Articles by: "Jennifer Choo, Senior Marketing Manager — Theorem Inc."

Struggling to implement advertising automation? Here are three critical factors

February 21, 2022 Jennifer Choo, Senior Marketing Manager — Theorem Inc.

Across the publishing, media and streaming industries, ad supported revenue models remain a central source of income, despite the growing popularity of subscription models. As we look to the future, we know that ad supported revenue models are here to stay, but to remain profitable and scalable they must evolve. Automation offers the ability to optimize processes and future-proof these models at scale. But implementation can be challenging for organizations that have long standing manual processes tied to revenue models.

Through the past few years, shifts in consumer behaviors have compelled many publishing, streaming, and entertainment brands to focus on optimizing their current ad models. To stay competitive, many concluded they would need to innovate their current strategies by leveraging automation as a tool to streamline processes.

Additionally, many organizations had to take a hard and fast look at their current business models and make changes that enable scale and ensure success in current and future markets. Let’s face it: This would be no small task at any time. However, it is particularly challenging these days given the impacts of the pandemic across all industries and the tremendous growth of digital marketing initiatives fueled by the shifts in consumer behavior.

The act of developing new ad modeling formats to engage with evolving consumer habits does involve innovation and proper management. Organizations going through these pivots can be vastly different in terms of structure, size, and strategy. However, their goals and the path to achieve them are the same: Streamlining processes and future-proofing business by automating the processes that enable advertising campaign deployment and successful ad model revenue streams.

Implementing automation is worthwhile, but it can be challenging. When implementing automation strategies into your organization, you should focus on three critical elements: managing the human element, enabling effective change order, and enhancing data analysis and utilization. These must be addressed to allow you to effectively implement automation, to optimize for today and build a foundation for the growth of tomorrow.

Managing the human element

Advertising is both an art and a science. The art piece is the element in which human creativity is necessary for innovation. The science is the technology that can be leveraged across repetitive elements to increase bandwidth in terms of scale and reduce the time required of teams.

For many, balancing the human element within their technology and automation implementations can be a challenge. Optimization of redundant tasks through automation is necessary to streamline internal processes, which enables scalability and business growth. But developing an automation strategy cannot be done without the human element of the business.

No matter what type of challenge you facie, and changes you are working to implement, one critical element of balancing the art and science of it all is transparency. Encouraging teams to embrace changes through open communication and collaboration and building a structure based on accountability is key.

The human element of your business is necessary part of the technology and automation implementation. The only way to succeed when implementing an automation strategy is to enable buy-in to the process by way of transparency from the start. It is critical that you involve you team in every step of the automation implementation process—and the earlier you involve them the better.

Enabling effective change management

Business optimization and growth at scale are a constant process for all organizations. It is impossible for any business to implement organization-wide changes to strategy and process, like automation of order-to-cash, without a heavy focus on effective change management. Ensuring that the entirety of the business has buy-in to the pivots in strategy and the new workflows that are being implemented is paramount to success, and effective change management practices will get you there.

Effective change management requires leading with empathy. To succeed, you must understand your teams, their fears, wants, and needs. The best way to do this is to establish internal feedback loops, encourage collaboration and develop a baseline of accountability.

Change can be intimidating for teams, especially in terms of automation, but it doesn’t have to be. Creating stability through large business shifts like automation implementation is critical. The key to effective change management is involving your teams throughout the change process, creating clear roles and responsibilities, and establishing a baseline of accountability for individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole.

Enhancing data analysis and utilization

Data is at the core of all organizations. Data analysis is the thread that ties the art and science of business evolution together. To successfully manage the human element of your business and enable effective change management, you must lean into your data. It is vital to thoroughly understand your audiences to better serve your brand clients and make insightful decisions when it comes to creative and logistical elements of your business. Significant innovations like automation implementation cannot be successful without leveraging your data and enhancing your data utilization strategies across your business.

The ability to enhance data analysis and utilization is critical for publishing, media, and streaming brands as it correlates directly to keeping brand partners in the know, for both existing initiatives and future planning. More than ever before, brand partners look to their media partners to provide real-time data insights to inform campaign optimization and ensure success.

Leveraging robust data utilization and analysis within your internal decision-making initiatives enables internal teams to develop content that serves the interests of the modern consumer, creating an audience pool with higher engagement levels for brand partners to reach. Implementing robust data collection methodologies and enabling both internal teams and brand partners to tap into that data in real-time is a key element to optimizing and building future growth.

