their company had recently been acquired, leading to expansion of their business and subsequent new questions about how to go forward in a cookieless world. They are working diligently to test solutions across multiple brands so they can be ready when the time comes. 

But not every publisher is working with the same resources necessary to solve for the cookieless future. One industry professional acknowledged that their team is too small to have a whole department devoted to figuring out the path forward, and said they were making a plan to tackle this challenge as their number one goal going into Q4. 

Another attendee explained that they were working with a team to create first-party datasets. However, they are in a niche industry where they are confident about who visits their website. A redesign this year cut this company’s inventory significantly. 

“We’re working with a really high sell-through rate for direct sales, which leaves little for programmatic revenue. We’re also increasing CPMs and working with our SSPs to monetize as much as we can with our redesign and lack of ads; we’re exploring bringing some ad slots back while keeping the user experience positive,” they explained. 

While the immediate concern for publishers is achieving Q4 goals, the threat of the cookieless future remains a thorn in their side. Defining a first-party data strategy leads the list for surviving the revenue hits that are sure to come. Publishers are rethinking how they present their value exchange to users to increase the likelihood of collecting more declared data. 

For example, a publisher might incentivize users to provide data through tokens or rewards to grow first-party assets over time. This way, publishers can build out audience cohorts and intent-based targeting strategies that help buyers engage with the right audiences in more meaningful and relevant ways.   

How the Privacy Sandbox Could Change the Game

We can’t talk about the end of third-party cookies without talking about the Privacy Sandbox, as they are two sides of the same coin.

“We’ll be testing more of the privacy solutions and figuring out from a programmatic perspective what works best for us and how we can continue to see the CPMs that we’re used to,” explained one publisher. They noted they are also diversifying their business model outside of their standard media business. Revenue diversification, for some, will be the only way to survive the coming storm.

Another participant predicted that the Privacy Sandbox would negatively impact their company’s revenue. “We are testing a lot more with our partners on Topics API. However, we are pushing the agenda on protected API as much as we can with as many groups as possible working closely with the CMA on this as well. This is an overwhelming fear we’re working on at the same time,” they added.

In early testing, Chrome’s interest-based Topics API showed promising results, but publishers are still worried they won’t meet their CPM goals.

User Experience is Paramount

Regardless of the challenging privacy landscape, ensuring the user experience remains seamless regardless of what is going on behind the scenes is critical. Advertisers are aware that too many ads can negatively affect an individual’s experience online, which can ultimately decrease revenue. 

The balance between ads and experience is imperative to achieving success. Noted a publisher in attendance, they are going through a website redesign and are working on the timing of building rapport with end users and when to re-incorporate ads in a way that isn’t annoying. 

Another attendee mentioned they keep some of their content behind a paywall where users have to exchange an email address to proceed with receiving free content, albeit still with ads. The publisher is still working to finetune the user experience overall.

Measuring outcomes beyond just clicks and conversions can help optimize the user experience. For some publishers, metrics like session RPM are becoming more important alongside traditional CPM metrics. As well, time spent on site and attention are also helping publishers to better understand how ads are performing.

One publisher admitted they had tried to incorporate more ads on their site, including exit ads, but the overall experience put users off so much that the company lost revenue. “We saw troves of traffic go away. It became really important to look at revenue not from an impression basis but by revenue per session and try to coax users into deeper sessions. Getting the user to stay on page longer is more valuable than having more ads on the page,” they shared. 

This publisher explained they saw these changes pre-COVID and acknowledged business is different now. However, they asserted that now that ad spend is in a bit of a recession it is the best time to make new investments to prepare for when ad spend ratchets back up.

Remaining Profitable in the Face of Uncertainty 

Growing revenue was a big part of the discussion, as companies look to diversify where their money is coming from. Others said they don’t think revenue from ads will disappear, but their goal is to grow the entire revenue pie. 

“We are leaning into other revenue streams, but I don’t think it’s at all leaning away from advertising. We are still expecting that to grow, and want other pieces of the pie to get bigger as well,” noted one industry expert. Revenue diversification into areas like subscriptions, commerce, and events is becoming increasingly important for many publishers. 

Some publishers said they are offering subscription services to boost their bottom line. However, one publisher talked about the realities of subscription fatigue, noting that due to rising costs, consumers are becoming more diligent about canceling subscriptions they deem unnecessary. Others even talked about exploring data marketplaces or selling segments of their first-party data to non-competitors, recognizing that privacy concerns may limit those aspirations.

The industry is in flux, and while no one has a crystal ball, it seems clear that diversifying revenue streams and capitalizing on first-party data solutions will be crucial to achieving growth in 2024 and beyond. 

The post Publishers Share Plans for the Many Unknowns of a Cookieless Landscape appeared first on AdMonsters.

So how is Q3? And what do you think will happen for Q4? Is it as bad as the media is making it out to be?

Silence permeated the room for a little while longer, most likely as the publishers sat with the implications of the question. As the news predicted, Q3 marked a rough patch for many publishers in the room.

Many Think Tank attendees noted that Q3 was brutal and that Q4 would follow the same pattern. The term ad recession has been thrown around ad tech circles quite a bit this year, but whether that is true or not, the publishers in the room all felt the effects of the ad spend slowdown.

They noted that news sites were hit particularly hard. Yet, the common consensus was that thriving through this tough period depends on how you reach your audience. Per the advice touted through many industry changes this year, reaching consumers and understanding their needs is of utmost importance.

