Admonsters Playbook: User Experience
The prominence of revenue operations as a critical function within the digital media world has had its ups and downs.
While programmatic and other indirect channels have proven ops as a serious revenue center, it’s also forced the department into highly unfamiliar territory such as creative development and user experience. And this more prominent role attracts the interest of other groups across the organization such as legal, IT/security and privacy/risk.
AdMonsters has long noted that ops professionals are the gatekeepers at digital publishers when it comes to advertising—nothing gets on the page without their (sometimes forced) approval. However, the the digital advertising industry is at a unique intersection: publishers’ revenue teams are eager to try any and every monetization resource as traditional digital revenue streams wane; however, creative has also never had such a high potential to be annoying, intrusive, alienating, downright threatening (e.g., malvertising) or prohibited (e.g., violating government regulations).
The situation is exacerbated by the disconnect between advertiser goals, publisher capabilities and audience acceptance. In response, digital readers are increasingly embracing ad-blocking extensions across platforms and governments are penalizing non-compliant activity.
While it may not seem intuitive, ops must do more than act as site gatekeepers who only follow publication-specific quality assurance guidelines. They must also actively analyze and strategize around how specific revenue efforts affect user experience.
This includes protecting the end user (and the site) from malware and other security concerns; validating all tech partners involved in advertising on the site; ensuring ad creative meets a certain standard; mediating the effect of ads on site speed and page weight; and complying with federal regulations around data privacy and other matters.
The AdMonsters Playbook: User Experience (developed with the support of The Media Trust) will examine these areas and more in an effort to help ops form an optimal user experience strategy.