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?
