• by Eldad Persky , October 7, 2009

SNAFU, when sanitized, stands for "Situation Normal: All Fouled Up." This slang acronym, which originates from World War II military lingo, is used to describe chaotic situations that are at the same time accepted as normalcy. It may also be used to describe the current state of digital.

 

There is not one step in the campaign management process that lives up to the promise of efficiency and automation worthy of this digital age and channel. Yet industry insiders seem to accept this as the most normal of situations. While this predicament may be understandable in a young, undeveloped industry, it is not becoming of us after all we've been through. Who's to blame? All of us --media and creative agencies, publishers, and perhaps to a larger extent, technology vendors. Let's take a step back. Where is the problem? Well, it lives everywhere.

Planning is difficult -- we use Nielsen and comScore to fulfill our minimal planning obligation, while in fact we have little confidence in their true impact. Historical campaign data is hardly available or actionable; the various planning resources are disconnected from each other and from the following steps in the process. Media Buying is excruciating -- RFPs and IOs are exchanged manually, and true electronic media buying is still far in the future. Seamless integration into the DDS billing platform and others is as elusive as ever; automatic buying optimization is experimental at best.

Trafficking is infuriating -- traffickers are spending days trying to push media plans into awkward and unforgiving platforms, refreshing browsers to find live ad screen grabs one by one, and endlessly exchanging tags with publishers while struggling to avoid looming catastrophes.

Analytics is despairing -- if you make it through the Sisyphean effort of consolidating numerous separate data sources, you're likely to end up with a vast collection of data that leaves you less intelligent. Advertising on mobile devices has been the "next big thing" for years, but we just can't seem to get it together.

Cross-channel marketing is impossible -- search and display are managed in silos, while the true path to conversion is often ignored. In-stream video advertising is un-scalable, as leading publishers continue to avoid third-party serving while others are slow to adopt prevailing player technologies like Brightcove or support emerging standards promoted by the IAB such as VAST and VPAID.

The impact of this utterly dysfunctional process goes well beyond the day-to-day operational aspects of digital campaigns. This SNAFU is paralyzing. Instead of analyzing campaign performance, we push Excel files. Rather than optimizing our messaging -- as Pepsi has done following the death of Michael Jackson -- we bicker about inconsequential creative specifications such as file size of streaming video, and when we should be innovating and challenging our clients with breakthrough ideas like Chanel's latest global takeover, we end up settling on the ordinary and average. We should be driving this industry to its full creative potential and celebrating digital as a viable branding channel, not left feeling lucky just to be able to get a campaign live on time.

Why do we accept it as normalcy? Two possible reasons come to mind. First, it seems that due to our infatuation with shiny new gimmicks like branded Facebook apps and augmented reality, we're overlooking critical aspects of our business that might limit the long-term viability of digital such as inadequate tools, antiquated processes and dysfunctional communication. Past trends show that many hyped new innovations are likely to end up being financially insignificant, and eventually end up kicked to the curb. Instead of being hypnotized by another passing gimmick, we should focus our attention on the issues relevant to our core business -- operational efficiencies, actionable analytics and flexible, openly integrated best-of-breed solutions.

Second, in young industries it's common that consumers are forced to accept suboptimal solutions due to the limited availability of relevant options. We're all familiar with Henry Ford's famous quote describing how things had been in the upstart automobile industry back in the early 1900's: "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." Like the automobile industry, the digital marketing space has matured over the years and it's about time we too can expect to buy cars in all shades of the rainbow as well as turbo engines and convertible roofs. Instead of settling on the archaic solutions, we should be pushing for technology that makes digital advertising better.

Whether we are facing a longer recession or rejuvenated growth, there is no way around facing up to our fundamental operational challenges. It's about time that we re-access our priorities, reevaluate the role of technology and alleviate the pain points within agencies to make more room for planning, analyzing and strategy. We better do something about this dysfunctional mess, before this SNAFU turns into a FUBAR...