Even though it’s been the ‘year of mobile’ for the last decade, mobile advertising really did seem to reach a critical mass this year, as many publishers sold some of their first campaigns, and marketers moved more share of budgets to the mobile medium.  From an Ops point of view, this was also the first year for a lot of organizations to come to terms with needing a real process around mobile campaign implementation on both the mobile web as well as in application environments. As it turns out, getting ads, particular rich media ads to work in an app is fairly complex, requiring a higher level of technical expertise than desktop advertising.

Thank goodness then for the IAB’s release of the first set of development specs for mobile rich media APIs, known as MRAID and written in partnership with ORMMA to unify the industry’s approach to in-application advertising and simplify the implementation of mobile rich media.

Why is MRAID Necessary?

Thanks to some of the security features built it to smartphones, a layer of software called a software development kit, or SDK is typically required in the app to allow ads to expand over content, play sound and video, and do other things that are fairly standard in a desktop environment.  An SDK is nothing more than a block of code that a vendor like a rich media company might write to get their products to work in other applications, so the application developers don’t have to write the code themselves.  The problem is that every ad server and network has their own proprietary SDK for publishers to implement in order to get their ads to work, which usually requires an update to get released through the app store, which typically takes a few weeks.

Publishers not only have to do some development work to make this happen, but they then have to ensure that it doesn’t break the app itself before releasing it and then have to support updates to the SDK, basically forever, since not all users will update their apps, so legacy SDKs will stay in place long after a publisher might remove a vendor’s code from the most current version of the app.

So, with all that headache, the IAB took up the challenge to set some standards for SDK development, creating an open standard for rich media APIs to communicate with a mobile device, which is what an SDK does. By standardizing the API code, publishers can hopefully move to an SDK agnostic place, where they can use one centralized SDK that works with all rich media, and not need to support multiple piece of vendor code to enable ads. This is a big deal for the Ad Ops community and the Ad Tech community, who have struggled under the weight of technical problems to get campaigns live and facilitate mobile ad budgets. Hopefully MRAID makes a huge dent in those operational problems, and makes it faster and easier to get campaigns up and running, which should encourage advertisers to put more money to work in mobile.

I would encourage all Ops professionals to demand MRAID compliant apps and ads in your mobile ad spec and with vendor negotiations. The good news is that MRAID has enjoyed wide adoption and compliance from the major players in the mobile marketplace from the beginning, so there is already considerable momentum here.

Read about the other most significant developments in Ad Ops in 2011:

MediaBank & Donovan Data Systems Merger
Adobe Emerged as a Major Force in Ad Tech

I can’t think of another powerhouse corporation that has moved so quickly into the ad tech business as Adobe did this year. Before 2011, Adobe had only happenstance exposure to the market, playing a key role in things like site analytics (via Omniture), and rich media development (via Macromedia’s Flash), but didn’t have much involvement in the delivery of ads themselves. In the course of a year however, Adobe bought its way to a leadership position in data management, cross platform video ad serving, and social marketing. Thanks to three major ad tech acquisitions book-ending the year as well as the launch of an ambitious product to streamline ad trafficking, Adobe’s moves should make any Ops department sit up and take notice as one of the most viable competitors to the Google stack to come along yet.

Demdex

The first, and perhaps most significant move this year happened in January, however when Adobe bought one of the leading Data Management Platforms (DMP) in the marketplace, Demdex. In a year where ‘data’ was certainly one of the most powerful macro themes, Adobe’s purchase is a big deal. Demdex is a cloud based, cookie management and segmentation platform that allows media organizations to target people based on observed and inferred behaviors, and one of a handful of companies leading the charge toward audience targeting, site personalization, and richer, data driven experiences online. Big data solutions for digital media companies have existed for a long time online, but Demdex and other DMPs make that data actionable in other systems.

Adobe’s acquisition of Demdex adds momentum to the adoption of data management platforms among big companies, and is likely to drive adoption of the technology with major marketers and publishers, who may have been hesitant until now to share their data with a startup ecosystem. Certainly seeing the resources of a public company behind the big ideas of a startup will be interesting to watch over the coming year. I’m particular interested to see how Adobe integrates Demdex into the Omniture suite of products.

Auditude

After Demdex, Adobe’s acquisition of the video monetization and ad serving platform, Auditude was their next most important move of the year in my opinion. Auditude has done a lot of work in the video space to make cross platform video ad serving easy, whether the creative is destined for a smartphone, tablet, or desktop device. They’ve done a ton of integrations work as well to make sure the product plays nice with traditional ad servers and measurement companies as well, which is what big brands want to hear.

While it represents a small piece of the pie now, make no mistake, advertising on digital video, especially on mobile devices is going to a major growth story in the coming years. Video supply is far more constricted in the market, and the user experience and engagement results are much richer for advertisers, so video is one of the few places where publishers have real pricing power. There’s going to be tremendous investment on the publisher side because of the available budget, so Auditude makes a lot of sense for Adobe.

Efficient Frontier

Then, red hot after the Auditude acquisition, Adobe announced their purchase of Efficient Frontier, a search and social advertising company that is best known for its technology to execute and optimize ad buys on Facebook. Despite billions in ad revenue and thousands of advertisers ranging from local mom and pop stores to Fortune 500 brands, Facebook still feels like an untapped market and most industry sources agree that the social network should effective double revenues year over year for the next few years.

