Pending publisher licensing deals with OpenAI aside, one part of the news organization finds generative AI extremely useful, and in some instances, transformative: the Ad Ops team. AdMonsters has interviewed numerous Ad Ops people across several organizations to see if and how they’re using it.

Reshaping Ad Ops With Generative AI

Ad Ops professionals aren’t just dabbling in generative AI; they’re diving in deep and successfully putting it to work to improve their daily jobs and elevate the overall Ad Ops team. It isn’t a surprise that they’ve largely sidestepped the challenges others have faced using generative AI. As tech-savvy people, Ad Ops professionals are well aware of the limitations of all AI and take active steps to mitigate the pitfalls and problems.

This Publisher Pulse looks at:

• • Popular generative AI tools used by Ad Ops team members
  • Ad Ops personas — distinct ways that interviewees use generative AI to elevate their performance or the performance of their teams
  • AI use cases
  • How generative AI will transform the Ad Ops Teams
  • Tips for getting the best results out of AI
  • Sample outputs

Enter your info to download your copy below!

The post AdMonsters Publisher Pulse: Ad Ops Reimagined — A Guide to Reshaping Ad Ops With Generative AI appeared first on AdMonsters.

As cookies make open web advertising more complicated, the big tech platforms, especially Google and Meta, are using AI to make buying ads on their platforms easier than ever before.

As a result, brands and agencies will be less likely to work with independent publishers, who require that they sift through an individualized catalog of ad products, where tech platforms offer greater ease and scale.

This gap — how easy it is to buy ads on a platform or publisher site and achieve the desired outcomes of digital advertising — will be the dominant challenge for publishers in the years ahead. It represents the synthesis of privacy changes and AI.

The good news for publishers, though, is that they, too, can use AI to make reaching their highly valuable audiences easier. Here’s why publishers need to make it easier to buy ads — and what they can do to bridge the gap.

The Age of AI, or the Advertising Easy Button

By leaning into AI for their ad solutions, big tech companies like Google and Meta are pushing ad buying further into the self-serve era. Take Meta’s Advantage+ for example.

To compete with Google and Meta, publishers must create easy buttons of their own to make it simpler for advertisers to do business with them.  

Through Advantage+, Meta enables advertisers, with as few inputs as possible, to leverage AI to find audiences on Facebook and Instagram and automate their campaigns. The challenge is no longer campaign planning. Advertisers need only tell Meta what outcomes they want, and the tech giant will do the rest.

To compete with Google and Meta (who have taken up 46.6% of the ad market as they’ve made it as frictionless as possible to advertise through their platforms), publishers must create easy buttons of their own to make it simpler for advertisers to do business with them.

Publishers’ Opportunity to Simplify — and Compete

Simplifying the ad buying experience for advertisers requires going beyond the traditional self-service system publishers have offered through the automated guaranteed (AG) model.

The traditional AG model places the onus on buyers to understand the intricacies of inventory options and how to make campaign adjustments manually across a labyrinth of platforms and tools.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Publishers also have the opportunity to leverage AI and automation to significantly reduce the friction in ad buying (and without having to undergo a costly overhaul of their existing infrastructures).

Three places publishers can incorporate AI and automation into the buying process are inventory discovery, media plan adjustments, and performance visibility.

3 Places Publishers Can Incorporate Ai and Automation Into the Buying Process

Inventory Discovery

Publishers can use machine learning-powered analysis of past and current campaign data to generate optimized ad product suggestions for each buyer. That way, publishers save advertisers the time — and clicks — needed to mine through interminable catalogs to find suitable products and generate the highest possible ROI.

Media Plan Adjustments

The next area publishers can automate is booking and media plan adjustments.

After deciding on a media plan, most advertisers have to log in manually to multiple tools and platforms on the publisher side to ensure sufficient inventory and book their orders. Not to mention the manual data entry (and re-entry) required for buyers to tweak their order based on availability or potential campaign changes.

Rather than putting the burden on buyers to go through multiple logins whenever they want to place or change an order, publishers should use robotic process automation to streamline these often tedious steps in the buying process.

Performance Visibility

When it comes to performance visibility, publishers can use AI to send buyers real-time alerts on campaigns. In doing so, publishers save their buyers’ ops teams from having to sift through anOMS or other systems to assess the performance of individual campaigns or surface any campaign issues that need immediate attention.

