Invision: Transforming Ops to Ops: Ad "Op"erations to "Op"timization & "Op"portunities - Michael Stoeckel - MediaBizBloggers

If you are a media seller in any field, many support functions are provided to you by a dedicated ad operations team. Unfortunately, several of the primary ad operations tasks, such as trafficking or ad production, can be quite mundane. Depending on the way your sales and sales support teams are organized, the ad operations team might also expand into functions such as account management, order management, stewardship and even some reporting. Beyond that, ad operations groups often serve as the bridge between Ad Sales and other departments such as Ad Technology/Engineering and Finance. As such, many typical ad operations roles are narrowly focused on workflow and collaboration.

There will always be sales organizations where the ad operations role is viewed as nothing more than a blunt tool required to bring in the money. However, the most successful ad sales organizations to which I've been exposed have been led by visionaries who utilized ad operations as a weapon to optimize existing products and create unique opportunities.

Grunt work is an inevitable and hefty portion of ad operations responsibilities. However, through performing many of these mundane tasks, the elite members of your ad operations teams will learn the intricacies and inner workings of your ad products and properties better than anyone. As a means of rewarding these top players and maximizing your revenue potential, allow them to concentrate on value driven tasks such as inventory optimization, yield management, product packaging and dynamic, supply-demand driven pricing. Provide these peak performers with the proper systems so that they can apply some of the science they pick up hanging around the engineers and vendors by recommending optimized prices and controlling over- and underselling. The return-on-investment will be both immediate, and, by intelligently maximizing inventory availability, long-term.

In addition to these optimization opportunities, there are emerging advertising dilemmas inducing the need for operational upgrades. As the world of advertising is becoming increasingly complicated due to cross-platform selling and the introduction of advanced capabilities, such as interactivity and addressability, into your traditional ad offerings, consolidate the workflow into a single suite of ad operations tools. Such consolidation is one of the few ways to counter the new complexity by providing familiarity and simplicity to your salespeople.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the first two golden rules of ad operations are:

1. Make it easy for buyers to buy

2. Make it easy for sellers to sell

The third, less quoted rule is: If it has to be difficult for anyone, it will be ad operations. However, this should not preclude your sales organization from striving for "universal ease." By automating many core ad operations processes, you can free gifted staff to work on the more strategic aspects of your business.

As we creep out of a fierce ad recession, which, in hopes of saving as much revenue-producing headcount as possible, may have led you to cut deep into your ad operations staff, it is a critical time to evaluate your ad operations tools. If you find Excel or cut-and-paste at the heart of any critical processes, you are in trouble. Prepare a checklist now for upgrading your sales management systems. Then, as business starts to pick up, you can move quickly to make the technology changes and minimize your need for additional ad operations headcount. Then as these more efficient workflow tools are put into place, redeploy your best and brightest ad operations players into the optimization-focused roles mentioned above.

Michael Stoeckel is Vice President, Digital Products for INVISION Inc.

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