Adthenticate

Finally, outside of acquisitions, Adobe launched an under-reported project around ad tag validation in October, perhaps their most relevant project to Ad Ops professionals. I’ve written about Adthenticate in detail in a prior post on this site, but the big idea is to streamline the ad trafficking process through ad tag certification against a publisher’s ad spec, and potentially integrate that functionality into Macromedia Flash, also an Adobe product, so creative is built to spec from the get go. This is yet another case of exciting potential versus having a product live in production, so time will tell how successful the effort will be, but I’m optimistic at Adobe’s ability to execute.

What’s Next for Adobe?

With so many acquisitions, it leaves one to wonder what’s next for Adobe in 2012? In my mind the answer is clear – buy an ad server. If Adobe acquired or developed a mobile ready, RTB enabled ad server, they’d have one of the most impressive offerings in ad tech out there, well positioned for the next arc in digital marketing. Adobe, are you listening?

Read about the other most significant developments in Ad Ops in 2011:

MediaBank & Donovan Data Systems Merger
MRAID Specs Released

If you’ve ever used Google’s AdWords product, you know how blissfully simple it is to plan, budget, buy, track, and pay for your campaigns from a single interface.  It’s intuitive enough for virtually any small business to figure out on their own, but flexible enough to scale up to the world’s largest marketers.  Compare that now to the way most agencies buy digital media from online publishers, hacking their way through Excel templates, a pile of system interfaces, gobs of email threads, and fax machine printouts with an army of entry-level communications graduates.  To get a display media campaign live, it’s downright prehistoric, and certainly one of the biggest growth liabilities to the industry.

That’s why the MediaBank / Donavan Data Systems merger, assuming it gets approved by the Department of Justice, is so significant, because it has the potential to link all the systems an agency needs to execute a media buy from start to finish, thereby dramatically simplifying the process, and making it more efficient to spend money in digital.  If you work in Ops, MediaOcean has the promise to effectively end standard ad trafficking as you know it, moving your team away from ad server monkeys to a far more strategic QA and custom campaign execution experts.

How exactly would this happen?  The vision is for these companies to combine their existing agency workflow management software, and then develop a powerful open source API connection for outside ad technology companies to build on top of their existing product.  Between the two companies, MediaBank & DDS already effectively own the market for agency workflow systems.  This is the software agencies already use to manage traditional advertising campaigns, covering everything from tracking client budgets and agency fees, to actually booking ads with publishers.  Now, the companies want to combine forces to enable those same benefits on digital channels.  Through their APIs, the systems might connect the marketer’s ad server to the publisher’s ad server, allowing a machine to book the campaign, or at least mostly, instead of a human.

In my mind, the success of MediaOcean would move the Ad Ops department in most companies to a much more strategic place in the organization, removing the need for a brute force army of traffickers, and instead creating the opportunity for more technical strategists.  By spending less time going through the motions in the ad server to get simple campaigns live, Ad Ops could transition to client facing, cross-department consultants that enable highly specialized sponsorship campaigns, cross platform buys, and provide smart optimization strategies to drive more impactful results for advertisers.  Vendor implementations, campaign measurement, campaign execution, company communication, everything gets easier.  It’s about as close to a silver bullet solution as I could think of to some of the biggest issues facing digital advertising.

Here’s hoping it works, and next year we’re talking about the impact of MediaOcean, instead of its potential.

Read about the other most significant developments in Ad Ops in 2011:

Adobe Emerged as a Major Force in Ad Tech
MRAID Specs Released

While new to the market and perhaps less established than AdValidation, Adthenticate is an exciting development in the ad validation space for lots of reasons.  First, it has the resources of Adobe behind it, a mammoth corporation with some seriously smart development talent which I hope will continue to build on the current offering.  Second, Adobe owns Flash, the mainstay creative format of virtually every form of desktop display rich media ad, which means it has more than its fair share of QA problems for publishers, and for which Adobe is best positioned to address.  Adobe understands this technology better than anyone else possibly could, so it’s exciting to see a technology owner enter the validation space.  Finally, after speaking with Adobe directly, it’s clear they have a forward thinking vision for where this technology can go, the potential applications, and the resources and clout to make it happen.

Specific to their technology, Adthenticate for now only QAs Flash tags, although it seems to do so exceedingly well.  Adthenticate checks all the basics you would expect such as ad dimensions and filesize, but looks at framerate, animation time, and CPU usage similar to AdValidation.  Uniquely, however, Adobe’s product goes deep in video, measuring a variety of elements like the file format, which codec is utilized, video framerate, and more.  From a measurement standpoint, Adthenticate is pretty comprehensive.

Any user who likes can sign up for an account with Adobe to test a tag, either a swf hosted on a url (which you can likely scrape off a website of your choice using Firebug, or a similar web development tool), a local file you might have, or even an ad tag you have hanging around. For now the demo account only checks against the IAB 3.0 specs, but publishers, advertisers, agencies, or even rich media vendors who are interested in using their own spec can contact Adobe to partner with them during the beta period.  The service also offers an API connection that’s integrated with DFP and other ad servers, so publishers can automatically push tags from the ad server for QA if they want.