Seller Defined Audiences: Sellers Take the Lead

From there, the conversation transitioned into a discussion about adequately using data once it is collected. For instance, some needed help classifying a consumer and determining the scale at which they reach eligible consumers.

For example, one attendee talked about how some publishers might have the data to understand that one reader visits four pages a month of niche-related content. Still, they need to segment that data to package those types of audiences for advertisers. Where does that leave the accuracy for audience taxonomy and scale? How can the buy side know that the data they recieve is worthwhile?

One publisher asked, “Have you looked at the accuracy of the data categorizations? We’ve been looking into that, and they’re consistently pretty wrong with how they categorize our content.”

In response, a revenue officer gave his perspective from the supply side. They postured that suppliers need to make the data packages they sell appetizing for buyers.

“Either that or we sit around waiting for buyers to define how this is going to work,” said the revenue professional. “They’re going to pick the easiest thing for them. Not the best thing for us. So I think we need to make something easy for them that is also good for us. Seller defined audiences could be that because it allows us to add more value to the open market. But the trust factor has to be there.”

This idea rests on the need for collaboration. Specifically, a partnership between the publisher and the exchanges so that each of their needs are met. It will be beneficial for both parties and the consumer.

“The exchange steps in on behalf of the publisher to also say that the data is good,” said the revenue officer. “Don’t make the publisher and each individual website prove to the buy side that our data is good enough. Have an SSP back it.”

For this to work, there needs to be stronger collaboration between publishers and exchanges. SSPs need to evolve to better serve the new needs of the publisher in the privacy-first world, and it’s time for publishers to lead the charge.

Contextual Targeting: Understanding Consumers’ Interest

How do you prove that the data is good enough?

One attendee asserted they believed contextual targeting was the way to go. While they emphasized that this was not his business’ first strategy, they did praise its usefulness.

For instance, if a consumer clicks on an article about the best fishing rod to buy, you already know what the user is interested in. You don’t need to find them three or four times before sending their data through the bid stream because we already have context about the consumers’ desires.

“I’m a huge fan of contextual but there’s a battle we have to fight to get the buyers interested again,” said the publisher. “You have SSPs on some publisher sites that set one ID category that bid requests across every piece of inventory. One single category for every page. We have other SSPs that will set three different page-level values and they’re accurate. We as publishers need to push on the SSPs to accurately and better define the pages. As publishers, we need to push on more accurate signals and the bid requests that are available on every page for you. That’s my hope.”

The revenue officer responded: “Were you given the bid log for requests that the SSP is then sending on from your inventory, or is that what they saw from you on the inbound?”

According to the publisher, you only get access to what the SSP sends outbound if you ask for it. If you don’t, you won’t see what is sent to the DSP to understand why a specific ID category was chosen.

“The exchange is doing themselves a disservice by having two separate teams on inbound and outbound, like supply and demand,” said the revenue officer. “For the publisher to be the most effective, we should have visibility all the way up to the DSP so that we can pre-populate with as much information as possible and not rely on the SSP for that part of it.”

The earnestness relies on collaboration from all sides of the supply chain — the publisher, the exchange, and accurate consumer data flowing through the pipes. The only way to work out system kinks is to understand the issues on all sides and work together to fix them. The publisher and exchange aspect of the bid stream is only a small part of the entire ecosystem, but this mindset of collaboration is key to thriving through the ad spend slowdown.

The post Publishers Prove Resilient Through Industry Changes appeared first on AdMonsters.

Reflections on 2022 and Holidays Ahead As we wrap up 2022, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on the year as an AdMonsters community.    It’s the time of year when many of us will pause and take stock. Personally, I like to evaluate the things in my life that move me forward, expand my horizons, or simply bring me joy. To me, that is the heart of professional education that AdMonsters strives to create: content that propels your career forward, connections that expand your professional circle, and (for all our event-goers), a good dose of actual fun!    Thank you for joining the conversation in 2022 in a variety of virtual and live learning events (and take a look back on our Best of AdMonsters series for a full rewind of 2022):  AdMonsters will be back in 2023 with more events, webinars, playbooks, awards, and networking opportunities to champion the mission-critical importance of Ad Ops and Revenue Operations within the media organization, and to bring people together for that purpose.   Here’s to you. Here’s to your work. Here’s to growth. And here’s to community!  We hope to get stronger and smarter together in 2023 and beyond.    Best wishes and happy holidays!  Lynne d Johnson Content Director

The post Take a Look Back on 2022 With Us appeared first on AdMonsters.

In a recent Think Tank roundtable discussion hosted by EX.CO at Publisher Forum Montreal, a group of revenue, product, and ad ops professionals came together and discussed what they believe to be some of the biggest issues facing the industry today.

With an eye toward developing a well-rounded revenue strategy, publishers are seriously thinking about how content and technology provide them with the necessary building blocks to provide a great user experience that will also bring in more advertising dollars. It’s all about putting users first and building better collaboration across the aisles.

Page Real Estate: UX vs Revenue

To kick off the discussion, Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech, posed a query about how to properly maneuver page real estate.

“So my thought around this is that ultimately page real estate is everything right?” asked Beeler. “And it needs to serve the user or it needs to serve our revenue strategy. It really does both, but who’s involved in those decisions?”

Everyone was in agreement that Ad Ops tends to make those decisions despite their main responsibility of serving ads. In addition, the publishers in the room considered the ways Google’s Core Web Vitals could impact page real estate and how tough it is to properly consider the best page layout that balances UX and significant revenue growth.

