Solidifying Your Foundation: An Ad Ops Perspective

The current state of the economy is having an impact on large, medium, and small sized businesses across the online industry, each feeling its effects in their own unique way. For many online publishers, advertising is typically the primary source of revenue generation, and online ad spending needs to remain strong for these businesses to be profitable. Moreover, due in large part to the current economic downturn, websites that haven’t traditionally run advertising, such as online retailers, are now beginning to do so in order to make up for decreasing sales. To weather the current economic challenges, these businesses need to secure a strong foundation on which to continue operating intelligently, which includes focusing on best practices within their support divisions.

New ad creative types, the ever expanding ways to advertise within video, interest targeting, and re-targeting technologies, are just a few of the blossoming areas within the online advertising industry. Agencies are constantly pushing the envelope by using these new and/or improving technologies to ensure that their advertising campaigns stay ahead of the curve and perform at their highest level. Publishers will always endeavor to support these new ad technologies in order to make sure their websites are eligible for inclusion on as many agency RFPs as possible. In order to do this, publisher-side advertising support teams must be prepared to quickly adjust to the ever-changing advertising landscape.

In addition to supporting evolving advertising technologies, publishers have also been combating potential risks to their bottom line using other approaches. Some have expanded their reach of saleable inventory by way of network affiliate sites, while many others are constantly managing remnant ad placements to drive incremental revenue and maximize effective CPMs. These heretofore time consuming tasks have been simplified by several emerging technologies, such as DART Network Builder, which enable publishers to more easily manage ad inventory across multiple sites, and remnant optimization technologies, such as AdMeld, PubMatic and Rubicon Project, that automatically optimize remnant impressions to maximize revenue. Proper implementation and support of these technologies is integral to ensure successful deployment and revenue recognition.

It’s important that companies perform a thorough analysis of how to best build out their advertising operations division. Having an experienced ad ops team in place can be the difference between recognizing millions of dollars in revenue instead of having to offer countless costly make-goods. One option these companies should consider is outsourcing this component to a team of professionals.

Here are a few of the significant benefits that can be achieved by working with an experienced outsourced ad operations partner:

• Staffing: Staffing around tight budgets can be avoided. For the same financial commitment, or possibly less, a company can have a whole team of ad operations professionals at its service. Worries regarding vacation days, unanticipated sick days, and potential employee turnover become things of the past.
• Coverage: Most of the big players in the outsourcing business offer multiple time zone coverage, which is especially useful when those last minute deals come in and need to be handled right away.
• Knowledge: Equipping companies with a high level of knowledge/expertise in all things related to ad operations allows them to keep up with industry buying trends and new technologies.
• Programming Efficiency: Companies will be able to keep their trafficking errors to a minimum, as their outsourced company will have well developed QA procedures in place.
• Partnerships: Avoid the frustration of figuring out which ad technology to work with, or which ad system to implement. Companies can leverage the established partnerships their outsourced company has built over the years.
• Focus: The current economic climate can distract to the point of derailment. Outsourcing allows companies to stay focused on both the task at hand and their vision, while their ad operations partner is making sure that requests are being handled properly and in a timely fashion.
• Motivation: Aside from finding qualified traffickers, the biggest challenge employers face within their trafficking department is keeping their traffickers motivated (more info on that and other trafficker related challenges can be found here).
• Play It Safe: Another angle to think about is outsourcing as a preventative measure. Companies can use an outsourced team as a component of their current team, to handle overflow, and/or for redundancy purposes in the event of unanticipated employee time off or turnover. It’s a great way for companies to protect themselves. There truly is safety in numbers.

The online advertising business is constantly evolving. Having a solid foundation in place on which to sell and deliver ad campaigns is a key contributor towards a company’s success. Companies who reinforce that foundation in order to further protect and maintain their advertising revenue will be better aligned to move forward, especially in a down economy. As detailed above, partnering with a strong outsourced ad operations company would accomplish exactly that.

Craig Leshen is the President of Outsourced Ad Ops (www.adops.com), a leading provider of around-the-clock online ad management services to both website publishers and agencies. Clients receive unmatched quality of service from their experienced staff of ad operations professionals. Outsourced Ad Ops’ offices are located in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Denver. Their strong ad ops teams operate in concert across all of their locations utilizing our highly efficient process that results in increased revenue recognition for your business.

(This has been re-posted from AdOps.com:  http://www.adops.com/news/?p=29)