For now, Adthenticate still has some work to do to be a home run solution, but for a beta release, it’s not half bad.  What’s most interesting to me however is their vision of integrating ad validation into the current agency and rich media vendor workflow, and get ahead of the problem before it ever reaches Ad Ops.  Speaking with their Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Lalit Balchandani, a few weeks ago, he outlined a roadmap Adobe has to integrate Adthenticate’s abilities into Flash Pro (check out the mock-up below) so advertisers and rich media vendors can ensure tags will comply with ad specs as they build the creative.

Taking the concept even further, Balchandani explained that eventually, Adobe wants to build a type of 3rd party certification into ad tags, so publishers know that tags have already been QA’d against a particular ad spec based on meta data or some type of fingerprint built into the ad.  The idea would be that publishers could load their ad spec into a centralized validation tool, and advertisers could automatically validate their ads against that spec in advance, and provide independent verification that their ads comply.  Now wouldn’t that be nice?

We’ll see if it happens, but the approach makes a ton of sense for the Ops community on all sides, and has the potential to remove a major implementation roadblock for the industry as a whole. Going forward, I’d like to see Adobe do more to extend their service to more than just flash files, and do some more work on the workflow side of the product to make it simpler to batch ads to the system, without the need for Ops to manually separate the tags from the ad server export files.  Adobe’s API is promising, particularly if the agency side gets engaged in tacking the issue on their end, before they get to a publisher’s Ops department.   A more effective option for the near term to keep publishers excited might be to take a similar approach to AdValidation’s ability to parse & queue tags directly from agency emails.  I’d also like to see Adobe make it simple to export results to agencies, or host the results on a dedicated URL, which Ops teams could email as evidence, and provide the necessary detail on a tag basis.

All that said, this is a project to watch.  Adobe has already built an impressive toolset and their roadmap for the product is exciting to say the least.  Ad Ops teams would do well to take a moment from their week and at least explore the demo functionality.  For teams with especially burdensome QA work, this could also be an excellent opportunity to get involved and shape the product roadmap, which Adobe seems to have customized quite a bit for certain clients.  For more information, visit the Adthenticate site or email the Adobe team at Adthenticate (at) adobe.com.

Based out of Sweden of all places, AdValidation is the first and the best tool I’ve seen focused on ad tag QA to date, though because of their location, not many people outside of Europe are familiar with the company.  That’s a real shame, because the feature set is quite robust, and there are a number of smart, platform agnostic solutions in place to make workflow easier.  As many things like this start, AdValidation was actually developed as an internal tool for a Swedish ad network to help them address the issues of working with hundreds of various publisher specs in their own business before they realized it could be a standalone product on its own.  The benefit of course is that the tool has been battle tested, debugged, and enhanced by a real world customer.  

The concept behind AdValidation is to enable publishers or marketers to enter in a required ad spec in advance, and then easily bounce any 3rd party tags they want against that spec with an automated system.  From what I’ve seen, the tool is by far the most comprehensive and flexible in terms of feature set, allowing customers to check not only all the basic qualities of an ad like dimension and file size, but more advanced concepts like clicktag format and functionality, auto-audio detection, and so forth.  Perhaps the most innovative concept AdValidation developed was around measuring CPU usage, which is all but impossible to do manually or consistently.  Using a graph, the tool can show just how taxing an ad is on a computer, and measures the average usage, peak usage, and maximum sustained usage over 2 seconds or more, for the same type of machine every time.  What’s more, the tool allows publisher to set a spec based on multiple metrics, to consider both average usage as well as peak usage thresholds.

AdValidation runs all these checks on robot machines that load up the ad and record performance, instead of just decompiling and inspecting the file, though the service does that as well to check other things.  By using virtual machines and tracking actual performance, AdValidation can test what happens when a user clicks on an ad, if any 4^th party calls are made when the ad is called, and makes it simple to push large volumes of tags through the system.

In fact, AdValidation even lets you forward an email with a bunch of tags attached, parses them, puts them into a queue for QA, and then emails you back the results, or just lets you see it in their UI.  As an additional benefit, the tool makes the results page linkable, so it’s easy to provide the information back to the agency or marketers showing exactly what tags are breaking spec, and in what way.

From a usability standpoint as well as feature standpoint, AdValidation has a fairly compelling offering in my opinion, but I would encourage publishers to see a demo of the tool themselves, and weigh it against Adobe’s Adthenticate product.  Adobe has arguably already surpassed AdValidation in terms of advanced criteria, though it appears for now AdValidation is still easiest to use, and fastest to implement.

Read More: Adobe’s Vision for the Future of Ad Validation – Project Adthenticate

There are lots of reasons to be excited about what’s happening in the ad technology world right now from a business point of view, but from an Ad Ops perspective, the current landscape is pretty daunting.  For lots of folks at the implementation level, ad technology often means more integration projects, more complexity, more relationships to manage, and frankly, more work to pack into the day with the same amount of resources.  There are lots of tools and services being built for advertisers and publishers alike, but where’s the innovation for Ops teams on either side?

To date, with perhaps the exception of tag management solutions, I haven’t seen many products that seek to simplify the operational process for the direct sales channel – most everything seems focused on creating new, more complex products or bringing new, automated sales channels to market.  Those are fine goals, but I would submit that much like the years of neglect around resolving 3^rd party discrepancies, the ad tech community has to date ignored a huge potential opportunity to make life easier for Ad Ops teams.  In the past few weeks, however it seems like that may be about to change.

