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.
A Fresh Attempt to Slay the $31.5 Billion Digital Advertising Workflow Monster
The digital advertising industry is wasting $3.6 million dollars per hour with inefficient manual processes. Despite the high risk of failure, Google, Centro, Facilitate, Mediaocean, Bionic, and others are making fresh attempts to solve the complicated digital media planning dilemma.
Agency Operating Systems are the New Battleground
With the inefficiencies in digital media buying today, your agency’s operating system is becoming a critical factor in winning new business, hiring the best talent, and operating profitably.
Digital Media Enters the Bionic Age
As we approach the 19th anniversary of the first banner ad, Digital Media Planning is entering its third age: The Bionic Age.
NextMark Spawns Bionic Advertising Systems
NextMark today announced the creation of Bionic Advertising Systems, a new division focused on delivering technology that streamlines digital advertising workflow for digital marketers, their advertising agencies, and publishers.
Complexity is the Digital Ad Agency’s Best Friend
I once heard Terence Kawaja remark that “complexity is the agency’s best friend.” It’s hard to argue with that. Early digital agencies were necessary because doing things like running e-mail campaigns, building websites, and buying banner ads were really complicated. You needed nerdy guys who knew how to write HTML and understood what “Atlas” did. Companies like Operative grew admirable services businesses that took advantage of the fact that trafficking banner ads really sucked, and large publishers couldn’t be bothered to build those capabilities internally. The early days were great times for digital agencies. They were solving real problems. Fast forward 13 years. Digital agencies are still thriving, mostly by unpacking other types of complexity. “Social media experts” were created to consult marketers on the new social marketing channel, “trading desks” launched to leverage the explosion of incomprehensible RTB systems, and terms like “paid, owned, and earned” were coined to complexify digital options. It’s hard being a marketer. So much [...]
The Elephant in the Room: Agency Compensation
Earlier this month, during the Agency-Only Day at the iMedia Agency Summit, I gave a presentation on agency automation and streamlining the media planning process. It’s a complicated and expensive process still done manually at most agencies.
Let’s End the Human Trafficking in Digital Media
In the envisioned world of “programmatic direct,” computers buy all digital media automatically with astonishing efficiency and without human intervention. Contrast that with today’s reality: an army of DSOs – Digital Switchboard Operators – carrying out digital media plans using a manual 42-step process. On the buy side, this process typically requires 482 hours in media agency labor per campaign. On the sell side, anecdotal evidence indicates even more time is spent among the publishers. One of the most time consuming, error prone, and soul crushing parts of the process is ad trafficking. Trafficking is the sub-process of setting up ad servers for a given campaign. Those not familiar with the digital media “sausage factory” might think this process is entirely automated and done with the click of a button. Nothing could be further from the truth. With directly sold ads, trafficking is done manually by humans employing a great deal of effort. Here’s how it works today. The trafficking [...]
If it’s not Programmatic Premium, then what is it?
I recently returned from an exciting IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Phoenix, where a packed Arizona Biltmore resort was host to over 800 digital media luminaries. On the tip of many tongues over a two day session was “programmatic premium,” the term our industry is using to describe the buying of digital media in a more automated way. One particular “Town Hall” type meeting was particularly spirited, as leaders sparred over what “programmatic” meant, whether or not publishers should be using it, and how agencies were leveraging it. Here is what I heard: We are calling it the wrong thing. Like it or not, the term “programmatic” is tied to the concept of real time bidding. This is natural, given the fact that the last 5 years in ad tech have largely revolved around DSPs, SSPs, and cookie-level data. This creates a problem because, when you add the word “premium” into the mix, you have a really big disconnect. Most folks don’t [...]
3 Reasons Why “Programmatic Premium” Doesn’t Work Today
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about “programmatic premium” – using machines to fully automate the purchase of premium advertising inventory.
The 10 Biggest Problems with RFPs
It’s the fall media planning season. It’s the time of the year when leaves fall and make a mess of all the yards in the neighborhood. It’s also the time of the year when RFPs fall and make a mess of all the desks and inboxes in the media world. In The Fiesta Nobody Loves, Doug Weaver writes: “As we enter the fall season and another online advertising year begins to ebb, the human-powered agency RFP process continues — against all odds — to cling to life. For those looking in from the outside, the RFP (request for proposal) is a weekly ritual in which an agency sends out digital planning requirements to five times as many sites and networks as they’ll be able to buy from. The sales reps get all lathered up, put their entire organization into Def-Con 4 status, and turn a detailed proposal around in 36 or 48 hours with relatively little quality information and — unbeknownst [...]