• by Kate Kaye , July 29, 2004

With an electrical engineer for a dad, it is only fitting that Adam Bliss, Motif campaign manager at DoubleClick, has gravitated towards things technological throughout his life. He landed a job three years ago at DoubleClick's Colorado location straight out of technical school, starting out in tech support and moving on towards specializing in assisting clients with rich media coding problems. Now Bliss guides clients through ad campaigns employing the ad management technology firm's Macromedia Flash-based rich media product, Motif.

Especially challenging are large campaign launches which require developing ads to satisfy all publisher specifications to ensure that ads run properly on the purchased sites. For big tasks like these, Bliss makes special trips to places like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago to share his expertise with clients in-person.

What are your favorite online destinations in the a.m.? Why?
I like to stay up to speed on general tech news, so I like to go to [Cnet's] News.com. And I gotta get the sports, so I hit ESPN usually.

What other sites do you visit frequently? Why?
Mainly ESPN for the sports. I also visit a couple photo sites....I just got a digital camera.

What is the most challenging part of your job?
A couple of things. The first is probably the publishers, being that there's no standardization. Having to work with each one individually is somewhat difficult. Another challenge is keeping up with all the technology, coding languages....

I keep up by learning as I go. Most of the stuff I've done here is pretty much self-taught. I keep up with news. Also, new stuff comes in from advertisers, like different ways of writing action script to get a floating ad to work for instance.

What do you like best about your job; what keeps you interested?
The same thing -- the tech side of it keeps me interested. It keeps me on my toes. There are so many different technologies I work with here at DoubleClick.

Flash is the main tool I work with nowadays. Before that it was ASP and java script stuff mainly.

How important is standardization? How much of an obstacle is it to advertisers using rich media?
Standardization is definitely a barrier. Publishers need to start raising size weights. They need something like the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] standards.

If the big sites got together, like Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL, it could make a big difference for everybody. For example, AOL allows you to do a 30KB initial file, and Yahoo! allows a 50KB initial file. If larger sites standardized, advertisers would be able to push back on the smaller sites to follow.

Do you know someone who deserves a salute from MediaPost's In the Trenches? Let us know! Contact Kate Kaye at kate@mediapost.com.