Specifically, during IAB Ops 2011, Adobe announced their entry into the ad validation space with some fanfare, throwing some much needed attention and hopefully some serious resources on a little known service with tremendous possibilities but few solutions.  For those interested in learning more, I hope you’ll read my new series on the ad validation space to explain the need, the current solutions, and where the space looks to be headed in the future.

Why Does Ops Need Ad Validation?

As a standard practice, publishers review the ads that marketers want to run before they are put in front of an audience.  This is true for traditional print and television publishers as much as it is digital publishers.  Most media outlets won’t allow marketers to swear in their ads, for example, but beyond content, publishers of every type have what is called an ad spec.  The ad spec details the format in which advertisers have to use for their ads.  For print ads, the ad spec covers things like colors, and dimensions; for television the spec might cover length, volume limits, and other technical aspects.

For digital publishers however the ad spec tends to get far more complex, covering not only basic details like ad dimensions, but also highly technical aspects such as framerate, peak CPU usage, animation cycles, clicktag formats, actionscript behavior, and allowable external dependencies.  For every piece of creative or ad tag that comes in, publishers have to check the ad against their spec, running down a long checklist, gobbling up hours and hours of time ensuring that the marketer’s ad is in line with what the company’s predefined limits to protect the user experience on their site.  The process is important, but so arduous, that plenty of publishers only check a handful of characteristics, if they have a QA process in place at all.

As any trafficker can tell you, the amount of time and energy wasted on ad tag QA is just silly at this point, and that’s just for the tags that will actually meet spec.  Find a tag that breaks a publisher’s creative guidelines, and a protracted battle begins between the publisher’s sales team, the agency, and other outside vendors that can last weeks or months, delaying campaigns, and costing everyone time and money.  The sales team always prefers to simply make an exception, so as not to bother the agency, and in some cases it can make sense.  The agency also tends to want the publisher to make an exception, and in some cases demands it, either because it will cost them money to rework the ad, or it will take so much time that it isn’t worth the trouble for the money they plan to spend with the publisher.  At the end of the day, the publisher has to weight these consequences against upsetting their users by possibly burdening them with ads that take a long time to load, interrupt the rest of the content, or are just obnoxious or annoying. 

Beyond the direct sales channel, as exchange-based demand has ramped up, publishers have less visibility on what runs on their site from an ad spec perspective than ever before.  Is a creative breaking a frame rate limitation?  What is the CPU usage to load the ad?  Are the click tags working and coded properly?  These are questions that no SSP or ad exchange will ask a publisher, let alone try to monitor and control.  Surely, there’s a better way, and ad validation technology just might be the answer.

How Does Ad Validation Help?

Quite simply, ad validation seeks to automate the QA process of checking ad tags against a publisher spec, saving publishers the time and effort to check all tags, allowing them to focus on problems instead.  These tools can measure a laundry list of qualities, everything from ad size dimensions to decompiling a flash file to inspect the clicktag format, and determine if the click tracker is functional.  While there are a number of browser plugins that can assist toward this end such as HTTP Watch or Firebug, but to my knowledge there are currently only two standalone tools built for ad validation – AdValidation, which is an independent company fairly established in the space, and Adobe’s Project Adthenticate, which is the new, but promising given Adobe’s importance and influence on the Flash technology.

Read More: AdValidation – First and Still the Best…For Now

What are Discrepancies?

As a standard practice in interactive advertising, advertisers and publishers maintain independent ad servers to manage their campaigns.  There are number of reasons and efficiencies each party gains with this approach, but since each party counts an impression at a slightly different point in the delivery of an ad (publishers count at the ad request, advertisers count when the ad is delivered), the reporting from either system never matches the other.  This difference is called a 3^rd party discrepancy, and unfortunately, they’re a fact of life in digital advertising.  While you can take steps to minimize discrepancies to a certain extent, at the end of the day you’re just going to have to put up with them as a cost of doing business.

Generally speaking though, discrepancies between your local ad server and a 3^rd party ad server shouldn’t exceed 5 – 10%. Every now and again however you’ll find a particular campaign that skyrockets into the 30% territory or more.  In those cases, you really need to look into the campaign and try to correct the problem.  Below are some initial steps to take to try and resolve large discrepancies. Integrate this process into your Ad Ops group and you should be able to address a majority of the problem tags you encounter.

Validate Your Reporting

The obvious first step is to make sure you really and truly have a problem.  One of the most common reasons people think they have a discrepancy problem is because they haven’t pulled the reports themselves, or are otherwise missing data.  You can save yourself time and headache by taking this step first.

To ensure that you are looking at the exact same tags over the exact same time period in both systems, re-pull the reporting yourself.  If there is indeed a problem, look in your local server to see if those are the only tags running at the placement level.  Sometimes advertiser will rotate tags from multiple 3^rd parties in the same publisher placement, perhaps one tag from a rich media vendor and another standard creative from their primary ad server, and the only reason it seems like there is a large discrepancy is because the reports are incomplete, and only include one party.

Similarly, some advertisers like to serve ad tags from a rich media vendor like Pointroll, but track those impressions in their primary ad server, like DFA.  In those cases, the DFA tracking code is often appended on the back of the rich media party, creating what is known as a 4^th party relationship. 4^th parties tend to have roughly double the discrepancy rate as 3^rd parties, so most publishers require that billing be done against the 3^rd party, whatever it is, even if advertisers also want to use a 4^th party.  Billing groups and sales planning organizations frequently miss this subtlety and may pull a report from the wrong party.

