Heading back to Washington, DC’s snow, ice, and “wintry mixes” was not quite as stimulating as spending time networking and learning at Operative‘s second annual Ad Revenue and Operations Summit, aka “OP/ED” that attracted about 100 executive last week in Miami, FL. The invitation-only conference was held for Operative’s clients and partners to share best practices, insights and help set the agenda for 2015 and beyond.

Lorne Brown, Operative’s President/CEO and Founder will be speaking on BIA/Kelsey’s Programmatic Superforum at the NATIONAL show in Dallas, which is March 25-27. Among other things, Operative and BIA/Kelsey will be releasing a jointly developed local publisher cut of Operative’s publisher survey previewed at OP/ED that analyzed profitability practices and parameters. Brown will highlight this study at our conference and also speak to what’s on his mind for programmatic and ad work flow from the perspective of publishers.

At the top of the wish list at OP/ED was the goal of publishers being able to provide “One IO, One Invoice.” This ideal of having sellers prepare a single Insertion Order (IO) for an advertising package that includes multiple channels and offers and both have it fulfilled in an automated workflow….and have the client receive a single, integrated invoice listing out all the inventory purchased and billed remains a bit pie in the sky. But clearly this is a serious and committed vision that companies like Operative are building out.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, it’s hard to know which thread to start pulling on. Operative’s strategy and really the industry’s, is to continue focus on building out its core platforms but to enable that One IO, One Invoice for its clients by adopting an API Stack Strategy to support interoperable database applications. There’s no other way to do it, so this is smart and extremely helpful for both publishers and clients. Operative clients including Comcast Spotlight, Hulu, NBC Universal, Verizon and Univision shared excellent and helpful insights and best practices based on their particular approaches to the sales process.

Digging deeper in to the topics, Digital Content Next’s CEO Jason Kint kicked thing off in his keynote by highlighting other areas of urgent concern, namely: Viewability, Fraud, Programmatic, Declining CPMs, dealing with the shift to mobile and better tools and information flows to support campaign optimization and revenue yield management. Compared to dealing with winter in Boston… a piece of cake!

Really one of the burning issues was dealing with viewability and fraud. In the wrap-up session, Kelly Blue Book’s Mark Bernstein; Gawker’s John Price and Eric Harris from BuzzFeed detailed out their vision for what needs to happen with viewability. In their view, supporting viewability and the “vCPM” (viewable CPM) metric requires a three-phased approach. The goal is for systems like Operative’s need to support automated delivery reconciliation and delivery, reporting and yield management. Phase 1 is to lay the groundwork to sell, execute and invoice viewable orders. Phase 2 is to automate delivery, billing reconciliation and invoicing. Finally, Phase 3 is to support viewable reporting, forecasting and payments.

For those interested, there’s a fairly rich Twitter stream at #OpED15, check it out.

The post One IO, One Invoice. The “Impossible Dream”? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Heading back to Washington, DC’s snow, ice, and “wintry mixes” was not quite as stimulating as spending time networking and learning at Operative‘s second annual Ad Revenue and Operations Summit, aka “OP/ED” that attracted about 100 executive last week in Miami, FL. The invitation-only conference was held for Operative’s clients and partners to share best practices, insights and help set the agenda for 2015 and beyond.

Lorne Brown, Operative’s President/CEO and Founder will be speaking on BIA/Kelsey’s Programmatic Superforum at the NATIONAL show in Dallas, which is March 25-27. Among other things, Operative and BIA/Kelsey will be releasing a jointly developed local publisher cut of Operative’s publisher survey previewed at OP/ED that analyzed profitability practices and parameters. Brown will highlight this study at our conference and also speak to what’s on his mind for programmatic and ad work flow from the perspective of publishers.

At the top of the wish list at OP/ED was the goal of publishers being able to provide “One IO, One Invoice.” This ideal of having sellers prepare a single Insertion Order (IO) for an advertising package that includes multiple channels and offers and both have it fulfilled in an automated workflow….and have the client receive a single, integrated invoice listing out all the inventory purchased and billed remains a bit pie in the sky. But clearly this is a serious and committed vision that companies like Operative are building out.

There are so many pieces to this puzzle, it’s hard to know which thread to start pulling on. Operative’s strategy and really the industry’s, is to continue focus on building out its core platforms but to enable that One IO, One Invoice for its clients by adopting an API Stack Strategy to support interoperable database applications. There’s no other way to do it, so this is smart and extremely helpful for both publishers and clients. Operative clients including Comcast Spotlight, Hulu, NBC Universal, Verizon and Univision shared excellent and helpful insights and best practices based on their particular approaches to the sales process.

