• by Tom Hespos , April 6, 2004

The ad serving customer support reps don't want to say it, because it will offend their clients. But if you were to take your customer support rep out after work for a few drinks and he loosened up a bit, he'd tell you to quit putting it off and come in for a training class.

The vast majority of time spent by most of these reps involves taking clients through basic functionality - the kind that gets covered in ad serving boot camp. Furthermore, salespeople from various ad serving companies have told me over and over again that their products are routinely selected against in the RFP process because the person making the decision thought they didn't have certain functionality when, in fact, they do.

We could make huge productivity gains as an industry if everyone dropped what they were doing right now, dialed up their ad serving company and scheduled a training class. Atlas, DoubleClick, Mediaplex, Bluestreak and 24/7 Real Media, among others, have taken great steps to automate not only simple trafficking tasks, but also all or most of the online planning process. The problem is that few media planners fully understand the breadth of their offerings. Nor, apparently, do they want to. Many media folks would rather "just get by" with a basic level of knowledge, but when it's time to traffic the streaming JavaFlashVRML ads with multiple click URLs, they're on the tech support hotline faster than Whitney Houston checking herself out of rehab.

Ad servers and their extensions were created to help streamline the media planning process. These days, you can do all your research, compose and send RFPs, accept or decline proposals, issue insertion orders and address just about every phase of the planning, buying and campaign maintenance processes through a simple web interface. That is, you can do all of that if and only if you know how to use the tool.

A top complaint I've heard from advertisers at conferences is that the online media buying process takes too long, as compared to that of TV, radio or print. While this might be a bit of a stretch, there's no reason to give that claim any legitimacy by not taking advantage of everything that's included in your ad server.

In any case, the ad serving reps don't want to command you to come in for training. Nor do they want to spend the rest of their days performing tasks that agencies can take care of themselves with the aid of some hands-on training. So let's make their days a bit easier. If you manage a department, start sending your people in for training, one by one. Or tell your clients you're closing on Flag Day and get the whole group taken care of in one day.