If everything still checks out, you’ll want to get a daily breakdown of impressions from the local ad servers as well as the 3^rd party, which may help you pinpoint the start of the problem.  For those unfamiliar with how to do this, I created a guide some time ago on how to pull daily reports from 3rd party ad servers you may find helpful.  If you find that the discrepancy suddenly increases at some point during the campaign, check the audit trail in your local server to see if a trafficker updated the tags, or perhaps changed something that would impact the tracking.

Validate the Ad Tags

Still looking for an answer?  The next step is to ensure that you have the same tags running in your local server as the 3^rd party, and there are no additional missing tags on either side.  The best way to do this is to match the ad IDs between systems.  The ad id is the unique identifier at the most granular level available.  The id varies between systems, but is typically a 9 or 12-digit number, one you can identify in the ad call itself, visible within the editable ad code on the tag in your local server, and a column you should be able to pull into a 3^rd party report.  Make sure that you are tracking impressions in the 3^rd party for every ID you have in your local server.

Measure the File Size

If you still haven’t been able to identify a clear issue, the problem might come down to latency, that is, the latency between how long it takes a file to load and how long a user might stay on a page.  If a file is especially large, or “heavy”, in the hundreds of KB, for example, it may take so long to load on the page that users move on to the next page before it can finish rendering on the page.  Measure the file size and check it against your ad spec.  For some extremely large ads that contain video or other rich assets, a technique called a ‘polite download’ is often used.  A polite download embeds the impression tracking piece of the ad on small file that loads with the page, and then loads the heavy content after the fact.  In some cases however advertisers may mistakenly put the view tag, or impression tracking segment in the delayed piece, raising the discrepancy rate considerably.

Validate the Cache Buster is in Place

Another potential problem with 3^rd party ad serving is that modern browsers may try and cache the ad material or code, preventing a new, unique call from the browser to the 3^rd party.  To combat this problem, ad servers use a dynamic piece of code, usually a unique number, to force a new call to the 3^rd party, called a cache buster.  Both the publisher and the marketer have separate cache busters in place; the publisher has one to ensure that the same ad tag on the same page generates a new call, and the marketer has one to ensure that their specific ad always generates a fresh call.  At times, the marketer’s trafficking team will forget to add the cache buster, and the publisher’s trafficking team won’t check for it as part of their QA.  If the marketer’s cache buster isn’t in place though, a fresh call is only made to the publisher, not the marketer, which can often cause large discrepancies between systems.

Unfortunately, inserting the cache buster on the 3^rd party tag is usually a manual process, and done through a short code called a ‘macro’.  The macro is a small line of code that allows traffickers to simply cut and paste a single word or handful of characters instead of the entire segment of JavaScript that actually does the work of generating the unique value.  The most commonly used macro is from the DFA system, and is simply %n, or %%cachebuster%%.  If either segment is missing, this is most likely the problem.  Missing cache buster macros are particularly common in flash files, where they need to be embedded in the code.

Validate Intermediaries

Finally, if all else fails, look to see if there are any other intermediaries or 4^th parties involved in the ad call that have the power to block the ad call between systems.  For example, ad verification systems like DoubleVerify and AdSafe both have products that quickly look at aspects of the ad call, such as geography or page content, and if they see something they don’t like, have the power to stop the ad from loading on the page.  This most certainly causes an increased discrepancy, but the good news here is that you can often get some type of reporting or information from the verification company on why or on what pages the block happened.

If none of those paths work, you last option is to submit a case to the 3^rd party in question, but frankly, this rarely yields any productive results.  The better option is to work directly with the marketer to get new tags, and try again.

As with any job, the first step in getting hired is getting educated on the state of the industry, how it works, who the key players are, and where you might get hired.  Thankfully, Ad Operations has an active and welcoming community, and is well covered by niche, but professional news outlets. This article explains how you can get involved and how to get and stay informed about what’s happening in Ad Ops and interactive media.

The Ad Operations Community: AdMonsters

While there are many trade organizations focused on interactive media, none is more focused on or relevant to the Ad Operations workforce than AdMonsters.

Many in the industry are most familiar with the organization’s event programming, which is highly recommended, as it tends to attract less people from the executive level and more from the operations, implementation level of organizations.  I find this approach grounds the conversations and makes for an action-oriented event, with concrete and relevant takeaways.  It also provides a rare opportunity to network and connect with folks who are solving problems on the ground at the organization, and get user-level feedback on new technologies, and potential partners your organization might be evaluating.

Beyond the full calendar of events and conferences around the world, AdMonsters hosts a digital library of reference content written by industry veterans that cover the finer details of a broad range of topics that explain everything from the technical standards for interactive video ads to how companies organize their Ad Ops departments.  This resource pulls from their well written on-site blog, as well as conference presentations.  In most cases you can find content that will give you a general overview of the topic, as well as explain the more technical side, so it’s an ideal starting point for research on niche topics.

