• by Kate Kaye , December 12, 2002

The online audit debate is far from settlement. For some in the interactive ad industry, customization could be the answer. MTV and DoubleClick, along with others in the space have taken a lead in that direction.

In any given week, MTV Networks’ VP ad sales operations, Matthew Goldstein, contends with reports on about one hundred advertisers whose campaigns run across the network’s online properties, including MTV.com, Nickelodeon Online and VH1.com.

Goldstein found two reports provided by DoubleClick’s Dart for Publishers (DFP) software to be especially useful in tracking the immense amount of data generated on each campaign: the Site Query Report, which among other things, tracks sum of impressions and click-through or yield, and the Ad Status Report which compiles data on the sum of total ads delivered and average of OSI (On Schedule Indicator).

In order to act expeditiously on the report data, however, Goldstein needed a way to view and analyze this information in a single place, rather than through separate reports. It was time for a bit of tinkering. In conjunction with DoubleClick's engineers, Goldstein developed a customized report that combines data from both the Site Query and Ad Status Reports.

“There’s no question that there’s a huge move towards customized reporting,” says Atlas DMT’s director of analytics and The Atlas Institute, Young-Bean Song, who’s currently working to develop customized reports for several of the ad technology firm’s clients. “There’s absolutely a trend going in that direction.”

In essence, merging the standard DFP reports allows Goldstein to isolate potential problems more quickly than he would have when accessing them separately, which can work to his advantage when it comes to pleasing advertiser clients. According to Goldstein, who deems the customized report as “invaluable in helping me piece things together,” the report notifies him if there is “anything to be concerned about” such as an ad that’s garnered no yield, or a campaign run that’s coming to an end soon. He uses the custom report for the entire MTV group of sites.

Based on that information, he can redirect inventory when a particular ad is under-performing, or, as Lewis Rothkopf, account director for DoubleClick’s Dart for Publishers Solutions Division notes, “rather than having the agency call and say ‘let’s drop it,’ Matthew can say, here’s how we can make this work.”

Still, DFP software does not optimize campaigns automatically; instead, it requires an OK from the advertiser/agency and publisher before manual redistribution of impressions occurs.

“I can’t know for sure how it’s affected sales,” admits Goldstein, “but I know intuitively that it made my group more productive and smarter. If I have issues, it’s easy to become aware of them quickly.”

In the future for MTV, DoubleClick plans on optimizing the use of other reports as well as creating customized reports that help determine keyword effectiveness in site searches.

The Site Query and Ad Status Reports are both available to all customers using DFP, although the combined report used by MTV is a customized offering. Other clients employing DFP software include Bertelsmann, Terra Lycos and Reed Business Information.