The AI-first Future of Open Web Publishing

Of course, AI and automation alone may not iron out all the details that more nuanced campaigns bring. But even if AI and automation only get a given advertiser 60 to 80% of the way there with the buying process, savvy publishers would still have saved their buyers hours — if not days — of tedious data entry. And even a 10 to 20% performance improvement in advertising results would represent a massive gain across a few hundred billion dollars of annual ad spend.

By leveraging AI and automation to create operational efficiencies and improve ROI, publishers won’t just better compete with the walled gardens and simplify the ad buying process for advertisers (and prevent headaches for operators). They’ll also enable buyers to take on more campaigns and increase spend while empowering themselves to service more deals — and generate more revenue opportunities at a much lower cost.

The post Publishers Need an Easy Button to Compete with AI-Enabled Platforms appeared first on AdMonsters.

2023 felt like the beginning of the end. It was like the perfect maelstrom.

A recession was forecasted. Oh no, no it wasn’t. Ad spend was plummeting. Oh wait, it started inching back up again.  For publishers, there was just no way to make heads or tails out of the year that was the last before the 3P cookies’ demise.

Political ad spend is on the rise, but there are ad quality challenges for any publisher wanting to jump into that pool. We’ve got a playbook for navigating those waters.  Targeting and metrics are getting a remix and creative could use a facelift. We’ve got a playbook to guide you through attention’s dominance.

What about bad ads, are they tarnishing consumers’ perceptions about your media properties? We surveyed 250 consumers to give it to you straight — along with publishers’ tips for cracking down on those bad actors and making the user experience a priority.

And finally, we took a deep dive into how widely contextualized AdOps data shared with sales and ad product teams. The truth is, AdOps teams are rock stars (party on) but sales teams might not be taking full advantage of their data stardom. We’ve got a playbook for that too. All it involves is making meaningful workflow changes to focus on revenue-generating tasks.

You really should download one of these (if not all of them).

AdMonsters Publisher Playbooks of 2023

AdOps Are Rock Stars. Are Sales Teams Taking Advantage of Their Stardom?

AdOps teams are data superstars, sitting on a treasure trove of information that contains rich and nuanced context. Many can say which ad units perform best, by format, section, industry and vertical. Some can accurately predict the ROAS advertisers can expect to see from their campaigns.

This is the kind of data that attracts advertisers, especially during a recession when their budgets are smaller and all focus is on performance and business outcomes.

But are publishers taking full advantage of these amazing resources? Our survey indicates they are not. There’s not enough collaboration between AdOps and the sales, product, and business intelligence teams. This is caused by a combination of tech limitations and interdepartmental inefficiencies.

More worrisome, only 22% of AdOps teams say they have access to a wealth of data and insights, which means the remaining 78% can’t help their colleagues succeed in their jobs to the fullest possible extent.

Now that advertisers are cutting back on campaigns, publishers need to work harder to attract brands to their sites. Detailed performance data distributed to all the teams that need it can help publishers win more business and revenue. As it stands, they’re leaving money on the table. Download this playbook now!

How Bad Ads Affect Consumer Perception of Publishers

Publishers have always struggled with bad ads. Nefarious players and scammers, who sought to exploit the digital advertising ecosystem to steal money or data from consumers, have been around almost since the first ad was placed.

But as the world became more digitized, and as global wealth (and access to it) went online, bad actors stepped up their game. Online scams beginning with a digital ad are now dizzyingly complex, with fraudsters going to great lengths to appear legitimate to their victims.

Not surprisingly, malvertising is now a major crime, with 46% of consumers saying they, or someone they know, has fallen prey to a scam. According to the FBI, American consumers lost $10 billion to online scammers in 2022, and 2023 promises to be an even worse year for consumers.

Malvertising and malware are upending digital advertising, with the FBI warning consumers to install ad blockers, and the New York Times telling its readers that “if it’s advertised, you probably shouldn’t buy it.”

Programmatic advertising burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s promising better monetization opportunities for publishers and better access to audiences for brands. That promise led to a robust industry; in 2022 global revenues topped $173.74 billion worldwide.