In addition to that, AdMonsters hosts perhaps the most engaged industry forum out there, where you can ask questions on virtually any topic pertaining to Ad Ops and get direct answers and help from people that work in the industry.  And finally, AdMonsters maintains one of the largest and most relevant job boards for positions in Ad Operations, especially at the junior and mid-level, so be sure to check it out if you are looking for your first job in the industry.

AdMonsters is a member organization, but free to join and open to students.

Digital Media News: Ad Exchanger

As you learn more, you’ll find few industries that match the rapid pace of change as interactive media, which seems to endure revolutionary change every few years as new startups upend old business models, powerful executives jump from one company to another, and private shops are swallowed up in public acquisitions.  So it goes without saying that being informed on what’s going on in the industry is part of everyone’s job.

To keep up with the industry news, many digital media professionals turn to AdExchanger, run by industry veteran and journalist, John Ebbert.  While the site covers breaking news, it excels more at in-depth, post-announcement interviews with industry executives, quality opinion pieces by industry stakeholders, and weeding through the mountain of press releases to round up the most important events and announcements of the week.  The site offers a free daily email that summarizes the daily site content which is recommended if you don’t have time to check the site on a regular basis.

In addition to their news coverage, AdExchanger has an underrated and under-appreciated resources section, which collects and categorizes a long list of industry whitepapers and thought-pieces, has a fairly comprehensive directory of industry relevant Twitter handles, as well as a directory of ecosystem links to various companies, trade organizations, and influential people.

And for more digital media coverage, check out Digiday and ClickZ.

Ad Technology 101: The LUMAscape

The LUMAscape isn’t an organization or a media outlet; in fact, it’s nothing more than a single slide of company logos, organized by the service they provide, and positioned between advertiser and audience.  Yet there’s nothing that sums up what’s happening in the digital media space more than this single image, which is referenced ad nauseam in sales presentations, conferences, events, and virtually anytime and anywhere the industry gets together.  It is so ubiquitous and influential that one might consider it an executive summary of the industry to the outside world.  As such, it’s required reading for anyone interested in working and understanding this space.

Compiled and maintained by the influential investment banker Terry Kawaja of LUMA Partners, perhaps the most important dealmaker working in the advertising technology industry today, this image is widely cited within the industry as a symbol of the fragmented, confusing nature of digital media.   That said, it also serves as a useful starting point in understanding what companies compete with each other, what all these startup companies actually do, who their customers are, and whether or not they are independent or owned by another company.  Terry does a great job of keeping the slide current, and actually maintains a few versions that speak to other branches of digital media, like Social, Mobile, Video, and others.

Join the Conversation on Twitter

It’s no surprise that the interactive media community is actively engaged on the social networking hub that is Twitter.  If you aren’t signed up already, I would strongly encourage you to do so now, especially for those looking to break into the industry.  Twitter is an ideal listening post to learn what people in the industry are thinking about, gauge their reaction to industry developments, start to make connections, and maybe even find a job.

Twitter is an ideal place to ask questions when you don’t understand something related to Ad Operations or digital media in general, want to see how someone else solved a technical problem, or need some feedback on a particular company or technology solution.  I find the Twitter community to be welcoming, but even if you don’t want to broadcast anything, Twitter is a fantastic listening post.

The easiest way to get started is to start following one of the existing industry lists out there – @contactjr has a good one named ‘Online Media’  that I would recommend, and which covers many individual influencers as well as company and news media accounts.  You can follow me by clicking the button at the top of the sidebar, or by clicking here: AdOpsInsider.

And, for more on who to follow and official company handles, look at the AdExchanger Twitter Directory

Follow Experts and Ask Questions on Quora

Ad Operations isn’t always easy – in fact, it’s frequently challenging, even for industry veterans.  Digital advertising is an ever-changing beast by definition, so no one can possibly be an expert on everything.  Perhaps that’s why Quora is such a vibrant resource – Quora is a free service that lets anyone ask or answer a question, but with a much more qualified and technical user base than something like Yahoo! Answers.  You can even follow the answers and questions of specific users once you sign up.  You must use your real name as your username on Quora, which is displayed whenever you answer a question, and helps suss out who’s qualified to respond and who’s not, as well as potential conflicts of interest in any answers.  The brilliant aspect of the service however is that you can ask questions anonymously, so there’s no embarrassment over what might seem like a stupid question.

The digital advertising industry is certainly engaged on Quora, and there’s an endless stream of questions out there specific to the digital advertising business and Ops specifically.  You can start by following some of the topics below, which will populate a feed of existing questions and responses on your login screen, and will automatically update with new items as they arise.  The service even suggests topics it think you might be interested based on what you already follow.

Digital Advertising

Internet Advertising

Ad Operations

Ad Servers

Ad Exchanges

You can see my answers and see what topics I’m following on Quora here: Benjamin Kneen

Next Week: How to Get a Job in Ad Operations

Even as the global economy limps along, the job market in digital advertising and Ad Operations specifically has never looked so bright, and anyone looking for their first job would do well to consider ad technology as a place to start their professional lives.

So why exactly would you want to work in Ad Ops?  Here are some of the best reasons as I see them:

1. There’s no better place to learn about digital advertising.

Because the Ad Ops department controls and operates the ad server as their primary responsibility, almost everyone else in the company depends on them for something.  Whether it’s the marketing team trying to get an internal promotion live, the finance or billing group needing accurate historical reports, the business development team trying to evaluate and implement a new technology, or just the day to day interaction with the Sales team to understand what clients want, Ad Ops is an information hub within the company, and a key resource for getting things done.