“From my point of view, if we’re talking about real estate on a web page for us to run ads, the real estate is limited,” explained one of the publishers. “For us, self-promotion of our own different products is something that we have to take into account because obviously, we’re pulling away the opportunity for us to run a different ad from another brand. So there’s a cost associated with it. And we have to internalize and think about what that cost is today versus if we don’t push that product. We consider where we are with our revenue goals.

But also, we’re like, look, we really believe in X, Y, or Z, and we know that we’re going to take a little bit of a financial hit right now to be able to push products that we really believe in down the road.”

“Are companies diversified enough to take a revenue hit?” pondered a programmatic professional. From their perspective, most companies are not allowed to experiment as much as they would like to because they are worried about staying afloat. A majority of the publishers agreed with that sentiment.

“Earlier, they were talking about testing, and unfortunately, you know, I’m not able to test in Q4. We tested during Q3 to make sure everything in Q4 is set up and optimized. If you do some testing in Q4 and you mess up, you don’t have a job.”

Collaboration is Vital 

The conversation evolved into a much larger discussion after one publisher posed a question about Core Web Vitals.

“I run product and technology and Core Web Vitals hit our brand really hard,” said a product executive. “It created a moment of urgency that allowed my team to say to our ad and rev ops teams, this is too much. When the traffic goes away, my money goes away and you work really hard for attention. I’ve always been curious to know what other companies are doing.”

There are usually two ways to act in times of discord. The first is to act as enemies and move forward with your own agenda. The other is to work in one accord and see how everyone’s goals can be met. The publishers thought the latter was a better choice.

“I like this shift in the industry. In general, it has made it essential for products and ops to talk with each other,” said another publisher. “I actually have a meeting right after this. There is a week that we have now where the head of product, our head of SEO, our publisher and our COO all get in one room. They look at the numbers, discuss what can wait for bids in the queue and more. But there is now more collaboration than before for people to get together on the same page. Confrontation does not work and collaboration is the goal.”

“For the first time in my career, I actually have a relationship with the ops team,” added the programmatic professional. “I actually feel cohesive when we sit and we talk. They actually recommended a product that programmatic loves, and I was like, wow, like you guys are recommending something that I will come to the table with.

We recently worked on a redesign of one of our pages together in Q2.  Immediately, we saw the effects on the revenue. It literally dropped by almost 75% because they’ve removed a lot of ads on the page. However, we are now seeing a rebound with SEO. They made a conscious choice to take the revenue hit back in Q2 with the hope of seeing it rebound by the end of the year. For me, it highlighted the benefits of having a healthy relationship between revenue and ops.”

There’s a lot of work ahead for the ad tech industry as it figures out new ways of navigating privacy regulations and massive technology updates. Without a doubt, the user experience will need to be considered more thoughtfully, especially for publishers looking to thrive through the decrease in ad spend.  To keep them afloat, it will also require collabortion, not just within an individual media organization but across the entire ecosystem.

The post In an Ever-Changing Advertising Ecosystem, Collaboration Is Key to Staying Afloat appeared first on AdMonsters.

The challenges are great, and in a recent Think Tank hosted by Celtra, publishers came together and discussed their individual challenges and how to rectify them.

First-party Data and Letting Go

“We sit on a wealth of first-party data, and quite a high percentage of our ad revenue is data enabled,” said one publisher.

“Targeting is heavily utilized. In terms of the intersection of data with creative, there are places where we’ve been really strong and done a really great job, and we’ve had to sort of prioritize what we focus on. We have really strong first-party multicultural data, and we know that our advertisers really needed some guidance about what is the right way to message these audiences: ‘When should I deliver an ad in Spanish versus English? When should I have cultural nuances or words inserted that show the audience that I’m aware of who they are, and they’re more receptive to the message.’ So I would say multicultural is a place where we focused because we saw that there’s a huge opportunity.”

Letting go is hard in all aspects of life; in love, in death, and in business. More times than not, it’s the right call.

“It’s okay, to throw things away,” added another publisher. “I think a lot of times we forget that. It’s fine if you tried a product and you learned from it and now you don’t want to use it, you want to sunset it or phase it out. And I think sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘well, we put so much work into this, so now we have to keep doing it because we spent all this time and money and resources doing it.’ But then you end up supporting too many things and maintaining too many things.

We did that recently. We phased out a pretty big product that just never worked the way we wanted it to work. It was like, okay, we tried and we tried, and it was too hard and too expensive to make it better. And it was disappointing but it was the right move.”

Template Is Not a Bad Word

Everyone wants to feel special, have that custom, unique experience, whether it’s as an individual or a business looking for that “wow” factor. Advertisers can still have that wow factor with the use of templates on the back-end. Templates work, for starters, and they are also easy to set up and ease the burden on an already stretched-thin ad ops department. 

“We try and make sure that the client understands that even though it’s a template,  it’s going to meet their KPIs,” said one attendee. We try to make these templates as simple as possible for clients. And, it’s repeatable. The agency loves it because for some of our units, it’s three assets, video and image and maybe a poster thumbnail and the pixels. And then we can just crank that out. If agencies want to rotate five different titles or five different versions of creative for the same unit, depending on it, we’ll throw it in for them, because it’s so simple to do, and they know exactly what they’re giving us every time.”