The scales have tipped, and programmatic has become more of a liability than an asset. Last year, Bloomberg News made headlines when it announced it was pulling the plug on open programmatic, citing bad ads and the impact they had on the reader’s experience.

They’re hardly alone. Jared Collett, Sr. Director of Ad Operations and Analytics, Major League Fishing, also said his company changed who they work with as a result of bad ads. “We’ve had to sever relationships with various programmatic partners and ad networks because they couldn’t get control over the bad ads they were sending us. I would rather serve a house ad, or no ads than serve a bad ad.”

Worse, bad ads are eroding consumer trust in publishers. For 77% of consumers, a bad ad is a signal that the publisher cares more about making money than it does about their safety. Another 64% say that seeing a bad ad on a single site tarnishes the entire industry. It’s fair to say we’re at a crisis point.

“This finding is really important. It brings home the point that rightly or wrongly, the reputation of the advertiser and the reputation of the publisher are really tied together. This is something media organizations will need to address.” said Amnon Siev, CEO, GeoEdge. Download this playbook now!

Targeting and Metrics Evolution: Are Publishers Ready for Attention’s Dominance?

Our survey results reveal that 2024 promises to be a year of rapid innovation, with publishers rethinking what’s possible:

The New Metric: Attention. As the digital advertising landscape undergoes transformations that limit the use of traditional identifiers, publishers are adapting their measurement practices to meet their advertising clients’ expectations. Driven by advertising demand, 82% of publishers said that attention metrics, which evaluate the amount of attention a consumer spends with content, are important or very important to their organizations. We see new metrics emerging, and publishers reporting some success, but new tools and education are still required.

Innovative Ad Formats & Ad Placements. Publishers are realizing that there is a significant opportunity to drive higher attention rates by experimenting with new and innovative ad formats (45%) or ad placements (55%), signaling a new era in which the advertising sector turns its focus from innovating in targeting to innovating in creative and placement.

Targeting Capabilities. While cookie-based targeting was mediocre at best, it did enable advertisers to scale their campaigns and develop proxies for their ideal audiences. Today, however, publishers are seeking privacy-compliant ways to home in on receptive audiences. Key among them: leveraging their first-party data.

Indirect Monetization. Some publishers appear open to granting permission for indirect representation of their inventory, allowing marketers to access approved pathways via ads.txt and other sources, even from non-direct partners. To maintain and optimize the list over time, publishers implement monitoring, regular communication, audits, and data analysis. This ensures a strong ecosystem of indirect partners, maximizing monetization while maintaining control and quality assurance. Download this playbook now!

Navigating Political Ads for the 2024 Season

A staggering $10 billion will pour into the political advertising arena to sway American voters during the 2024 Election cycle. While $10 billion is a boon for digital media stakeholders, that money comes with severe risks.

Navigating misinformation and disinformation will be a key challenge of this election cycle, driven by the widespread availability of sophisticated AI tools. Digital publishers and CTV stakeholders face direct and negative effects on their business, from drops in user engagement to broader societal mistrust.

The proliferation of generative AI, deepfakes, and sophisticated malvertising tactics have empowered fraudsters and foreign governments to distribute deceptive ads via programmatic channels. This alarming trend has forced digital media entities into a rapid and rigorous process of establishing, overhauling, and strictly enforcing political ad quality policies.

Ultimately it falls to publishers to serve as the final bastion of defense for their audiences. Publishers must undertake the critical task of determining whether specific advertisers and promoters of sensitive, hot-button issues can be permitted to run ads on their sites and under which conditions, while simultaneously ensuring malicious actors are kept at bay.

This Playbook provides a robust framework for an ad quality strategy, essential for setting up robust election advertising guidelines. It delves into the tools available to publishers for increased visibility and control, shedding light on challenges in the upcoming election cycle. The Playbook’s goal is to empower publishers to guarantee that political ads on their platforms are informative and accurate and enhance both user experience and their reputation. Download this playbook now!

The post AdMonsters Publisher Playbooks of 2023: Political Ads, Attention Metrics, Bad Ads, Ad Ops Are Rock Stars appeared first on AdMonsters.

