Publisher Forum Sonoma Summary

Event Summary

AdMonsters Publisher Forum XXXVMarch 1-4, 2015 | Sonoma Valley, Calif.

Making Media Matter

More than 100 senior ad operations leaders met in the California Wine Country to

discuss, debate and shape the future of digital media and advertising.

Additional Sponsors

Keynotes

Winners’ Circle: Panel With DMLA Award Recipients – Dan Murphy, Univision Online;

Joanna Bloor, Pandora; Matthew Corbin, Facebook

Writing the Book on Programmatic – Michael Smith, Hearst Corporation

Innovation Through Collaboration – Steve Patrizi, Imgur

Sessions

Mobile: Past the Traffic Inflection Point – Christine Desrosiers and Kat Griffin, Baby Center

Revving Up Programmatic – Cynthia Butler, Ask.com and Brian Brownie, eBay

Management In the House – Rose Steinberg, Microsoft

Data Management: From Drilling to Refining – Ben Wallace, StubHub and Elizabeth Corbin, BSkyB

Operating on a Creative Level – Dana Langford, Expedia

The Tagless Option (Note: Requires Tags) – Emry DowningHall, StudyBreak Media

Ad Ops Mentorship – Wendy Mazzoni, Wikia Inc.

Viewability Working Session – Raef Godwin, PGA TOUR

The Broadcaster Bunch – Stephanie Giarrusso, NBCUniversal

DMLA Winners’

PanelMatt Corbin

Global Agency Team

Facebook

Joanna Bloor

VP, Sales Operations

Pandora Media

Dan Murphy,

SVP, Interactive Research

Univision Online

Keynote Panel

DMLA Winners’ Panel

• Only in the last three or four years has there been a wake-up call at the executive level regarding the importance of employee retention and development.

• You weren't hired because of your resume, you were hired because you articulated a solution to a problem, said Pandora’s Joanna Bloor

• “Our hiring process is not about if you had a 4.0 and swam the English Channel,” said Facebook’s Matthew Corbin

• “Sight, sound and motion are the great advertising mediums we've invented,” said Corbin.

• If we were going to compete with radio, we needed to speak the language, said Bloor regarding Pandora Radio’s jump into the ad market.

• If you can’t speak the currency of advertisers, how can you meet let alone understand their objectives?

• Executive level ops leaders have to possess the tech know-how: “Not only know how the sausage is made, but how to go to market,” said Univision’s Dan Murphy.

Writing the Book on

Programmatic

Michael Smith

VP, Revenue Platforms

Hearst Corporation

Keynote

Writing the Book on Programmatic

• “We wanted to make accessible all the different types of technologies; we wanted to pull the curtain back,” Hearst Corporation’s Michael Smith says on his book “Targeted.” Learn more.

• The private marketplace hasn't developed to its full potential yet. Money is flowing more so in open exchange, but that will change, says Smith.

• “Being open for business on a multitude of platforms has worked well for us,” says Smith about Hearst’s changing philosophy towards digital.

• The fulfillment of digital is increasingly done robotically, but the people who are in charge of the robots are the most crucial asset.

• Engineering skills are increasingly becoming great assets for ops teams. Any kind of engineering or development experience is a true boon for the team.

Innovation Through

Collaboration

Steve Patrizi

VP, Sales and Marketing

Imgur

Keynote

Innovation Through Collaboration

• Business and creative – The ad industry is one of the few places where these two things intersect well, says Imgur's Steve Patrizi

• What’s the key to campaign success? Being clever, witty, and respecting the consumer, says Patrizi.

• 85% of skippable ads are, indeed, skipped.• “Let's create advertising that is so relevant to this audience that they won't want to

skip it – they'll want to engage with it,” says Patrizi. • Imgur bootstrapped its first five years of existence through programmatic advertising.• “Nothing beats a great process, says Patrizi. Your ad ops team can help hold your #ads

to higher standards.”• Ad ops can help make your advertisers up their creative game by demanding higher

quality control.• Good targeting is essential to respecting the consumer.

Revving Up

Programmatic

Cynthia Butler

Sr. Manager, Programmatic

Ask.com

Brian Brownie

Director, Ad Ops

eBay

Session

Revving Up Programmatic

• Balancing multiple SSPs takes a great deal of tinkering; establishing where to send inventory will depend on ongoing performance reports. No one model will work for all pubs.

• PMPs remain a very manual process within an automatic system – it’s tough to get buyers to adjust.

• Big challenge of the moment: unlocking the value of first-party data in private exchanges –theoretically could optimize against two sets of data

• Pubs must understand advertiser goals to get PMPs to succeed, but getting agencies to share can be like pulling teeth.

• Experiment in letting the open marketplace take precedence over PMPs – see where you get better pricing.

• Programmatic and viewability are just beginning to cross, notably with querying viewability scores for placements.

• Programmatic direct fails implicitly in its real-time nature – the basic idea is to remove ops from the flow, but the tech is still heavily flawed.

• Marking URLs to make inventory anonymous can drive pricing research in the open market.

Data Management:

From Drilling to

Refining

Elizabeth Corbin

Head of Digital Operations

BSkyB

Ben Wallace

Manager, Ad Ops

StubHub

Session

Data Management: From Drilling to Refining

• In seeking a DMP and integrating, team up with other departments – in particular marketing, which will likely be your partner in DMP management. There are plenty of things to learn from other departments using the DMP, so you should keep up constant communication.

• Hardest part with the initial integration: deciding what data streams are actually relevant. • Because the tech is very complicated, customer service should be a top priority in picking a

DMP. Beyond the selling team, ensure the vendor account management team understands your workings and can determine how best to insert their product.

• The major advantage of a full DMP versus an ad server offering like Google Audience is flexibility and independence, including the ability to plug into multiple SSPs.

• Log-in/registration data is more important than ever, in particular with the proliferation of online GRP metrics. DMPs can incorporate third-party sources for ever-heralded demo data

Operating on a

Creative Level –

Dana Langford,

Expedia

Dana Langford

Expedia

Session

Operating on a Creative Level

• Maintaining a style guide across POS and other products is crucial; but loosening constraints is also important.

• Maintain consistent QA across the board – frequent face-to-face interaction; ‘around-the-sun’ coverage.

• Stay on top of your campaign management team – share best practices (i.e., Wiki), give CMs more flexibility over creative process (reducing manual steps and effective data use also beneficial to CM team).

• Identify effective ways to prioritize projects, consider options for auto creating spec sheets

Resources

AdMonsters Playbooks

Important Links

Humans Sleep, Fraud Bots Don’tPercentage of Website Traffic Due to BotsBots Can Do Everything You CanMRC Accredited Viewable Impression and/or Ad Verification Vendors: Enhanced Description

AdMonsters Resources

events

OPS – London – April 28, 2015

OPS – New York – June 9, 2015

AdMonsters Publisher Forum – Brussels – June 21-24, 2015

AdMonsters Publisher Forum – Charleston, SC – August 23-26, 2015

Marketing Operations Tech Summit – New Orleans – October 18-21, 2015

AdMonsters Publisher Forum – La Jolla (San Diego) – November 8-11, 2015

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