“Template can almost be considered a bad word from a sales perspective, because sales wants to sell customized experiences,” added another participant. “Advertisers want to want it to feel custom, want it to feel special.

But on the back end, you can use a template, and the output can still look and feel like it is custom for that advertiser.”

The post Things That Keep Publishers up at Night appeared first on AdMonsters.

In a recent AdMonsters Think Tank hosted by Celtra, publishers shared how they define success, upgrades made through the years, and what works best.

Countless creative options sound great on paper, but when an advertiser is faced with 15, 20, even 30 ad options, choosing what’s best can be overwhelming. 

Less Is More

“We went through this ad product cleanup exercise where we sort of doubled down on what we say is ‘less is more,’” said one publisher. “We’re trying to shift away from standard IAB to more high impact. We adopted a portfolio of close to 30 different formats that we offer, which is too much, to be honest. So the challenge is trying to strike that balance between which ones actually work, and which ones are being well received by clients.”

“And the sellers understand because that’s part of the problem; if you have too much, they get lost,” continued the publisher. “We measure success around interaction, hovers, view time, watch time, time spent, any of those types of stories that we can tell with the formats is what we strive for.”

Another publisher noted the conundrum of making money on the publisher side but ensuring it hits KPIs on the client side. 

“It may be a great ad product from the publisher point of view,” they said. “It sells. It makes a lot of money. But on the flip side, is it doing what it needs to do from the buyer’s KPI? And if their [advertiser’s] goal is bottom of the funnel, maybe it’s not doing what it should do. So how do you judge? I make money and then it’s also good for them because it meets their KPI.”

Programmatic, Programmatic, Programmatic

It may not be sexy, but it brings home the bacon. It’s not automated, it’s not industry standard, it makes life challenging for programmatic teams, but it’s a profitable requirement for publishers.

“We want our advertisers to have a destination, for it to feel natural, but it makes my team’s job harder, as programmatic is not necessarily industry standard,” one publisher said. “But at the end of the day, the programmatic team is driving the bulk of the revenue. And so no matter how much they don’t like it and it doesn’t fit the future vision, it’s a necessity.”

Programmatic creative is having a renaissance of sorts, with more dynamic options available for advertisers. 

“It [creative within programmatic] took a step back initially because it had less features and functionality available for rich media,” chimed one publisher. “We’re starting to climb back out of that. We’re starting to see a lot more rich media being transacted programmatically. And there are many publishers where anywhere between 50 to 100 percent of their revenue comes through programmatic. Now we’re always trying to be thought leaders of what is the next step that we can do within programmatic.”

“There is going to be an evolution of rich media within programmatic,” remarked another publisher.

Less is more seemed to be the resounding response regarding ad product strategy given that so many things must work together harmoniously to succeed and remain seamless.

Shop [in This Ad] ’til You Drop

The pandemic saw the use of store locator functionalities decline significantly and brought an uptick of shoppable ads. Until this format is standardized, feelings about it remain mixed.

“E-commerce has become huge,” one publisher said. “We helped strategize with a lot of our clients that were getting hit because there was no use of location-based data. Once location came back, they now had the shoppable, e-commerce solution and they had a location base. So it’s actually helped with overall growth.”

Another noted that they feel a “little uncomfortable buying something in an ad because [they] work in the industry and see enough going on with malvertising and data leakage.”

“There’s nothing in that [ad] window that says ‘this is a secure buy.’ There’s absolutely nothing. And there’s no way to prove that they’re secure.”

As publishers continue to be seen as trusted spaces, additional data needs to be analyzed to further elevate the need/use for shoppable ads.

“Advertisers like them because they’re interactive, and something different beyond standard, but do they actually work,” concluded one publisher.

The post Evolution of the Ad Product Suite appeared first on AdMonsters.

How do publishers centralize vendor management? What are their biggest challenges in developing a revenue strategy across multiple brands and sites?

These, along with how publishers are preparing for a post-cookie world, were discussed during a recent Think Tank hosted with The Media Trust.

Testing 1-2-3

When publishers add potential vendors to the mix, they test them out on their largest, most profitable, websites first, and if they pass the test, other niche sites will follow.

“We test [vendors] in specific groupings of sites so we can see how it affects certain sites with certain scale, depending on what the vendor is,” said one publisher. “We have this whole rubric for how we categorize the sites and how the testing affects all of them. But the main thing is if it doesn’t work for our main site, then it’s not good enough for the rest of our sites and we’ll just continue to iterate.”

Vendors may look good on paper but lack cohesiveness when added to the technology mix. 

Oftentimes, a publisher won’t have all of the necessary resources to make a product work for their business, which will have a huge impact on deciding which vendor to go with. Vendors, with the ability to provide deep customer support, especially when it comes to testing and onboarding, will naturally rise to the top

“We do make mistakes when we’re trying a bunch of vendors at the same time,” added another Think Tank attendee. “We tried one, but found we didn’t have the resources internally to actually teach the algorithm, so we went to another platform with an algorithm that was already educated enough to run and scan our content. It was something that we learned in real-time. Some stuff you’re just figuring out on the fly, too.”

The Centralization Quandary

The more websites and M&As a publisher undertakes, the harder it becomes to centralize rev ops.

“We have vertical teams aligned with a lot of the domains or groups and also teams that run sort of horizontal,” one Think Tank attendee admitted. “But the challenge of centralization for us is how much control does my revenue development team keep and hold versus what do we build to be configurable by the individual verticals?”