From a strategic standpoint, virtually any new technology, from workflow management to analytics to data management eventually needs to interact with the ad server, so Ops is inherently at the center of those conversations and product rollouts.

2. Ad Ops is challenging – no matter what your skill set, it forces you to develop lots of new ones.

Ad Operations is the primary bridge between the business groups and technical groups within a company; as such, the people who work in Ad Ops are among a rare breed that need both excellent hard and soft skills to succeed in their day to day jobs.  For example, working in a sales organization will teach you how to set client expectations, and keep your head above water in an aggressive, sometimes stressful work environment that demands a lot of face-to-face contact with impatient people.

On the technical side, you’ll learn how to read HTML at a basic level, almost without trying it’s such a critical piece of the job.  Moreover, you’ll get a sense for how coding languages like JavaScript and Flash work, how to look for problems within the code, and solve those problems.

There’s a project management piece to working in Ad Ops as well, since the department often plays a big role in implementing new technology, and is looped in on software builds and site updates.  In these situations, Ad Ops tends to represent the business and sales needs of the organization to the technical groups, which can be strange, because the business and sales teams usually think of Ad Ops as representing the technical side of the organization.  The truth is though that Ad Ops has their feet in both areas, and learns to think about things from both perspectives, giving them a unique, consultative strength.

Finally, there’s no doubt that Ad Ops is a great place to build an analytical skill set, and learn how to work with data to answer questions.  Chances are you’ll be familiar with a number of reporting systems regardless of your job function and will be adept at using the more advanced features of Excel.

3. Ad Ops is the ideal platform for just about any job in digital advertising.

Since Ad Ops develops a broad range of skills, it creates lots of options for career advancement.  Aside from all the vertical opportunities within an Ops department, such as leading an Ad Ops group outright, or moving into a management position in the yield and pricing groups or billing groups, Ad Ops veterans often transition into client service leadership positions at technology companies because they understand the products so well.  They can move to formal project management jobs, really implementation specialist roles, because they understand how to roll out complex technology integrations that require inter-departmental teamwork.

Transitions to the sales or marketing groups are also common because Ad Operations people have such a solid foundation in reporting, analytics, and how to optimize campaigns for performance.  Finally, there are all kinds of horizontal opportunities, too, where talented Ad Ops people move from the publisher side to the technology or agency side, and vice versa, or go from a display advertising focused job to one centered on mobile or social advertising.  The possibilities are really exciting.

4. Major job security – virtually everyone is hiring and there aren’t nearly enough qualified people.

Practically speaking, there are a lot of jobs available in Ad Operations, at almost every level of experience – and that includes no experience.  In fact, Ad Ops tends to have an outsized amount of job opportunities at the junior and entry levels and is a great place for inexperienced workers to get their foot in the door, and find some early success.  If you’re looking for your first job out of school, consider working as a trafficker, who are the implementation foot soldiers of any digital media organization.  Working as a trafficker will teach you everything from how an ad server works to how to debug a flash file, not to mention deal with an impatient sales rep.

5. As a strategic team, Ad Ops is only getting more important within digital media companies.

Advertising has been statistically smart for decades, but has only recently sought to be technologically smart, too.  From a macro perspective, this means there is a big shift happening in the types of people and skill sets required to succeed in the industry.  Namely, there is an enormous need for a new breed of flexible, tech-savvy workers who can still work in a client-facing organization; people that blur the line between the business and technical side.  Ad Ops plays a central role in developing those types of people, and over the relatively short life of the digital advertising industry has developed into the ideal training ground for future leaders.

6. The industry is growing at an incredible pace and diversifying into new areas that all need Ad Ops leaders.

Ten years ago digital advertising was a $7 billion dollar industry – this year it will be a $30 billion dollar industry, and five years from now it’ll be a $50 billion dollar industry.  Now that’s growth.  You only need to read through the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Ad Revenue Reports to see the industry has grown at a double-digit clip almost every year, resilient in spite the tough economy, and that’s not likely to quit anytime soon.  And within the industry at large there are pockets of mega-growth, such as mobile advertising, real-time bidding platforms, data management, and social media – all of which are still in their infancy, in need of Ad Operations expertise and looking to hire.  As employment opportunities go, both for today and in the future, you really couldn’t ask for a more perfect storm.

7. Ad Ops has a great community built on cooperation.

More than other areas of digital advertising, Ad Ops has a tight-knit community.  The amount of interaction and cooperation between companies between ex-colleagues, conference acquaintances, or friends of friends is surprisingly high.  Can’t remember how to append the click-tracking code in Dart Enterprise?  Post it on the AdMonsters message board, send a request out on LinkedIn to one of the many Ad Ops groups, ask a question on an Ops related topic in Quora, or just IM an old colleague.  Chances are someone else has faced the same issue before and is willing to offer some advice same day, or even walk you through it. Ops people love to solve problems and help each other, and are usually more than willing to share that information to anyone who wants it.  Worst case scenario, reach out to me directly on this site through the comments and I’ll try to help you!