Growth ahead

Regardless of your business model, developing a methodology to ensure your business can grow at scale for years to come is critical. Publishing, media, and streaming companies have encountered a host of different challenges over the past few years as they work to optimize and scale their businesses. Automation is central to future-proofing your advertising strategies. These three core implementation strategies will help you get there.

These elements are at the heart of the evolution of ad supported revenue models for streaming, media, and publishing brands. Understanding the necessity and building a strategy with these elements as the focal points will ensure successful innovation for scale in the modern competitive market.

Advertising | Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Three trends that will transform media operations and advertising in 2022

December 6, 2021 Jennifer Choo, Senior Marketing Manager — Theorem Inc.

Residual effects of the pandemic on consumers are driving many trends within the advertising and media operations industry. For companies with an advertising revenue stream, it is critical to evolve with these trends in order to better serve advertisers and prepare for 2022 and beyond.

Today’s consumers respond to deeper personalization and more nuanced marketing campaigns. So, to cater to these needs and evolving advertiser demands, media brands must adjust their strategies. From adopting performance-based offerings to enabling fully compliant data and integrating automation to streamline workflows for scalability, here are some of the top trends in media operations and advertising that media companies should be taking note of as we look ahead at 2022.

Adapting a performance mindset

While performance metrics have long been a part of the media buy, the way that they are viewed and the depth of their impact on media spends has rapidly shifted over the past two years. In the past, top-of-funnel metrics like brand awareness and views were center stage. Now, the industry is taking a deeper look to correlate media buys with bottom of funnel metrics like pipeline scale and sales growth.

As a result, the pressure is on for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad spending. This, in turn, is driving more publishers and media streaming brands to look at and present their media offerings in a more performance-driven way. This may seem like an unwelcome change. However, those that can connect their offerings to impacts on bottom funnel KPIs are sure to stabilize and scale revenue streams while ensuring higher rates of business renewal.

This shift just starting to take hold of the advertising and media industry. So, we are sure to see a rapid development of methodologies used by publishing and streaming media companies to connect their media buys to key performance metrics. One such strategy that has begun to emerge is the integration of first-party purchase intent data into media buy targeting.

Leveraging automation to manage scale

Advertising and media operations are becoming more complex and nuanced in the post-pandemic modern marketing landscape. As more sophisticated advertising emerges at scale within the media industry, so do the pain points that come along with streamlining processes like order-to-cash (OTC) to fulfill the needs of the industry and prepare for future growth. This is where we are seeing automation come into play.

For many media brands that rely on advertising as a revenue stream, the manual aspects of operational workflows have long been an issue when it comes to scalability. This rings particularly true within their order-to-cash processes. As the demand of the industry forces advertisers to adapt to growth and prepare for scale, many look to automation solutions to help streamline the redundant elements of their workflows. The goal is to optimize today and build for tomorrow. Meaning ensuring scalability, significantly reduce error rates, increasing ROI and, of course, free up internal teams to focus on other growth elements of the business.

This may seem like a daunting task to many publishers and streaming media brands. However, the rewards to be reaped by taking the time to enable automation into their processes are numerous. The shifts we have seen towards more complex and customized advertising won’t slow down anytime soon. In fact, they will become even more intricate and nuanced over time.

Automation solutions not only allow media brands to optimize for current business, but they allow organizations to be ready for growth. An agile solution will accommodate whatever the future of advertising and media operations has in store for the publishing and streaming industries.

Adapting data strategies to meet market demand

Constantly evolving data compliance regulations coupled with the privacy changes brought forth by Google and Apple are changing the way data is viewed and leveraged. These changes are especially prevalent within the publishing and streaming industries where leveraging customer data as a selling point is the standard.

To adapt, many marketing teams are leveraging customer data platforms (CDPs) to streamline their data collection and management across all of their data sources. Publishing and streaming companies need the ability to provide their advertising clients connectivity to data without oversharing or putting privacy at risk.

Some larger walled gardens have developed solutions for this via “CDP Adjacent” systems. However, we are still in the early days of developing an overarching solution for the wider publishing and streaming industries. The imminent demise of the cookie is a driving force towards building solutions. The development of data connectivity systems and similar technologies will allow companies to connect and match data sets in a controlled and privacy-compliant way.

The bottom line

The ever-evolving demands of the modern consumer market are a driving force for trends we are seeing across the advertising and media operations landscape. While these trends are not new concepts within the publishing and media streaming communities, the pace at which they accelerated certainly is.