Centralizing revenue operations also faces the obstacle of dev teams scattered across individual properties. A lack of uniformity in dev causes headaches for revenue alignment.

“When you’ve got multiple dev teams, everyone’s invested in their own team,” said another publisher. “It’s a wider organizational challenge to talk about the benefits of having a more centralized development team versus the six different dev teams we have that are completely separate.”

Organizational size—and willingness to invest in diverse talent—can become a game-changer in centralizing operations.

“Not all publishers are big enough to have dedicated dev team tech engineers and programmatic devs,” said one publisher. “For us, centralizing for the sake of simplicity is what we need to do, even with [the publishers] that we bring on. Many have a lot of stuff going on on their websites, like widgets and plug-ins, and we tell them less is more if we’re going to take over monetization.”

Data Leakage Concerns in a Post-Third-Party Cookie Era

Publishers are taking a closer look at what lies beneath the technology running across their websites. The effort is time-consuming but necessary for a world sans third-party cookies.

“Everything has to be spoken for the purpose of revenue alignment and if nobody knows why it’s there, or how it got there, it comes out,” said one publisher. “We want to know why and how it works, what the revenue opportunity is because we’re so concerned with data leakage.”

But what makes the data leakage threat particularly menacing is the unknown and untested tracking and targeting technologies rapidly entering the digital ad marketplace.

“The vendors can do whatever they want,” another attendee revealed. “The legal in these services is so maliciously vague because the concepts of the legislation have not evolved yet where they need to be specific. What I’m finding is they’re trying to get us into contracts now and deploy all of these scripts that have the potential to do really anything. 

“Beyond data leakage is a huge information security risk that is probably going to cost publishers downstream pretty significantly,” they added.

The post Top of Publishers’ Minds: Centralized Rev Ops And Data Leakage appeared first on AdMonsters.

That’s because as publishers, platforms and marketers try to figure out how to move beyond third-party cookies, the realization is that doing it together — and coming up with solutions that benefit each segment of the value chain somewhat equally — is the only sustainable way forward.

This theme of collaboration and collective ingenuity came up during a Think Tank we recently hosted with Celtra. 

Even before the cookie started to crumble, the pandemic pressured publishers to deliver eyeballs and results, and for many, that meant creating unique, outside-of-the-box ad experiences. But not all publishers have fully-staffed creative services divisions, nor is every ad ops team equipped to traffic (or track) custom campaigns in a scalable way. 

So over the course of 2020, revenue and ad ops leads increasingly found themselves needing to collaborate with new contacts within brands and agencies. They also had to come up with hacks and lean on solution providers to help create engaging ad experiences that enticed users (and drove performance). And as we continue to emerge from the post-pandemic haze (and ride out the cookiepocalypse) there are a few changes publishers expect to continue: 

1. Operational challenges on the buy-side have created windows of opportunity for publishers to innovate (and collaborate).

Hiring freezes, furloughs and layoffs meant that brand and agency teams were smaller and got tasked with doing more. For some publishers, that made the creative review process a little more challenging: 

“We [had situations where] we’d be reaching out to one person for creative approval and they were no longer there. So we had to start the process again with a whole other round of people with different preferences and points of view …” 

That created delays in getting campaigns out the door in a streamlined manner. 

“We’d have a C-suite level person taking over for someone more junior that had been in the weeds and knew more about the project, and that was a challenge.” 

Other companies leveraged these staffing shortages to bring more business in-house. 

“[As of Q3 and Q4] the agencies were back, but they weren’t necessarily full-staffed anymore. So they’d say ‘we want to get this campaign running again,’ and we’d ask for the creative and they’d say ‘Oh, that person isn’t back to work yet, or they’re furloughed’ … And that allowed us to come in and say, ‘Ok, let us help you. We can create these things for you.” 

“Suddenly, these departments were quite open to having conversations about creative … And because [custom] creative doesn’t really work well when they just send us an asset or an idea, we definitely saw an increase in the kinds of tasks around [designing and developing] creative for our clients.” 

2. Advertisers are more willing to use publishers’ content (and context) for creative inspiration.

In the era of pandemic-driven creative collaboration, publishers saw more interest in pulling inspiration directly from their content. 

“We saw an increase [in advertisers] wanting campaigns modeled after things the newsroom was doing,” said one news-centric publisher. “Early on in the pandemic we had an animated explainer about flattening the curve, and then we got lots of requests for [campaigns like that] because the newsroom was doing it so well. So, it wasn’t a ‘net new’ creative experience, just one we hadn’t had much desire for from advertisers in the past.” 

There was a more direct desire from customers to [create ad experiences] that replicate what they saw in terms of content, and that was a benefit because by helping them build the creative, we were also able to help tell the story contextually.

“There was a more direct desire from customers to [create ad experiences] that replicate what they saw in terms of content, and that was a benefit because by helping them build the creative, we were also able to help tell the story contextually,” added another pub. 

“There was definitely a pivot because we do a lot of branded content and a lot of video for our clients,” said one publisher. “And there was a pause [in physical production] so we got to do things like stop motion animation that we’d never been able to do before.”  

3. Make it cool … but make it measurable, too. 

Yet in addition to ingenuity, brands are asking for more granular metrics. 

“It definitely seemed like clients were asking for more and different things with a simple campaign, where in the past, it might have been a particularly easy sale,” said one pub. “Now, suddenly there were more reporting requirements. More requests for different metrics, more requests for tracking.” 

