Would you like to streamline the workflow at your advertising agency? Here’s a collection of tools and resources to help you automate your agency.
What I Learned About the Future of Media Planning at iMedia
Last week, I learned about the future of media planning with about a hundred media agency executives at the iMedia Agency Summit.
Are you using Flintstones tools in the Jetsons age of advertising?
In today’s fast-paced world of programmatic advertising, you can’t afford to fall behind on technology because you may never catch up. This can be devastating to your organization. Here's why...
27 Tips to Build a Healthy Programmatic Direct Advertising API Ecosystem
To unlock the potential of Programmatic Direct, we need to fix the problems of the business arrangements and the design of the API protocols. Here are 27 tips to build a healthy Programmatic Direct advertising API ecosystem.
Interview with True Media’s Sean Cotton
Sean Cotton, Vice President of Digital and Social Media for True Media, shares his experiences struggling to keep up with triple-digit growth at his media agency, searching for a media planning and buying solution, and eventually finding Bionic Media Planner. This 26-minute interview was conducted on February 13, 2015 via web conference by Hollis Thomases, Digital Ad-Marketing Consultant, ROI Diva, LLC. Here are the highlights from the interview: Struggling with agency growing pains (located at 4:49) “Our agency is 10 years old and has been very successful from day one. Each year has been triple digit growth that we've been in business. A couple years in and I could see that we were going to have to become better and more efficient at planning and buying to accommodate all this growth. I started talking to various companies that were just starting out in the space of programmatic planning and buying with some success, but it seems like there [...]
4 Essential Questions to Ask When Choosing Your Media Buying Platform
Choosing your media buying platform is a critical decision that will make or break your media planning and buying operation. It’s a decision on a tool that you’ll be using for your daily work for years to come. It will give you a distinct competitive advantage if you make the right choice. Or it can bankrupt you if you make the wrong choice. Using Microsoft Excel for media planning and media buying drains your energy and prevents you from reaching your full potential. Excel’s inefficiency is infamous in professional media circles. But finding a media buying platform to replace Excel can be an extremely confusing and frustrating experience. It seems that everyone is offering a media buying platform these days. When you Google “media buying platform” (with the quotes to limit the search results), you get more than 20,000 results. This creates a long, confusing list of options. In reality, only a small fraction of those options actually provide a [...]
Advertiser vs. Agency Debate – Part III – Follow the Money
Until advertisers stop punishing agencies for efficiency through broken compensation systems, agencies will continue to have a talent problem.
I See Dead People… Responding to my Marketing!
In today’s digital marketing, we seem increasingly dependent on algorithms and attribution models for targeting and measurement.
Do Digital Media Agencies Have a Plan?
Digital agencies used to get paid for unpacking an incredibly complicated digital landscape for marketers. Faced with all kinds of new marketing opportunities, advertisers turned to savvy digital agencies to figure out where to spend their money, and how much of it to dedicate to display, mobile and social channels. The dingy little secret was that the agencies didn’t really plan much of anything. The way it worked was that agency planners would make an Excel template, create an RFP document, instruct the media owners to send back all kinds of creative ideas and fill out the media plan template. RFPs sent publisher teams spinning into action, churning out exciting-looking PowerPoints with screenshots and suggested spending levels. Not much of this was scientific. Publishers often promised more inventory than could be delivered, knowing they would never get the full budget allocation. Agencies asked for various “budget levels,” knowing they would allocate only $50,000 per publisher – but asking to see [...]
Know These 5 AdTech Memes for 2014
Well, at least it’s not the “year of mobile” again. Or, maybe it is. After several days of media investment banking conferences (Gridley and JEGI), I can reliably report that 2014 will be “the year” of many uber-trends ,some of which will enrich the M&A bankers who have a focus on the increasingly frothy ad technology and marketing space. Here are five memes to consider: “Mobile First” If you were to believe every ad tech panelist, you might be inclined to throw your laptop in the East River. Apparently—despite desktop only slightly starting to lose overall time-spent share to mobile on a year-over-year basis—nobody is developing ad tech solutions for the desktop anymore. Everyone is “mobile first,” meaning that they are writing code for tablet and mobile phone browsers and apps before developing solutions for the poor laptop or desktop computer. Of course, mobile devices are showing explosive growth, and clearly where the majority of consumers’ time will be found [...]
The Battle for Workflow Automation
Even though programmatic RTB has seen the lion’s share of venture capital funding and an enormous amount of innovation, RTB buying only accounts for 20%-30% of all digital media dollars. The real money still flows through the direct buying process, with agencies spending up to 400 hours and $50,000 to create the typical campaign, and publishers burning through 1,600 hours a month and 18% of their revenue responding to RFPs. What a mess….and an opportunity. Everybody’s battling for a slice of that direct sales pie, and the game is all about helping buyers and sellers automate the manual processes that drive almost 80% of transactional value. The Holy Grail for both sides is a web based, connected platform that will enable planners and sellers to thrust aside Excel, and start to transact business in the cloud. Although a number of companies have tried and failed to deliver on the promise of workflow automation, the time seems ripe for true adoption, [...]