In the ever-changing world of ad operations, it is crucial to stay ahead of the shifting landscape. One development that is here to stay is ad automation: using software and tools to automate and optimize backend operations to increase lead generation and revenue. Automation can assist with any task that has clearly defined parameters, such as campaign rules, budgets, keywords, and bids. 

Ad automation is not a new concept – it can be traced back as far as the 1980s – but today’s automation is leaps and bounds above what existed 40 years ago. This is in part due to the way the internet has changed during this time, with advancements in everything from social media and AI to search engines. More companies than ever are opting to use automation in their day-to-day operations to help increase efficiency and scale their business. 

One automation solution that launched last week is Upward, a customizable, white glove solution from Theorem Inc. that works to increase efficiency and reduce user pain points, which gives users a competitive edge. 

Industry Professionals Have a Positive Outlook on Automation 

Theorem recently conducted research in collaboration with global insights and strategy agency Hypothesis Group to understand the need for automation in the ad ops industry. The results showed an overall favorable opinion of automation. The research indicated:

• 4 in 5 respondents have a positive view of automation 
• 90% of respondents stated they were open to their roles evolving as a result of automation
• 87% of ad operations professionals agree that automation can make their organization more profitable
• 86% of respondents state that automation would modernize their organization
• 83% of respondents agree that automation would make their team more productive

This positive outlook on automation is indicative of industry confidence in its ability to solve problems for ad ops organizations. For example, Upward enables the automation of advertising operations across the order-to-cash process including trafficking, reporting, brand safety, campaign management, and optimization.

Solutions such as Upward can be customized to each user’s needs, working within existing platforms, workflows, and processes. This helps to increase workflow efficiency because reporting, insights, and campaign performance can be customized on brand levels. This can help a company scale their business while decreasing employee burnout by alleviating employees of menial tasks and allowing them to focus on high-level work. 

Automation Solutions Can Save Publishers Time and Money 

Common pain points within ad operations include inefficiencies, high numbers of complex processes, disconnection within teams when it comes to information sharing, and frequent human errors. Automation can help lessen employees’ tedious tasks, increase job efficiency, and reduce human error. 

Reducing errors can also reduce the number of make-goods, saving organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars each year that would have otherwise been spent on mistakes. Eliminating this waste contributes to an increase in overall profitability.  

Automation also allows employees to have more time to focus on high-level work and strategic thinking, rather than menial tasks. This allows them to focus on doing work that will ultimately increase their company’s bottom line. Theorem’s Upward solution eliminates manual inefficiencies by leveraging technologies that are sitting in the cloud, which allows organizations to scale and have an edge over the competition.  

“Ad ops professionals are well-versed in a multitude of platforms and are highly organized, detail-oriented, and analytical – making them incredibly valuable to their organizations. By making ad operations and trafficking technology-enabled, media and publishing companies can create new innovative ad products that make them more competitive. When organizations are finding solutions within, they are boosting revenue,” explains Theorem’s CEO Jay Kulkarni.

Future Ad Ops Includes Automation but Humans Are Still Essential

Not all tasks can or even should be automated, but those that can be automated are working for ad ops professionals, not against them. This technology is shaping the way ad ops employees will work in the future, increasing efficiency and driving revenue in exciting new ways. 

“Automation is going to revolutionize ad operations and the way business is conducted within the industry,” Kulkarni says. 

Automation is also impacting how teams work together and helps ad ops professionals progress in their careers in new ways. Without the hassle of tedious tasks, teams can instead focus on proactivity, building stronger relationships, client growth and satisfaction, team empowerment, as well as greater productivity and cost efficiencies. 

However, automation can only work to alleviate tasks that have very clear decision-making parameters, as objective and qualitative decision-making does not lend itself to automation. There will always be work that requires a real human, and automation will not eliminate that need. 

Notes Kulkarni, “I would say that automation is not a replacement for humans but rather, a complement to existing workflows. If organizations have a fear of adapting to automation, they will become less competitive.”

Customizable solutions like Upward can help a company get the best out of automation in a way that fits their individual needs. The future of ad ops includes automation, at least in part, and automating tasks is going to continue to be crucial to remaining on top.

“Good automation journeys touch all aspects of the organization, including business models, upscaling, training, career pathing, and good transparent communication to reduce insecurities and for all teams to support that journey. This journey cannot be done in a silo,” Kulkarni asserts.