“If someone asks us for a custom experience [and we’re able to build it], we do it,” said one publisher. “But then the reporting part is where we often find ourselves in a bit of a challenge. And we’re very transparent with our partners to say ‘we can build this and figure out how to make it beautiful, but sometimes with reporting there are limitations.”

I'd say one of our biggest challenges is how to build something beautiful but also provide a bunch of different kinds of metrics that the client needs to determine that it was a success.

“I’d say one of our biggest challenges is how to build something beautiful but also provide a bunch of different kinds of metrics that the client needs to determine that it was a success.” 

For some pubs, delivering those results means having a conversation with the client about exactly what kinds of metrics would align with the audience (and the ad unit itself): 

“I think one of the biggest things that we’re constantly battling — especially with our metrics that we pull from Gen Z and how they react to ads — is being able to find ways to make ads more interesting and interactive, without having it scream ‘this is an ad’,” said one publisher. “That requires having a conversation though, about how to measure the interactive features in a way that’s not just clicks or view throughs.” 

4. Enabling e-commerce is now table stakes. 

Creatives that can drive in-store traffic have always been in high demand for retail advertisers, but post-pandemic, being able to drive e-commerce purchases is just as important. 

“We saw a huge spike in people strategizing how they could shift the ‘drive to store’ kinds of campaigns to e-commerce and ‘shop now’ ad formats,” said one pub. “And it was really collaborative for us, in terms of the buyer wanting to shape the experience and help us craft an ad that gots the same cost-per-interaction (CPI) in an online shopping environment.” 

Another publisher agreed. “We already had shoppable ad formats, so it was an easy transition. Where the growth came from was our customer success managers sharing this info with clients that weren’t already using them. So it drove a different kind of internal collaboration …  we had the account management team working with ad ops and sales to help craft these more compelling pitches around our e-commerce capabilities.” 

What the discussion revealed is that for many publishers, the pandemic forced their teams to develop a new level of creative agility, as well as a broader sense of collaboration (both internally and externally). And there are signs that, in a post-pandemic, post-cookie world, advertisers will continue to look for media partners that can collaborate, pivot, and help develop distinct, but scalable ad experiences. 

The post Amidst the Cookiepocalypse, Creative Agility Can Be a Rev Team’s Secret Weapon appeared first on AdMonsters.

“It was like a magic reset button or a pause, one pub said at a recent Think Tank with AdPushup. “Everything had stopped. So let’s redo our website. Let’s make it faster, let’s go through and do that. And one of the resulting things has been a little bit more strategic conversation.”

As the Think Tank progressed, it became clear that pubs are truly taking a ‘nowhere to go but up’ mentality this year, making most of the dregs befalling ad tech to conduct thorough audits of their partners, re-evaluate their place in the client-side vs server-side header bidding ecosystem, improve their Google Core Web Vital scores and, ultimately, offset revenue losses from 2020.

Pandemic Times Allow for Thoughtful Latency Audits 

Asked how they see latency affecting revenue in days leading up to the cookie’s demise, one pub joked, “All I know is that, instead of 10 SSPs hitting me up to get integrated, now I have 10 ID solutions hitting me up to get integrated.”

He added that he believes ID solutions are the right way to move, but that there needs to be more consolidation.

Another pub agreed, explaining how the pandemic allowed his team to reset with the dev team and show them what was truly valuable to them now.

“Ad dollars had slowed down for a time period, and [it allowed us]  to really strategize a roadmap that really kind of helped benefit us in the second half of the year,” they said.

“All the advertising dollars kind of came back to us. We pushed our sales team to really dive into programmatic and guaranteed a lot of lean on our efficiencies there. And it really worked out for us. And we’re seeing this year start off really strong already. So that pause, seeing who is benefiting us and optimizing our stack was a big benefit of this.”

For mobile-first publishers like Ed Arrandale, Head of Programmatic at WeatherBug, figuring out an ID solution, and how that will impact the user experience, as we move closer to entering a post-IDFA world has been top of mind. “We’ve looked at pretty much every identity solution there is and talked to every partner that we could talk to. And really for iOS, there is no perfect solution. We think realistically it’s going to be in the 20% range [of users] that will actually say yes, and that is with a thoughtful prompt and being a brand with dedicated loyal users.”

Overall though, consolidation was a big theme of the Think Tank, with a focus on pandemic audits and a re-evaluation of the partners who will help pubs better navigate latency, particularly as it impacts revenue.

Reassessing Latency Around Google Core Vitals 

One pub said that an audit of his prebid stack with 10-15 demand partners prompted the question, “why do we need so many resellers?”

“So we’re kind of going down that path of speed, supply path optimization, as well as making sure the ads don’t do that fun CLS thing for Core Web Vitals, and a couple of other things just to make sure the ads aren’t slowing down the page.”

For this publisher, over the past nine months, it’s been important to take the approach of quality over quantity when it comes to speed and efficiency.

So we're kind of going down that path of speed, supply path optimization, as well as making sure the ads don't do that fun CLS thing for Core Web Vitals, and a couple of other things just to make sure the ads aren't slowing down the page.

Another pub explained how the Google Core Web Vitals conversation also ties back to their team conducting a lot of A/B testing. Some of that testing has included looking at how ads load on page and making sure they’re loading separately from content.

They explained how the site has a right rail with additional sponsored content suggestions that are being populated by an internal algorithm.

