• by Darren Herman , July 29, 2011

Delivering an advertising campaign across the paid, owned, and earned ecosystem is not easy, and coupled with a myriad of different technology solutions that are necessary to serve, track, analyze, and optimize is becoming increasingly complex.

Way back when, we evaluated our media partners by the content they produced and the ratings they accumulated. Now, coupled with all of what we did in the past, we have to understand the technology behind our partners to be able to pinpoint the redundancies between them and make sure we're delivering within not just IAB standards but ensure our campaigns are OBA compliant (through the Digital Advertising Alliance).

The role of the "media technologist" was created and born in The Media Kitchen when we realized how much time was being spent on advertising operations not including the trafficking of ads. The Media Kitchen deploys both MediaMind and DART depending on client needs for ad serving, VisualIQ for true attribution and data management, Varick Media Management for our trading desk and advanced optimization, Evidon for OBA compliance, and DoubleVerify, AdXpose, and Ad Safe for advertising verification. This is not a comprehensive list of vendors, but it very much mirrors the famous Luma Partners' Lumascapes and is becoming increasingly complex.

Instead of putting together communications plans or negotiating with media partners, the media technologist is working to build and maintain relationships with our advertising operations partners as well, as, be the first line in troubleshooting when systems go down. We expect that our internal brand teams will tap into our media technologists as each brand has their own instance of our technology capability.

Some areas that we expect our Media Technologists to concentrate on in 2H 2011:

1 - Understanding inventory pools of different partners and reducing and eliminating redundancies where applicable.
2 - Making sure all of our clients are consistently running OBA compliant campaigns
3 - Eliminating any waste from non-sanctioned impressions (below-the-fold, international traffic, non-enforced sponsorships)
4 - Consistently address The Media Kitchen brand teams with best practices and use cases