Digital advertising has presented challenges and opportunities for publishers looking to future-proof their businesses. In a recent LinkedIn Live event, I sat down with Justin Wohl, the Chief Revenue Officer of Snopes, to discuss the key trends and strategies shaping the future of ad ops and the ad tech stack. 

Wohll offered a unique perspective on the shifting dynamics between buyers and sellers. For instance, the supply side has been catching up to the buy side, becoming more sophisticated and aware of their value. This newfound empowerment is crucial to the industry’s evolution as publishers strive to optimize their partnerships and drive greater efficiency in their ad tech stacks. 

Beyond the changing publisher-buyer relationship, Wohl also delved into the potential impact of emerging technologies, such as AI and generative AI, on the future of ad ops. 

But he heeds a warning about Google’s trial with the DOJ. Wohl explains that the decisions made in this case could profoundly influence the future of pre-bid and header bidding, potentially unlocking more efficient and pure programmatic opportunities for publishers. “Should that unlock for us, it’ll create plenty of movement and opportunity for publishers to, like better, optimize and become more efficient with how we run our auctions and sell our inventory.”

Want to get the full scoop? Watch the full live below: 

Publishers Grow More Sophisticated as Ad Tech Evolves

Over the years, the ad tech industry has significantly transformed, and publishers are still learning to find their footing. According to Wohl, the dynamic between the buy-side and sell-side has been shifting, with publishers playing a more active role.

“I think that the experience of always being on the supply side, always being on the publisher side of this business, has been one of catching up to the buy side,” he explains.

Wohll notes that publishers are becoming more sophisticated and aware of their value proposition, leading to a more balanced understanding of the tech stack between buyers and sellers.

“We’ve become smarter, more sophisticated, more aware of our value proposition. As tech understanding comes to parity on both the buy and sell sides, we should keep seeing this evolution of more sophistication and self-determination on the supply side, where we know the value of our inventory and can sell it successfully,” said Wohl. 

Snopes FactBot: Integrating AI in Ad Tech 

Interest in integrating AI and generative AI technologies is growing. Wohl points out the difference between traditional machine learning, which has been valuable for data analysis, and the new opportunities generative AI presents for publishers.

One example of Snopes’ use of AI is its fact-checking bot, designed to be transparent when it doesn’t have an answer. Rather than generating inaccurate responses, the bot informs users when it cannot address a query. Snopes then logs those unanswered questions and uses large language models to analyze recurring topics, providing valuable insights for the editorial team to expand their fact-checking coverage.

This strategy helps Snopes understand audience interests while expanding its content. However, Wohl also emphasizes the high costs of using generative AI. The expense per query, he explains, is significantly higher than the revenue generated from those queries — about five times more. As publishers consider adopting these technologies, Wohl advises carefully evaluating the potential benefits and costs, focusing on practical applications that can optimize efficiency and revenue.

Practical Strategies for Optimizing the Ad Tech Stack 

Drawing from his own experiences, Wohl urges publishers to understand their programmatic partners’ contributions to revenue versus the opportunities provided. 

“One of the recurring conversations I have with our SSP partners is about their performance. We run a direct-only auction with no reselling, involving around 20 SSPs, each with a direct seat. Every quarter, they all ask where they rank—whether they were our third-largest or smallest buyer.”

Wohl suggests that publishers should come prepared for industry events, such as the upcoming Pub Forum Scottsdale conference, with this level of partner analysis. 

“I want to optimize my partners and know who sits where so we can talk about the business and why that is.” By understanding the nuances of their ad tech stack, publishers can make informed decisions about optimizing their partners, determining which ones to include or exclude from their auctions, and ultimately driving greater efficiency and revenue. 

During his session at AdMonsters PubForum Scottsdale, Wohl plans to explore this concept of partner optimization.

The post LinkedIn Live Replay: The Future of Ad Ops According to Snopes’ Justin Wohl appeared first on AdMonsters.

As we turn an economic corner for the worse, it matters greatly that many ad tech companies and products either came about or experienced most of their growth under relatively rosy economic conditions. The ad tech product features and value propositions that marketers prized in the Good Times likely need to be adapted to suit the Not-So-Good Times.

It’s Time for Ad Tech to Step Up

Overall, ad tech has been and will continue to be a success story, but marketers would be smart to scrutinize the parts of ad tech that may not hold up as well anymore, such as clunky products, questionable campaign measurement, and gold-plated prices. Marketers facing the pressures of even a brief recession (which still implies a multi-year recovery) need ad tech platforms that will help them navigate a more adverse, uncertain world where consumers spend less money, brands have fewer resources due to budget cuts, and “flat is the new growth.”

I’ve outlined three important ways ad tech can step up to the challenge. I could probably think of ten more. I’m curious what else you, dear reader, would add to this list.

One: Marketers Will Need Ad Tech That Works Out of the Box

In the world of enterprise software, expecting a platform to “just work” is probably asking too much. But when brands no longer have as much time and budget to expend configuring and fine-tuning temperamental ad tech platforms, marketing teams are naturally going to gravitate toward the products of least resistance.

