It seems the industry has battled for years over 4th party ad calls.  Publishers don’t like them because it’s extra load time.  Agencies and advertisers love them because they are usually there to verify, provide additional data, or serve a very useful function.  The real problem is that with many publishers not wanting or allowing 4th party ad calls, ad tags could very easily integrate 5th, 6th, and 7th party ad calls at this point – there are that many great services that deliver value.  How will the industry tackle this?

First, let’s quickly identify where they’re coming from.  Having an audience measurement pixel, like one from Quantcast, in each ad would sure be nice.  Then we can see the general makeup of the audience who is viewing the ad and whether or not it fits the target we wanted to hit.  Having verification is a must, like a pixel from Adometry or DoubleVerify.  Certainly there are times where two ad servers are used, such as a rich media ad server but then also a standard ad server so all data can be in one place.  We’re up to six (user, publisher, and standard ad server are the first three.)  And more valuable metrics and verification services keep coming up.  How can we integrate this value without hanging up the user’s experience to such that no publisher will accept all this?

One solution is a universal tag container that cookie matches with each of these companies and outright transfers the pixel firing to its own servers.  TagMan is a container solution but it still requires pixels to be fired while the user is on the page.  It delays them do it doesn’t delay load, but if the user navigates away too quickly, the calls aren’t made.  The other solution would be for ad serving companies to buy these other companies and integrate them into their own ad call.  If you’re an ad serving company looking to make a real challenge to DoubleClick, installing all of this functionality within a 3rd party ad server would be enough reason for a whole lots of advertisers to make the switch.

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No one has dedicated more resources to grab online dollars from D.C. political advertising than Google.  They have built a team and offer full service search, display, and ad serving.  This past Saturday there was a great irony, however.

We also handle a significant number of digital political campaigns and for anyone who knows political advertising it is a seven-day-a-week job.  Messages change at any time on any day regardless of the standard advertising work week.  We received a client email at 11am CST Saturday that some text changes needed to be made to a current high-profile campaign.  Luckily we had all the files we needed and our production director had the changes done within an hour.  Our VP of Ad Ops was available to make the change out in our ad server 10 minutes later and the entire change would have taken two hours from start to finish – on a Saturday – with no one at Goodway knowing this change was coming. Except for one problem.

DoubleClick, our ad server and the $3.1 billion ad serving acquisition Google made last year, is down every Saturday for maintenance during the day.  So, despite everything being ready to go on our side we were at the mercy of Google’s engineers making regularly scheduled updates.  It took three more hours for Google to get DCLK back online.  In the meantime, a couple hundred thousand impressions were served.  So, Google… Your efforts to bring D.C. into the digital world are admirable and good for everyone.  But, to do so requires you keep their hours, not the other way around.  How about moving DCLK’s maintenance time to overnight to show your real dedication to D.C.’s digital efforts?

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When ad networks launched ten years ago one of the greatest things about them was the ability to run a campaign across hundreds or thousands of sites and, not only get great performance and value, but get learnings from the campaign.  Because you could see what was performing in which channels or sites from the many, it was like free market research.  At the time it was a great approach and despite the cost of non-performing media to get those learnings, it was innovative and a good value for the time.

Fast forward to now and there is no longer an excuse for “Let’s Run It On Our Network And See What Works” campaigns.  We have become too sophisticated with our data and knowledge of users, brands, and digital media use the LRIOONASWW strategy any more.  Through user-level cookie/data exchanges we now have data on almost every single internet user on the planet.  Some of it is true online-based behavior while some of offline and demographic or psychographic-oriented. Using almost any of this data is going to at least help you pre-target better than the LRIOONASWW strategy.  Second, composite indexing through Compete, Quantcast, or even Nielsen can help you include and remove many sites from a larger list to narrow the buy down before you start.  Sure, there is the chance that a site that indexes an 84 against your brand or category ends up to be a top performer, but it’s a small chance.  More likely is that you’d have to spend thousands of dollars of media on other similar sites that follow the logic of the model and end up not performing well at all.

While this may be self-promotional (it is the Goodway Blog after all), there really is no excuse for RON network buys any more.  Our automotive network, Beep!, now has a custom-build site list for every brand based on clickstream shopping behavior from our partner, Compete.com.  Beyond that, we’re applying cookie-level data to every campaign to enhance performance (to be fair, so do many other networks.)  The bottom line is that there is no more room for LRIOONASWW – demand more from your network partners!

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Today’s digital world is rapidly advancing and almost becoming too innovative for the major publishers/portals to handle.  Seems weird writing that since these are the companies that used to be the bulls of the industry when it came to development and innovation.  But somehow, these companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN  and the larger independent publishers are becoming less eager to work with new technologies until they can be fully vetted and approved by their overstretched tech teams.  I truly understand protecting one’s interests, one’s data and ensuring the end user is being protected from malicious companies.  However, agencies and networks are being asked for more efficiencies, transparency and performance from the media buy which would mandate outside platforms are used within buys. This requires a 4^th party ad call to be made when ads are served.

These creative optimization and verification tools like Doubleverify, Adometry, Adexpose, and Tumri are relatively new and each have their own methodology to how they render the ad call and report on the buy.  All different methodology, but they all require a call to be made to their servers to process the data.  If you’re like 90% of all online display agencies you are probably serving the creative through your 3^rd party server for many reasons.  If you add the optimization and verification code to your tags, you are now making a 4^th party call and in violation of all major publishers and won’t be able to serve across their content until the product is certified or you remove the code.  Seems reasonable if the certification process was a 2 day turn around.  But, that’s not the case and many startup’s and clients are being denied the right to optimize, verify and attribute conversations across these platforms on a site by site basis because the publishers will not certify the technology fast enough.  This certification process can take months and we all know that a month is like a year in the digital space!    The online industry is all about quick thinking, resolution driven start ups that fill a need fast.  The need today is for better transparency, optimization and reporting across the exchanges, networks and DSPs.

Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN – act now, time is of the essence!

We as an industry need to push these publishers for approval of useful and beneficial startups so we can better manage clients’ media.  This isn’t a request from most advertisers and agencies, it’s a demand.  We’re growing the online display space and taking on larger budgets.  With these shifts in media allocations comes accountability.  We are now seeing more money in the space and we want to keep it here so we can continue to creatively evolve the medium.  Approving technology partners faster and with more accuracy will do the trick.  Declining them simply because you enjoy a wall around your garden is to no one’s benefit. It’s an open source world and every major publisher needs to be comfortable vetting and understanding new products developed outside their war rooms.  Publishers, put the onus on the start ups to provide everything you need to certify their product, but make sure the certification is quick and accurate so we can continue to advance.   Otherwise, we could see budgets start shifting back to mediums where clients are more comfortable, and that benefits absolutely no one.

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