• by Michael Stoeckel , November 9, 2016

As my colleague Scott Bender so elegantly articulated, a somewhat unexpected byproduct of programmatic advertising has been the need for publishers’ sales and ops teams to be more closely aligned than ever before.  Programmatic bringing people together. Who knew?

Back in the day, old-school ops teams could only dream of a world where the most friction-heavy tasks  — the insertion order (IO) and the invoice — would be eliminated.  

Yet, as much as I relish watching the cash register ring in real time and find fulfillment in lifting eCPMs and fill-rates, my crush on programmatic is also due to the neutering of these obnoxious and overly manual processes.

Still, these onerous tasks did provide solid demarcation within a publisher’s ad revenue team:

·      The IO represented the pass from ad sales (planners) to ad operations
·      With the invoice, ad operations pushed to finance/accounts receivable team

Gray areas did exist; the hand-offs were a series of pass-backs between the respective parties.  But it’s interesting to see how those shades of gray color today’s automated systems.

For open market programmatic, the pre-IO planning process is irrelevant.  With other flavors of programmatic it’s a different case — and it can feel like the Wild West.

IOs provided checks and balances. In today’s programmatic world, certain transactions — including RTB — are sorely lacking some of the important checkpoints that the IO helped enforce.  

Cast your mind back a few years to the pre-programmatic landscape.  No sane publisher would ever send out a media plan without first checking the available inventory for each line item.   Even for a pre-emptible deal, a rough estimate of delivery would be recommended to properly manage the expectations of the buyer.  However, for private marketplaces (PMPs), this critical step is often skipped, resulting at times in massive under-delivery versus expectations.  

Although PMP deals are predominantly non-guaranteed, no one on the buy or sell side is happy when spend materially misses expectations.

So why do some publishers feel they can be negligent with inventory forecasting just because the word “programmatic” is associated with the deal?  Yes, estimating availability is tricky with audience targeting, especially when buyers can bring their own audience data. However, options exist to ameliorate the situation. At the very least, proxies should be used to minimize the occurrence of embarrassing under-delivery.

Technical and process solutions can address dilemmas in a non-IO world, but they may mask wider organizational inefficiencies.  We have all heard legitimate complaints from salespeople over the years about the number of hand-offs that exist before and after a campaign goes live.  For any given task in the process, a salesperson may have to go through an email chain of death just to discover the actual internal owner of the task.  Is it the planner?  The campaign manager? Other?

On the upside, in this more-automated world, the planner will inevitably learn some of the more “technical” aspects of digital advertising.   Even if a planner’s sole desire is to be promoted into sales, this knowledge is not wasted. The most effective digital salespeople must know enough about how the sausage is made to creatively sell it.