8. It’s Fun!

Part of the reason people want to work in advertising in the first place is they think it will be fun.  You know what?  They’re right.  Advertising is a blast, and digital is the best part.  Offices tend to start later in the morning, the dress code is relaxed enough that virtually everyone outside sales wears jeans to work, and the industry tends to be young and energetic.   It’s not surprising to see people with a beer on their desk on Friday afternoon, especially if you work at an agency, and there are frequent industry events and sponsored happy hours that allow people to network and kick back a bit.

The major difference in digital is that you get to sit on the leading edge of innovation; you get to be part of the real-time invention of an industry, and work for exciting companies that are changing the world.  Could there be anything more fun?

Next: Must Know Ad Ops Resources

Before the internet and digital advertising, direct mail solicitation was perhaps the most technologically advanced form of marketing out there.  Even today, as much as interactive marketers like to poke fun at traditional media people, the direct mail industry is far more sophisticated at accurate audience segmentation and message delivery than most of the digital realm.  Since everything in the snail mail world works off your actual name and address, it is far easier to connect data points in your life – the car you drive, your credit score, your age, gender, and plenty else from public records.  Start adding information about your purchase habits from catalogs, your credit cards, and all the hotel and airline loyalty cards stuck in your wallet and the direct marketers can profile you three ways to Sunday. The truth is that it’s far easier to move data offline by matching on a name and address than to move it online with nothing but a cookie.  That said, data companies and marketers alike have a huge incentive to try, because offline data is generally much more reliable and therefore valuable than its online competitors.

The challenge to moving data online however is matching to a cookie, which tends to be difficult because offline and online systems work on a different paradigm.   Most online companies expressly do not collect PII due to privacy concerns, meaning they think in terms of cookies instead of actual people.  This presents a unique challenge for online marketers because a single device might be used by multiple people, with no way to tell who is using it at any given time.  Alternatively, the offline world functions entirely on PII and can easily differentiate between multiple people in the same household: they just mail it to a different name.  Add in the fact that users can delete their cookies and the benefits of offline data emerge.  People can move, but they can’t delete themselves from the real world. Offline data follows them everywhere they go, so it stays reliable and person specific, making it more valuable that most online data.  If only you could attribute real-world behavior to digital tracking, right?  That’s exactly what the data companies thought.

The key to transitioning offline data to a cookie is, well, a key.  A database key to be exact, which allows identification of the same user in an offline database as well as a cookie database.  A database key is a common field between two systems; in the online world, a cookie sync creates a foreign key relationship on the cookie ID values that allow the DMP to cross reference the same user in different data sources.  The concept is the same for the offline world, but the sync is a bit more complicated, and unless the client collects personally-identifiable information (PII) from online users, the sync typically requires an outside data company to perform what’s known as a match service, usually by using an email address as the key.

For example, eBay was a prime provider of match services until they shut down the service in March of this year.  Since eBay was a digital marketplace, they were able to cookie every user and because they had an order management system that required users to register with their real name and email address before they could buy, they knew the name and email for their cookie.  So eBay could serve as its own data provider.  With PII married to a cookie eBay had a tremendous asset they could monetize by syncing other people’s offline data to online cookies.  They’re out of the market, but plenty of other companies have the same data – any large site with user registration pretty much qualifies.  I have no idea who is a current source of match data, but I would imagine the airline booking sites, large eCommerce sites, and even banks could provide the necessary information.

Whatever the provider, here’s how it works:

The match service, before it has any client, contracts with a data provider and has the data provider place the match service’s pixel on one of their pages where users frequently pass so they can run a cookie sync.   Users who hit that page call the provider’s cookie, which then piggybacks a call to the match service.  In a server-to-server integration, the provider uploads the PII for each cookie to the match service servers, who in turn attribute to their own cookie ID.  This process just continuously runs, building a larger and larger data set for the match service, which pays the data provider for this information.  Now, a a client wanting to move offline data to a cookie contracts with the match service, which has the client setup a cookie sync with them.  When a user hits the client’s page, the client’s cookie fires and then piggybacks a call to the match service, passing it the client cookie ID on a query string. The match service records the client’s cookie ID, and checks for an existing cookie on the user. If that user has been cookied before by the match service, the user’s identity is known, and the match service can attribute the PII from the data provider to the client’s cookie.

At the same time, the client sends the match service a file of the offline database records.  Now the match service can look for users with the same PII in an offline record as they have from the data provider.  When they find a match, they already know what their own cookie ID on that user is as well as the cookie ID for the client is.  Over time, as more and more users call these tags, the data builds up and the match is complete.  Importantly, to satisfy privacy regulations, the PII known by the match service is typically stripped off before it is sent to the client.  The client can know which users were matched in aggregate, but usually cannot know which cookie ID is which user.  So the match is not anonymized, but the results are.  Unfortunately, the overlap between sources tends to be small, typically 30 – 40% of the total offline records on a good day.  It depends how often users delete their cookies, and how often they visit the site.  Match services typically contract with more than one data provider and match against the aggregate records, but even then, the results are often not ideal. Cookie deletion also makes the match process a constant one to re-sync users who erase their online identifiers.

Still, the results can be powerful – Nielsen was one of the first companies to bring their offline data online, syncing PRIZM segments to cookies as far back as 2009.  Polk, Experian, and other premier offline data companies have followed and as DMPs become more commonplace among marketers with deep data sets targeting will only improve.  If you are interested in match services, look into LiveRamp, DataLogix, Datran, TargusInfo, or Acxiom for more details.