The post Boost your Business: Embrace Ad Ops Automation for Enhanced Efficiency appeared first on AdMonsters.

For those that enjoy sailing, that statement is a quaint reminder that adjustments are required for the skipper and crew to properly sail toward their destination regardless of how the wind is shifting.

Metaphorically speaking, that adage can also be applied to businesses.  Leaders and managers must prepare to react to changing economic conditions beyond their control to properly navigate their company toward its strategic goals.

To wit, it has been a full year since we wrote about “Navigating the Great Resignation,” the term used to define the post-pandemic phenomenon of employees leaving their jobs at record rates while companies were left scrambling to retain and replace talent. 

But what a difference a year makes. Changing market conditions have seen the FOMC raise interest rates ten times since March 2022, thus moving from a regime of quantitative easing to quantitative tightening. These rate increases are meant to tamp down inflation, which peaked at around 9% last June, by increasing the cost of borrowing and driving down consumer demand.

Are these rate hikes working? The results seem to indicate that they are. Inflation is down to around 5% and consumers have been spending less overall.

However, to adjust for higher borrowing costs and decreasing consumer demand, businesses have had to lower their expenses considerably, which typically begins with headcount reduction. These personnel cuts have resulted in over 186,000 layoffs in the global ad tech sector over the first four months of 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi. The prevailing explanation for why we are seeing this Great Layoff is that companies who over-hired and hoarded talent last year during the Great Resignation now must reduce their headcount totals and pause or scrap non-strategic initiatives.

Maintaining Equilibrium

Those that race sailboats will tell you that finding your equilibrium when sailing upwind can be difficult, but once you and your crew balance everything, forward progress will come rapidly!

In a December 2022 White Paper published by OAO, we discussed the rising tide of economic uncertainty facing digital publishers as we headed into 2023, such as higher operating costs due to rate hikes, the tight labor market for skilled and experienced talent, reductions in ad spend, and a hodgepodge of new state data privacy regulations going into effect. 

In the White Paper, OAO champions five strategic advantages publishers can achieve by partnering with the right outsourced ad operations provider. Regardless of the reasons for outsourcing certain roles or tasks, the key takeaway is that any publisher who works with the right outsourced partner as part of their corporate strategy is well positioned to attain the proper equilibrium for cutting through these shifting economic headwinds. 

When the economy is strong and growing, outsourcing tasks and roles to skilled and experienced specialists enables publishers to expand their capacity and grow their operations quickly. During tighter cycles, publishers can ramp down their use and cost of working with an outsourced partner without worrying about rehiring risk or business continuity disruptions.

Top 5 Strategic Advantages Gained by Outsourcing Ad Operations

1. Focus on core competencies

Publishers can allocate more time and resources to manage their core competencies without getting distracted by the nuances, technical complexities, and increasing costs of running an in-house ad ops team.

2. Access to skilled and experienced talent

With skills and expertise spanning many facets of ad operations, an outsourced ad ops partner can fill a gap on a publisher’s team or step in to manage the bulk of their ad operations.  Leverage your ad ops partner’s technology relationships to improve your business operations further.

3. Save on labor and overhead costs

Hiring talent is time-intensive and expensive, especially considering recruiting costs, salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, onboarding, training, and career path management. The right outsourced partner can be a budget-friendly complement to an in-house ad ops team that can expand their skills and capabilities or fill any vacant roles.

4. Workflow optimization

An experienced outsourced ad ops team should be able to plug in seamlessly with a publisher’s existing workflow and be willing to offer suggestions and insights for optimizing it to drive greater efficiencies, faster turn-around time, and better results.

5. Redundancy and business continuity

Outsourced ad ops providers should have strong documentation and record-keeping capabilities that enable publisher teams to easily access historical and current information around process, ad tag architecture, trafficking rules, and other important material. With the right partner, publishers can also scale up or down their operations with ease and without the worry, cost, or emotional stress around headcount management or brain drain from employee departures.

In this manner, a solid outsourced ad ops partner is like an experienced yacht racing crew — working with publishers to balance their operational needs without changing course or slowing down — enabling forward progress to come rapidly!