“Our site is not always sponsored, but it’s sort of recommended reading for everyone and that was starting to push the ads down, which also then pushed the rest of the content down,” they explained. “And so we actually had to go back and reconfigure that part of our sites, because not only did it affect our Google Web Vitals score, but it actually completely killed my CPRs for my half-page ad. So we told them that that wasn’t gonna work.”

Another pub said that they’re finding success with Google by making sure all ad placements have a fixed height, no matter what they contain. 

“We actually took out our 970 x 250 in favor of a 720 x 90 in the masthead, which didn’t really impact revenue that much,” they said. “Most of our traffic is mobile. So it was hurting us on desktop. It wasn’t a huge portion of what was being sold. And, you know, as we have direct sales coming, that will probably need to come back. But we’ll just figure out how we need to do it because it was all about CLS and speed.”

Why There’s No Set Healthy Number of Prebid Partners

One publisher, acknowledging his privilege of having a Google team he could go to audit his site and provide the dev team with a list of action items so that those things could be fixed on the site. He acknowledged that the dev team is great, but has different ideas about how things should work compared to how Google thinks things should work. 

When it comes to A/B testing, the pub discovered that creating custom high-impact units they could sell became a problem, especially with page latency and Google-heavy ads. It was important to create different versions of these units that work within the guidelines from Google. This involves multiple testing templates, such as biweekly updates to individual ad units based on what the reporting might say. 

It's really just being able to have enough data and identify where you can make updates rather than having some overall look at what Google says on latency.

Also by working with Pubmatic’s OpenWrap for Prebid, they have built-in A/B testing on any wrapper.

“I can go into any site across our network and say that I want to test a new time out for 10%, or 25% of the traffic on just this site for this time frame,” the pub said. “And they automatically are able to filter that traffic. So to create an A/B testing scenario for me, I don’t have to work on my dev team at all. I’m also able to do it with other SSP partners.”

“It’s really just being able to have enough data and identify where you can make updates rather than having some overall look at what Google says on latency,” he added.

The same pub went on to say that working with OpenWrap has allowed them to see, for instance, if one partner is timing out much higher than others. This ultimately helps them better consolidate partners within Prebid, making for a simple and effective way to reduce latency on page.

He added that there shouldn’t necessarily be some arbitrary rule for how many are on page, because every site is different.

For AdPushup, the future lies in building optimization back for pubs. They’ll build rule engines, marry their research and analytics to the machine learning they have for their testing algorithms.

“Right now there is a lot of manual testing going on in the Prebid stack,” said Dikshant Joshi, Director of Publishing Development, AdPushup. “But marrying the data that we bring into the analytic solution and the capabilities to test it out with machine learning algorithms is something that we are looking at as something beyond the standard Prebid conversations.”

Moving Toward a Hybrid Solution For Client-Side and Server-Side Bidding

Another pub said that they see pros and cons to working using client-side and the server-side, and as such, they use both.

“We have a complex setup where we kind of tap into different partners in different places,” they said.

Other pubs agreed with this approach. “I think that the solution for publishers is just [having] as much data as you can, look at it, and see what works best for you,” another added. “And I’m definitely confused sometimes because I do hear this conversation and I have vendors reaching out to me, [saying] that the benefit of using them is their server-side.”

And if you’re thinking one of the benefits of Prebid is that Amazon isn’t involved, you might want to rethink that.

According to one pub, Amazon’s demand is enough of a benefit to stay with them. “They just kill it on the open exchange,” they said. “So even if I just stop using TAM, I would just keep Amazon’s demand up there if I could.” 

“I think the hybrid solution is something that you’re indicating towards, with Amazon running client-side bidding and open bidding that’s all configured,” said AdPushup’s Joshi.

“Yeah, it’s kind of unfortunate that we do have to have all these integrations, though” replied the pub. “It would be nice to have more consolidated solutions, but we’ve created this ecosystem where we’ve had to have all this diversification and if you don’t have it, then that’s when you get hurt the most.”

The post How the Pandemic Helped Pubs Think More Strategically About Latency appeared first on AdMonsters.

While many pubs don’t distinguish much between SSPs and demand sources, the nuances between them add up. Where an SSP gets their ads matters, for instance, whether it be from uniques or from trade desks.

“I think a classic SSP needs to have a particular toolset that a demand source wouldn’t necessarily have,”  one publisher said, speaking with us at a recent Think Tank with Sovrn.  “That’s an important differentiation. An SSP needs to have deal ID-building capabilities. Not all demand sources have that, but any decent SSP should.”

As the Think Tank progressed, it became clear that the depth of tools and analytics that SSPs provide continue to play a crucial role for publishers. What’s more, the service that pubs receive from SSPs —and how much human touch that service has — makes a world of difference. 

An Emphasis on Service 

Most pubs were eager to emphasize the fact that they don’t feel great about communicating with an SSP through a ticketing system. They much prefer a human rep, and ideally a single point of contact, to address changing needs and figure out solutions together.

“I need to feel like there is a person who understands our partnership, who is there to help me,” one pub said. “That means if I ask for an intro to a DSP, they can get it for me, or if I need certain data that’s not in their UI, we can have a conversation about how to get that.” 

Another added that, as more SSPs forgo providing human reps in lieu of ticketing systems, they lose a competitive advantage to Google. Although Google has pretty terrible service, they do provide support via a real person, even though that person usually isn’t an expert in the specific needs of the pub. 