This could take a number of forms inside ad tech stacks: fewer features or “lite” product versions, a culling of fragile “data pipes” and “data hops” that don’t actually add much value, or something as simple as better Help content and documentation.

Marketers should look for road-tested products with fewer things that might break, and more accessible help when something does.

Two: Marketers Will Need Airtight Attribution

A grim economic picture will inevitably lead to corporate budget cuts and difficulty justifying advertising campaign expenditures. Unless, of course, a team can demonstrate to their CFO that a particular campaign or tactic is genuinely contributing to the health and growth of the business by making money, lowering customer churn, building market share and so forth. However, much of ad tech still runs on so-called “proxy metrics” and “vanity metrics.” Basic click and conversion reports may not be enough anymore.

A dire need for genuine attribution measurement comes at an interesting juncture for ad tech, which was already suffering “death of the cookie” measurement challenges before COVID-19 hit. Other ID types (e.g., mobile) may be next on the chopping block. Ad tech will have its work cut out for it.

As with “Does it work out of the box?” the platforms that can best answer the question “Did it lead to actual sales?” will serve marketers in a recession better than solutions that look like money pits to CFOs.

Three: Marketers Will Need Risk-free SaaS Pricing

Ad tech has always touted “pay as you go” SaaS pricing, but CMOs and ad tech sales executives know this isn’t entirely true (often for perfectly good reasons). As marketing budgets fall, many of the pricing hurdles set by ad tech platforms will have to come down. Marketers will have smaller budgets and scant appetite for financial risk.

Pricing can be considered along many dimensions, including startup costs, recurring overhead costs, contract terms, and minimums. Outcome- or performance-based pricing is also going to start looking relatively more attractive too. I don’t think this begs a wholesale shift over to pay-per-click (PPC), but when outcomes can be natively baked into an ad tech offering, it really minimizes the risk marketers are taking with their spend.

Savvy, cost-conscious marketers should keep an eye out for ad tech pricing and performance models that better reflect the realities of a recession.

Cue the Bean-counters

The three ideas above basically serve as inputs to Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) models that marketers can use to get the resources they need in a recession (and that ad tech product managers can use to stay competitive). Financial models and cost justifications aren’t very exciting, but then again, as ad tech has matured into a form of enterprise software, it was already on a path to existing very much at the pleasure of CFOs.

With any luck, this period of both marketers and their ad tech partners groveling to bean-counters will be short-lived and we can all get back to enjoying more Good Times. Keeping my fingers crossed for everyone.

The post In a Recession, Marketers Urgently Need Three Things From Ad Tech appeared first on AdMonsters.

If you really wanted, you could muddy the water, argue that advertising is a category within the broader world of marketing, and suggest all ad tech technically falls under the martech umbrella. I don’t want to, because it doesn’t help this discussion very much. Just saying you could.

Practically speaking, there’s a difference between advertising tech and marketing tech. Ad tech refers to processes used to find and speak to anonymized consumers or audiences among an ocean of data points. Martech refers to processes used to find and speak to known, identifiable consumers. Ad tech is about prospecting the unknown. Martech is about maintaining existing consumer relationships.

Martech and ad tech are both roughly involved in automating and optimizing that old “right person/right message/right time” bit. There’s a quote from a byline by Dave Helmreich from LiveIntent (a vendor that incorporates ad tech and martech functionalities) that I return to a lot when we talk about this stuff: “Marketing implies a continuing relationship with a known person, rather than shots in the dark. Advertising is more transactional.” Ad tech tends to focus on buying and selling ad inventory, and services that facilitate or enhance those transactions. Martech encompasses things like content management, email, CRM, social media. Martech focuses on custom communications, and on analyzing and optimizing the relationship between the business and the customer.

Ad tech, for the most part, has historically engaged in piecing together profiles of users, relying on cookie data to make an informed guess about any given user’s interests and demographics. Martech doesn’t need to make so many assumptions, because it’s used to communicate to people who are “in the system” already. You know who they are, and you have a lot of information about them, much of which they’ve given you willingly. They’ve logged into your systems, and you probably know how to reach them personally. The tech helps you understand how and when to reach them, and how to make that process more efficient.

Martech might be perceived as less “sexy” than ad tech—it doesn’t tend to go as hard as ad tech into things like machine learning and AI. But it’s consistently useful over time, when and where it’s implemented. The consistency factor is part of why we’ve seen VC investment on martech hold steady while investment in ad tech has cooled off in recent years, and why we’ve seen figures suggesting large companies across several verticals were spending as much or more money on their marketing tech capabilities than they were on advertising itself.

That leads us to one part of why ad tech people are increasingly in a position to be conversant about martech. The ad industry wants lasting relationships with consumers, not a series of fly-by-night digital pings. Martech holds a few keys to understanding those lasting relationships. The buy side wants the messaging in advertising to become more personal. Doing so will require digging deeper into consumer relationships with publishers and brands alike. Basically, ad tech wants what marketers have had all along, and there’s a lot of activity around stitching together and automating those two.

AdMonsters resources:

Marketing Tech Comes Home for Publishers

The Unwalled Garden: LiveIntent on Scaling the Identity-Based Market

MarTech, Big Data and the Publisher Quest for the Holy Grail Dashboard

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