About OAO

OAO is a U.S.-based, full-service ad operations agency and Google Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP), built by seasoned ad operations professionals and guided by our mission of being the premier white glove ad operations services and solutions provider for digital publishers.

OAO prides itself on providing high-touch, white-glove ad operations services, solutions, and support ranging from standard campaign management and reporting to platform integrations, software solutions, migrations, monetization services, and much more. We can be counted on to act as your full-service ad ops team or serve as a complement to your in-house team, filling in any existing skill gaps.

When working with OAO, publishers can expect to have the support of an ad ops team that is composed of industry experts who continually stay apprised of current trends, emerging technologies, and best practices. We are always expanding on our offerings, evaluating new technology, and developing new skills that enable us to provide our clients with the highest possible level of service and support.

Learn more about OAO:

• Services
• White Papers 

The post Navigating the [Not so] Great Layoff appeared first on AdMonsters.

This is the kind of data that attracts advertisers, especially during a recession when their budgets are smaller and all focus is on performance and business outcomes. But are publishers taking full advantage of these amazing resources?

AdMonsters AdOps are Rock Stars Playbook survey indicates they are not. There’s not enough collaboration between AdOps and the sales, product, and business intelligence teams. This is caused by a combination of tech limitations and interdepartmental inefficiencies.

AdOps Is an Underutilized Strategic Resource

More worrisome, only 22% of AdOps teams say they have access to a wealth of data and insights, which means the remaining 78% can’t help their colleagues succeed in their jobs to the fullest possible extent.

Now that advertisers are cutting back on campaigns, publishers need to work harder to attract brands to their sites. Detailed performance data distributed to all the teams that need it can help publishers win more business and revenue. As it stands, they’re leaving money on the table.

We understand that if AdOps had more tools and workflows to share those insights, client-facing teams could have more data-driven conversations with advertisers about campaign performance. This in turn will lead to repeat sales, as well as provide the data needed to recruit other advertisers in their sector.

To dive into the results of this survey and learn more about publishers’ challenges, as well as access our pro tips, download AdMonsters AdOps Are Rock Stars. Are Sales Teams Taking Advantage of Their Stardom? playbook, created in partnership with DV Publisher Suite. 

Download your copy of the AdOps Are Rock Stars. Are Sales Teams Taking Advantage of Their Stardom? Playbook now!

The post Only 22% of Adops Teams Say They Have Access to a Wealth of Data and Insights appeared first on AdMonsters.

Intuitively, we understand that if AdOps had more tools and workflows to share those insights, client-facing teams could have more data-driven conversations with advertisers about campaign performance. This in turn will lead to repeat sales, as well as provide the data needed to recruit other advertisers in their sector.

Additionally, this data would help product teams design premium ad units and ad packages by sector, as well as the right price to charge for them. Once this data is made actionable, there are even more possibilities that we can outline here.

But how widely is contextualized AdOps data shared with sales and ad product teams? Have publishing organizations succeeded in digital transformations, or are they still struggling with silos that ultimately inhibit a more robust monetization strategy?

To answer these questions, we surveyed 136 people who work in digital publishing in an AdOps, sales, revenue, or product function.

Enter your email to download your free copy of AdOps Are Rock Stars. Are Sales Teams Taking Advantage of Their Stardom? below! 

This playbook, created in partnership with DV Publisher Suite, dives into the results of our survey while highlighting publishers’ challenges and providing tips to overcome them.

The post AdMonsters Playbook: AdOps Are Rock Stars. Are Sales Teams Taking Advantage of Their Stardom? appeared first on AdMonsters.

With over 15 years of experience in the ad tech industry, Chris Contreras now leads customer success efforts at MNTN. At PubForum Miami, he joined Erik Requidan, Founder of Mediacraft and Kerel Cooper, President of Advertising at Group Black, as their special guest for an episode of the Minority Report Podcasts.

For the onstage recording, the trio discussed Chris’ career development. He started as a financial analyst at HBO and transitioned into the world of digital media and ad tech. The conversation also explored leadership tactics, what it means to be LatinX in the industry, and why we need more diversity.

Watch the live recording below:

Or you can listen to the podcast:

The post PubForum Miami: Minority Report Podcast Live — Developing a Leadership Career in Digital Media and Ad Tech appeared first on AdMonsters.