As one pub put it bluntly, “We probably wouldn’t use any features an SSP brings to us if we don’t have that service relationship with them, because we need to be able to have that support as we roll out new features.”

Tailored Reports are a Must 

As pubs pivot their strategies to meet the myriad of challenges coming over the next year, they also require increasingly robust, tailored reporting from their SSPs. And that can’t take the form of an emailed file with formatting problems, misplaced fields, or other issues that slow down the pub’s ability to pull insights from the data. 

I really wish the IAB would come up with API standardizations, a list of dimensions and metrics and if you really want to work with partners, you have to check a box and you have to be able to provide this.

One pub said that of the two dozen SSP demand sources they work with, only three provide them with satisfactory reporting.

“I’ve got a standard list of about a dozen different dimensions and about four different metrics,” they said. “It’s really basic shit, right? I want to know how many requests I’m sending out. I want to know how many bid responses I’m getting back. That’s Greek to the majority of our partners.”

Instead, pubs said that most SSPs still only provide them with a grand, daily total that isn’t well organized or broken up by property.

“I really wish the IAB would come up with API standardizations, a list of dimensions and metrics,” said another pub, “and if you really want to work with partners, you have to check a box and you have to be able to provide this.”

Where Are the Benchmark Reports?

A chorus of pubs also wondered why most major exchanges can’t provide them with monthly or quarterly benchmark data that shows how their CPM compares to that of their colleagues. Pubs are only ever able to get those from SSPs if they ask multiple times and wait for a timely turnaround. By that point, the insights aren’t always actionable.

Many want this report to be automated for each pub, then sent in the form of a monthly report card. Of course, it would be totally anonymized. 

These periodic benchmarks would allow pubs to pivot their strategies in a more timely fashion, a necessary consequence of the privacy and regulatory changes coming this year.  “That would be amazing,” said one pub. “Especially when you’re trying a lot of different things, which I was certainly doing in March and April, and nothing was working.”

Most were incredulous that these reports aren’t often included already, and another wondered why an SSP that makes “like a hundred million dollars an hour has to charge me fifteen hundred bucks a month to get the data.”

How Can Pubs Highlight Risky Demand Sources?

As pubs express a continued need for more robust service and reporting, both needs fall under the umbrella of tools — whether human or automated — that ultimately help a pub mitigate risk.

Everybody’s default risk odometers went sky high as soon as the pandemic started. And as pubs begin to understand their risk profile, Brian Bouquet, Vice President of Product Management at Sovrn, said that the SSP is almost ready to roll out features that allow pubs to adjust their bidders accordingly.

Bouquet explained that Sovrn will soon be releasing controls that give publishers the ability to filter out certain bids depending on the pub’s risk profile. For instance, a pub may decide that they don’t want to pay insurance for the 10-20% that a creditor may not underwrite.

“We are constantly mitigating the risk from demand-side defaults on behalf of our publishers,” says Brian. “We continuously perform thorough credit reviews of all our current and prospective demand partners. We only work with those partners who meet our strict criteria and we establish strict credit limits for all of our active demand partners.”

Sovrn approaches these features in a couple of different ways. They let pubs access the demand that’s guaranteed 100%, or they can access all Sovrn’s demand, which gives them extra DSP partners that their creditor will not underwrite. He added that this mitigation program would be completely free. By selecting only guaranteed DSPs, publishers will impact bid depth which will ultimately impact revenue.

“Every company needs to make their own decision about how they want to treat that risk with demand partners,” Bouquet said. “We’re building it with flexibility so you can opt-in and choose your own path.” 

How Will SSPs Help Figure Out the Cookie Conundrum?

As reports about the imminent death of third-party cookies keep coming, pubs see a red flag with any SSP who says they’re still in the early stages of figuring out a replacement.

Let's lobby hard to make sure that ID modules stay on the table. But that's not on us. That's on SSPs, because they will just go away if there's no addressability.

A couple of ad tech vendors have submitted big proposals on top of Google’s TURTLEDOVE proposal, like Criteo’s SPARROW and Magnite’s PARRROT. Features of those proposals have made it into Google’s FLEDGE proposal for operationalizing TURTLEDOVE. Some pubs support SSPs partnering with ID modules as a potential solution. But ultimately, the obligation is on those SSPs to figure things out before the industry takes another huge hit.

“Let’s lobby hard to make sure that ID modules stay on the table,” said one pub. “But that’s not on us. That’s on SSPs, because they will just go away if there’s no addressability.”

Another explained that the responsibility for figuring out a rebound strategy falls on the marketing side, not the publishing side, because the marketing side will only spend money where they are going to get a return. 

“If the dollar originates from them and ends up at us, I feel like there’s only so much we can do,” they said.

Even if pubs spend time with SSPs to get IDs set up, potential conflicts abound. What if the ID methodology doesn’t bring an advertiser the same returns? The advertiser will likely turn down their spend with the SSP and spend more with Google. Because pubs are connected with Google, they’ll retain some of that spend. But it could also create a situation where less pressure is put on Google from SSPs, and the CPMs for publishers suffer significantly.

“Publishers can run around and scramble and put whatever solutions in place that we think will work or be appealing,” they said. “But if the buy-side doesn’t agree, doesn’t find value in them, doesn’t see results from them, it’s kind of all for naught.”

The post Pubs Want SSPs to Offer More Reporting and Advocacy appeared first on AdMonsters.