Digging deeper in to the topics, Digital Content Next’s CEO Jason Kint kicked thing off in his keynote by highlighting other areas of urgent concern, namely: Viewability, Fraud, Programmatic, Declining CPMs, dealing with the shift to mobile and better tools and information flows to support campaign optimization and revenue yield management. Compared to dealing with winter in Boston… a piece of cake!

Really one of the burning issues was dealing with viewability and fraud. In the wrap-up session, Kelly Blue Book’s Mark Bernstein; Gawker’s John Price and Eric Harris from BuzzFeed detailed out their vision for what needs to happen with viewability. In their view, supporting viewability and the “vCPM” (viewable CPM) metric requires a three-phased approach. The goal is for systems like Operative’s need to support automated delivery reconciliation and delivery, reporting and yield management. Phase 1 is to lay the groundwork to sell, execute and invoice viewable orders. Phase 2 is to automate delivery, billing reconciliation and invoicing. Finally, Phase 3 is to support viewable reporting, forecasting and payments.

For those interested, there’s a fairly rich Twitter stream at #OpED15, check it out.

The post One IO, One Invoice. The "Impossible Dream"? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Ever get that “grass is greener” feeling that your digital media competitors may have a leg up on you in how their organize and run their advertising operations? Here’s a chance to find out how you compare.

Operative is running an online survey of publishers with partners MediaPost and Digital Context Next (formerly the Online Publishers Association) to get at questions around the profitability and efficiency of their digital media business. Participants in the survey will receive a free copy of the research report on February 25, 2015. The survey questions explore publishers’ current and planned sales operations size, make-up, ad stack technology platforms, typical CPM rates, revenue structure and profitability.

The goal of the survey partners is to provide some benchmark data to assist industry players to make better assessments both about their own operations and how they compare to others in digital media.

We look forward to seeing the results and offering some of our own insights and data around this topic when the report is released.

The post How Profitable is Your Digital Media Business? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

While this would be a first, should this really be a surprise? 

Broadcast’s gains have to be measured amid the fact that it has benefitted from a surprising spike in spot demand given its ongoing ratings declines. The gains in CPM are a combination of higher unit rates and the impact of continued ratings erosion as each spot delivers less audience on average than it once did. So, in theory, even rates that are flat in a program would carry a higher CPM than it did one year ago if that program has a lower audience level. As the years go by, it takes an increasing amount of commercial inventory to reach target demo delivery goals than it did a few years prior. While it might have taken 20 spots to reach 100 demo points five years ago, it now takes maybe 25 or 30 to reach that same targeted delivery. While there were impressive CPM gains ranging from roughly 9 percent to 15 percent depending on the network’s place in the hierarchy, this year’s upfront totals will not equal the broadcast industry’s highpoint in 2004 thanks, in part, to that continued decline in delivery assuming a constant in the percentage of sold inventory. 

Given the demand present and despite the constant harangue of digital sellers with dollar envy, a number of advertisers have made it clear that television remains the primary focus of the marketing budget. But if the points aren’t there in broadcast, where do you turn? 

The growing appeal of cable networks have been both a cause and beneficiary of the ratings decline of broadcasters in terms of viewers and ad dollars. Cable’s timing has been impeccable as this increased demand for its ad inventory comes when the industry is putting forth better and more highly rated content than ever, including more first run, local news and sports programming, across a wider array of its networks. Upfront reports confirm that the continued decline in broadcast audiences is translating into ad buyers buying much more deeply into the cable network universe this year in order to meet the television campaign goals of their clients. It also appears that the gap between broadcast and cable pricing continues to narrow. These are the fruits of the continued fragmentation of the television world. Buys that might have been five or six networks deep in years past are now going past 10 or 12. The gains are moving beyond the first tier networks of ESPN, TNT, USA, TBS, Discovery, etc.

What does this mean for local markets? It’s hard to imagine that what we’re seeing play out in the upfront won’t also happen there. Local advertising buyers will also likely find themselves buying more spots on broadcast stations and more local avails on a deeper selection of cable networks from the MSO’s than ever before just like their national brethren. We can all debate the impact of cord cutting or cord shaving in this Netflix-influenced era, but one thing is pretty clear-cut: It doesn’t much matter whether you’re cable or broadcast these days, just as long as the word “television” follows. 

The real trick for both broadcast and cable TV sellers is figuring out how to grow the ad pie in their local markets instead of poaching each other’s clients and prospects. The strength of their traditional assets, including their brands and television inventory, plus their growing digital offerings give them great allies in that effort. 

I guess it’s not a bad time to be selling TV advertising, is it?

The post Is This Really News? Cable Upfront to Surpass Broadcast appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.