How Technology Is Digitally Transforming Ad Operations
Discover how technology has transformed ad ops and will continue to do so in the future.
The advertising industry has evolved over the last couple of decades. The digitization of ads and technological advancements have revolutionized the industry. The same holds good for advertising operations (Ad Ops). Discover how technology is transforming ad ops and how it will continue to do so in the future.
The first ever banner ad on the internet was released on HotWired in the 90s with an intriguing message, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.” The ad was clicked by about 44% of people who saw it and changed the ads game forever.
With the advent of the internet and digitization, the world has changed how we consume content and services. The digitization of ads completely revolutionized the industry and set it on a growth track unlike any before it. According to Statista, today, the global digital advertising market is expected to reach $616 billion, with 89% of digital ads revenue set to be programmatic by 2027. The U.S. digital advertising industry, which leads the world in ad spending, is projected to reach $150bn+ by 2024, according to a PwC and IAB study.
Before the Digital Era
The digital revolution took some time to truly impact and change the way media houses worked. Michael Alania, Executive Vice President at Outsourced Ad Ops, in a conversation with AdMonsters, once said about the evolution of the ad ops workflow, “Fourteen years ago, there wasn’t workflow; it was triage like you were in a MASH unit. Companies eventually put in processes because they understood how valuable ad ops is to revenue recognition.”
‘Ad ops’ was an unheard-of term in the era of excel sheets and manual buying. Buying and selling digital ads meant human and email interactions, manual bidding, campaign reporting and tracking campaign delivery via a sea of spreadsheets. These systems were not only time-consuming but also expensive and had high margins of error. Manually managing large ad inventories made it impossible to monitor consumption and delivery metrics, holding publishers (i.e., the owners of ad inventories) back from growth. These ways of working needed to change, and they needed to change fast. That is when the industry turned to tech.
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Digital Transformation and the Automation of Ad Ops Workflows
With the evolution of technology and digitization of workflows, ad ops teams at media houses became integral to growth. Today, a typical publisher manages multiple campaigns running simultaneously across channels and ad formats. These deals are sold directly and programmatically, each delivering multiple KPIs. And most importantly, revenue is linked to KPIs, as simple as impressions or as complex as app installs.
Ad ops professionals are tasked with delivering on their organizations’ ad commitments, ensuring no revenue is at risk. A typical ad ops team handles creative management, campaign setup and flighting, yield management, billing, reporting and analytics, and much more.
Automating ad operations has not only helped save time and costs but has also seen more advertisers and publishers turn to programmatic channels to generate revenue. According to a report by eMarketer, over 90% of digital display ad spend will be programmatic this year. Programmatic channels allow advertisers to buy impressions from several publishers and help them reach their target audiences more efficiently. Publishers benefit from having more competition for their ad inventories, helping them earn more for their ads.
The Future of Ad Operations
As is evident, technology has significantly impacted ad operations. Ad stacks are elaborate and complex — often with multiple or custom ad servers, multiple programmatic partners, data partners and more. Ad ops is no more about compiling and analyzing reports. It is now truly a strategic revenue-influencing function. Considering the sheer volume of campaigns that need to be managed daily, ad ops professionals need to use tech to solve critical problems and ensure revenue growth.
In the future, we expect to see ad ops ninjas continue to use data and technology to solve critical business problems. Publishers will always want to maximize their revenue, and a large part of that task falls to ad ops teams. These professionals will be expected to spend more and more time optimizing, gathering intelligence from data, and using that data to make revenue-driving decisions. The current regulatory and policy environment will undoubtedly add more complications to the mix.
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Successful ad ops professionals understand that being efficient is not enough today. They need to be natively comfortable with technology, drive experiments, measure results and do all of this at lightning speed. The best publishers today already realize that tech-driven ad ops teams can have a direct revenue impact. The most successful publishers of tomorrow will be those that realize this sooner rather than later.
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Image Source Shutterstock
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