Standards

As I'm working my way through the new house, replacing things that need replacing and fixing things that need repair, I'm coming to the awful realization that the previous owner did a lot of things completely half-ass.  I'm also realizing that for some reason, if there's a standard way to do something, the prior owner didn't do it that way. I had a list of projects this weekend I only got halfway through.  I didn't finish partly because the last time these things were done, the prior owner didn't do them the standard way.  Case in point, the kitchen sink appeared outwardly to be a standard 25X22" kitchen sink fitting into a standard hole on a standard countertop.  It needed replacing.  Badly.

When I did get the original sink out, it turns out the hole was anything but standard.  It was quite a bit smaller, and from the looks of things, carved out half-ass with a saws-all.  Getting a new sink in required widening and lengthening the hole with a jigsaw.  Of course, the hole had to go all the way back to the backsplash, and when I got that far I figured out the guard on the bottom of the jigsaw wouldn't let me cut that closely to an edge.  So I improvised, cutting out sections with a Dremel (setting off the smoke alarm in the process) and knocking pieces out with some precision percussive maintenance (whacking the hell out of them with my channel locks).  In the end, it got done, albeit with a few chips in the formica I'll need to figure out how to cover next weekend.

There's a metaphor for the media business here, believe it or not.  I'm not one for blindly following standards, but standards exist not only to streamline things and make them easier for us, but also to let everyone know what to expect when you get down to the nuts and bolts of things.  With standards, there are fewer surprises, delays and improvisation.

The 80/20 Rule of Ad Management

In our consulting assignments for ad management and ad serving companies, a common theme emerges.  Ad management companies claim the 80/20 rule.  That is, 80 percent of their customers use 20 percent of the cool features built into ad servers, and getting media planning types into advanced training sessions to learn how to use the rest of the features is difficult at best. I had a refresher course from one of the ad serving companies recently, complete with an overview of some of the cooler stuff they can do from the agency side.  It really started the wheels turning.  New features are coming out all the time, and when they do, media people need to be on top of them so they can be leveraged tactically for clients.  I walked out of the overview with half a dozen solid ideas for how we might use advanced ad serving features for our clients.  Among those ideas were new applications of domain targeting, retargeting based on action tag data, geographic segmentation and auto-optimization.

This all reinforced the importance of training in my mind.  No matter how busy your people are, sacrifices have to be made so that everyone understands the full capabilities of the tools available to us.  This extends well past ad management into syndicated research, rich media and a bunch of other toolkits we use every day.

Sometimes, I notice folks (not just here, but at other agencies as well) doing things the hard way, when technology has already eased a particular pain point for them, but force of habit and inertia keep outdated practices solidified within a day-to-day routine.  There are a lot of efficiencies to be realized across the industry.  Training is one of the things that gets us to more efficient processes.

Learn to use tools the right way.  Not half-ass.  Not "just enough to get by."  The right way.  And take steps along the way to make sure you stay on top of new developments - don't take vacations from training sessions for years at a time.  Sign up for regular refreshers.  Ad management, rich media, research and tools companies wish you would.  It helps you get the most from the tools your agency pays good money for.  Most of all, it helps your clients.

Yes, the Buy Side Does Know

I was talking about online ad networks the other day with a friend who works for one, and he was a bit surprised to hear about some of the network horror stories and underhanded tricks I knew about.  Behind the scenes of a network ad buy, quite a few of the networks will try to wring every last ounce of performance out of a campaign by using certain tricks of the trade that they'd prefer buyers didn't know about. They range from the slightly unethical (adding targeting filters to ensure ads get served to people with a higher propensity for clicking on ads in general) to out-and-out fraud (the use of click farms or incentivized clicking).  What surprised me about my friend was his surprise - Did he honestly think that these things would stay buried in the ad ops dungeon forever and never see the light of day?  In this day and age, with hyperlinks subverting heirarchy and all that happy crap, all secrets like this eventually become known to anyone who is interested.

Putting aside the Internet's effect on secrecy for a bit, online media is a social industry.  We all go out after work and see one another at industry get-togethers.  Does anyone expect that ad sales and ad ops people never go out and have alcohol-fueled conversations about, say, buying inventory on a non-affiliate for 10 cents a click and then getting 25 cents a click for it from network advertisers?

Certainly these things don't happen on every network buy.  But people on the buy side aren't stupid.  We know something's up when a campaign dogs it for six weeks and then suddenly comes alive with click activity two weeks before the end of the flight.  We listen to network folks, especially when you let stuff slide about behind-the-scenes manipulation of campaigns.

Maybe you won't always get caught.  Sometimes you will.  When you do, it won't be pretty.  I like to tell people about the vendor we caught a couple years ago who took apart our ad tags, developed some unapproved creative of their own and then used the clicktag to artificially inflate their click rates.  They could have called the agency and asked for an ad tag so that they could serve some bonus inventory - we would have been happy to give it.  Instead, they got busted when we noticed the unapproved creative running and called the vendor on the carpet.  We haven't bought from them since.

My point is that we're not as stupid as we sometimes look over here on the buy side.  Some of the little tricks vendors use to get their click rates up are almost indetectable, but not impossible to pick up on.  And it's not as if every sell-side ad ops person is sworn to secrecy about the stuff they do behind the scenes.  We overhear things, IRL and in online forums.  There are no secrets in this business.

Star Trek: TOS on iTunes

I downloaded a few of the Star Trek episodes that recently went live on the iTunes store.  Last night, I set my TV up with a cheap docking station so that I can play my iPod through my stereo, but I also ran an S-Video line to my TV set so I could watch all the TV shows I've downloaded on a much bigger screen. Surprisingly, the video plays on my TV with amazing clarity.  I figured it would be somewhat distorted, but it looks really nice.