Yield Management Isn’t Just for Ad Operations Anymore

Tracking and managing ad inventory is as critical as it’s ever been for online publishers, but the concept of yield management has expanded beyond the ad operations group and today touches every part of a successful online media operation. It has become essential that all areas of a publishing organization have accurate and meaningful data points to make decisions to optimize ad inventory and maximize revenue. Let’s look at how effective yield management can benefit the various departments at an online publisher:

Ad Operations:

This is the nerve center for driving delivery for all those campaigns that the sales group has worked so hard to bring in. But just delivering isn’t enough. The ad operations team must have a clear vision of actual inventory on a real-time basis to ensure they don’t hold back too much inventory. This prevents under delivery, a practice that leaves money on the table for many publishers. Ad operations also has to manage their most valuable inventory and make sure premium impressions are monetized in the most effective manner. Having an effective yield management process allows ad operations to maximize the value of their inventory before it gets released to networks and exchanges or, even worse, goes unsold.

Read More: YieldEx

Yahoo! Begins Requiring Right Media Seats for Demand-Side Platform’s Advertisers

The other shoe appears to be falling.

If you’re a demand-side platform or ad network on Right Media Exchange, you may not be allowed to buy Yahoo! Class 2/remnant inventory on behalf of your client unless your advertiser gets its very own seat on RMX. (Having an advertiser get its own seat is not easy on RMX. It requires time, money – and approval.)

According to multiple, reliable sources, that’s the latest directive from Right Media account managers who began telling some of their DSP/network clients that they will have until December 2 to migrate their advertisers. Thereafter, the display ad inventory “valve” containing Yahoo! inventory which leads directly to the DSP, will be turned off.

As All Things D’s Peter Kafka reported two weeks ago, retargeters such as TellApart, Criteo and Dotomi have already had their “Class 2″ inventory (Yahoo! remnant display ads) shut off.  This week’s move isn’t a huge surprise given the demand-side platform model is essentially the same between retargeters, DSPs and ad networks.

Read More: AdExchanger

TidalTV Taps Korrelate For Offline Sales

Advertisers and publishers are still struggling to connect online marketing messages with offline sales, which could boost demand and prices for online ads. To this end, online video ad platform TidalTV is tapping Korrelate for sales attribution using its census-based O2O (online-to-offline) measurement service.

The O2O service, which so far is focused on automotive purchases, is based on non-identifying data received from third parties about the past behavior of a user’s Web browser, based on the Web pages visited.

This data is used to put group users into segments, which are then targeted with relevant advertising. It is combined with offline data to determine ad effectiveness. The offline consumption information is drawn from RL Polk’s household-level make and model purchase data from vehicle registrations.

This method is sensitive to privacy concerns, according to Korrelate, because it doesn’t require any identifying information about the viewer, and no offline data can be tied back to an individual online user.

Read More: MediaPost

AOL Starts Mapping Plans For Huffington Post

AOL plans to focus more on video during the next year, expanding into Asia with products and offerings after setting up the infrastructure in the U.S. The company has high-definition studios in New York and California and recently bought a company supporting a network of videographers to provide production, distribution and monetization of content, according to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, speaking at the Signal L.A. conference in Los Angeles Tuesday.

Armstrong and Arianna Huffington, AOL president and editor in chief for the newly created Huffington Post Media Group, provided insight into the $315 million deal announced Monday. Federated Media Executive Chairman John Battelle led the discussion.

Some reports suggest that the political content attracted AOL, but Armstrong calls that theory “a red herring” because 85% of content or traffic on HP doesn’t have anything to do with politics. “Our interest in buying the Huffington Post was about the social content and the future in distribution and, frankly, Arianna’s TLC around the content space,” Armstrong said.

Read More: MediaPost

Specific Media CTO McCartney joins VisualDNA

He was instrumental in building the Adviva ad-serving platform which Specific Media acquired and on which its offering is based. He joins VisualDNA as CTO to help the company scale up.

According to VisualDNA founder and CEO Alex Willcock, “McCartney started last week and is building out our platform to enable massive scale. It’s a big coup for us.”

In the coming weeks, VisualDNA intends to tie up with demand-side platform AppNexus, synching data so that media agencies can buy against it.

“We’re getting a lot of traction in that we collect first-party, opt-in data, when there’s very little high quality data around,” said Willcock.

Read More: New Media Age

5 ad operations tips for the year ahead

As we evaluate our successes and shortcomings from 2010, and set expectations for 2011, it’s always good practice to review the work that your team developed, and the processes by which they did so. I wanted to take a moment to share, with the online advertising community, some of the observations and ideas that we’ll be using to build a stronger ad operations process for the year ahead, and beyond. Here are five ad operations tips to get your 2011 off to a great start.
 
1. Review workflow, processes, and templates
In all probability, the last quarter of 2010 was a hectic time, with your ad ops teams working extended hours, implementing makeshift processes, and coming up with temporary solutions. Traditionally, workload drops drastically in Q1 and the pressure is significantly lower. Hence, the beginning of 2011 presents an ideal opportunity to review workflow, processes, and templates.

Read More: iMedia Connection