But how widely is this insight shared with the sales and ad product teams? Is your business suffering from a data divide, inhibiting a successful monetization strategy?

Share your insight in our 5-minute survey.

Your contribution to this survey will help other publishers fully understand if they have a data divide and what they need to do to close it to bring in more revenue or repeated business.

From your feedback, AdMonsters, supported by DoubleVerify, will create a Playbook that digs into how well AdOps, Sales, Product, and Analytics/BI teams collaborate and share data about sales and campaign and inventory performance to help each team be more effective at their jobs. We will also provide best practices and tips for setting up workflows and streamlining access to data to help you develop a successful monetization strategy.

The post Bridging the Data Divide to Develop Effective Monetization Strategies appeared first on AdMonsters.

This is a serious issue given the high cost of recruiting, hiring, and training campaign traffickers. It’s a situation that begs the question: What can we do to make these jobs more attractive so that experienced team members stay longer in their positions?

The answer is to eliminate the tedious and manual tasks that take up so much of their time, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks instead.

Consider this: According to research by Central Research Inc., AdOps teams spend about seven hours each week performing manual, repetitive (and, let’s face it, boring) tasks. That’s a full day out of the work week. In an industry that prides itself on smart automations and efficiency, that’s just unacceptable. But there’s good news on the horizon.

When Automation Works Well

Recently I met Daniel Opler, CEO of Adwallet.io, which is a Danish company that has automated one of the most mind-numbing jobs that AdOps spends several hours each week doing:

• Taking screenshots of ads as they appear in real environments.
• Packaging them into a PDF or PowerPoint.
• Sending them to the advertiser, agency, or both.

Screenshots are the modern-day tear-sheets that show clients that their ads are in working order.

I was a bit surprised by how much time taking screenshots required, but I quickly got an education. “It’s ludicrous that here we are in 2022, and AdOps teams in large publishing houses must manually take hundreds, sometimes thousands of screenshots per month, then insert it into a PowerPoint deck and email it to their clients,” he told me. “And because it’s so manual, these publishers can’t provide screenshots to all their clients, as much as they’d like to. Only the biggest clients get screenshots of their ads as they appear on their sites.”

Opler did what any entrepreneur does when they see a gap: He launched a company to automate this task. Think of it as a platform for programmatic screenshots. 

Here’s how it works: Before a campaign goes live, the AdOps user determines which campaign screenshots to provide for the client — banner ad desktop, mobile, interstitial ad mobile, etc. Once the campaign goes live, the platform takes the screenshots automatically and stores them in a folder for that campaign. The platform takes screenshots of campaigns sold directly and those that appear “in the wild,” as Opler refers to programmatically placed ads.

AdOps user then selects which screenshots to send to the client. The platform then inserts them into a PowerPoint or PDF that includes the publisher’s logo and branding elements and sends it off. Some clients would rather import those screenshots into their internal systems via an API, which AdWallet.io easily supports.

What is the impact of this automation on AdOps teams? “In the world of AdOps, screenshots can be a pain point,” explained Sharon Goldsmith, Manager of Digital Advertising Operations for Tribune Publishing, Inc. “Eliminating a manual and mundane task, such as screenshots, has opened up time for growth opportunities. This has led to higher job satisfaction for our employees.” Now that process is automated, Goldsmith’s team can focus on optimizing and booking new business, a more rewarding task for all involved.

The Democratizing Effects of Automating AdOps Tasks

Automating repetitive tasks has a democratizing impact on everyone involved in the ecosystem.

The AdOps teams within publishers and agencies are relieved from repetitive tasks, like taking screenshots, essentially giving them back a full day of work to concentrate on other high-value and more personally rewarding work. “Nobody goes to university so they can take screenshots all day,” Opler said.

Conversely, employees who feel valued and engage in more meaningful work are far more likely to stay than look for another job. In addition to saving on recruitment and training costs, publishers or agencies benefit by keeping that hard-earned experience and industry knowledge on their payrolls. And their clients benefit from continuity.

It also means premium services like screenshots of ads appearing on a publisher’s website or in programmatic land can be made available to all advertisers, not just the ones with the million-dollar ad spend.

The post Let’s Get Serious About Automating the Last of AdOps Tedious Tasks appeared first on AdMonsters.