It is imperative that brands investing in advertising as a revenue stream are not only watching these trends but reacting to them. Working to optimize their current processes, while building agile foundations to prepare for the future. Pivoting to a more performance-based models, integrating automations to streamline processes and developing more robust and data privacy compliant technologies will do just that.

Perspectives

Marketing cloud best practices for publishers

May 26, 2021 Jennifer Choo, Senior Marketing Manager — Theorem Inc.

The innovations in marketing technologies and platforms over the past decade have been transformational for the marketing industry. For publishers, the latest and greatest in MarTech and software can be both groundbreaking and challenging. Innovations in marketing automation have revolutionized the order-to-cash process for media organizations across the industry. However, other modern marketing tech — like most marketing cloud platforms — have posed challenges for marketers in the publishing world.

Helping publishers or marketers

But why are these innovations so helpful to general marketing teams yet so challenging to publisher marketing?

In simple terms, many of the marketing platforms today are not built to accommodate the needs of publishers and their marketing teams. Lack of speed, minimal out of the box capabilities, and antiquated features and UX pose a challenge to publishing organizations in terms of marketing cloud set up, cost, reporting and continuity.

It is those that allow media org marketers to follow the current marketing cloud best practices for publishers that are assisting in publisher marketing success.

Choosing the right platform

In simple terms, many of the marketing platforms today are not built to accommodate the needs of publishers and their marketing teams. For instance, most marketing cloud platforms are created to host one main brand. However, media companies often have a dozen or more brands, under their parent company umbrella. These need to be housed together though they operate separately. This poses a challenge in terms of marketing cloud set up, cost, reporting and continuity.

Many of the big names in marketing cloud software today cannot be used by media brand marketers without a stifling amount of customization in-terms of platform setup and integrations. Even with full scale custom integrations, most do not satisfy the needs of publishing organizations. The fact is that they can be somewhat antiquated and not optimized for the speed most publishing companies require.

However, it is important to note that there are marketing cloud platforms (like Saithru) that are configured to host publishing and media brands with ease. When selecting a marketing cloud platform, it is imperative to choose one that is built to allow media industry marketers to follow the current marketing cloud best practices for publishers.

Curated content capabilities

One of the most crucial aspects for marketers is publishing curating content. The ever-growing consumer demand for digital content has bolstered the need for publisher brands to aggregate their original content with curated content from reputable sources. This provides readers with the content they demand and develops trust between them and the publisher brand.

Developing a strategy for curated content is a cornerstone for media brand marketing teams. However, it cannot be done without proper planning and technology that includes content curation capabilities.

Excellent audience segmentation

Audience segmentation is a critical component of marketing strategies for all marketing teams. Yet this is even more true for publishers. Because of the breath of their brand audiences, marketers in publishing companies have another layer of segmentation to consider. This means that marketing cloud tech they employ must allow for in depth segmentation. It must also have the capability to automate that segmentation consistently.

Yes, audience segmentation enables marketing teams to create appropriate messaging. However, it also informs curated content, customization, and engagement strategies for both the publisher and their advertising clients. Without properly executed audience segmentation strategies and the marketing technology to enable it, publishers cannot succeed.

Customization is crucial

Just as important as segmentation is the customization that derives from it. As best practices go, customization has ranked in the top five for all marketing teams for years now. Enabling a customization strategy has become more and more crucial as customers inboxes and feeds become more and more cluttered.

In simple terms, aggregating customized messaging is the best way to bolster engagement with audiences. And that is the goal of all marketers. For publisher brand marketers, this is exponentially more important. That’s because they are striving for engagement of their brands for their parent company as well as their advertising clients. In other words, engagement by way of customization is at the heart of multiple ROI streams for media organizations. Ensuring the ability to plan, curate and implement customization strategies efficiently through marketing cloud technology is more important now than ever.

Drip campaigns for consistency

Constant and consistent messaging is another best practice for marketing teams in the publishing world. The amount of content, both editorial and media, that publishers output lends well to drip campaigns. This approach enables ongoing communications with audiences and increase user engagement. The difference between a drip campaign in the media industry and a standard marketing org is the sheer volume.

Tying directly back to the numerous child brands publishers house, advertising clients, curated outside content, and original content, the volume of drip campaigns publishers must output daily can seem staggering. It is imperative that the selected marketing cloud platform can handle the daily output. It also needs to simplify the process via automations and enablement of standardized, consistent template systems.

In summary

For publishers using marketing cloud technologies, there are key components that must be considered to ensure success. From tech platform selection to curated content, audience segmentation, customization and engagement, the best practices for publishers are more complex and crucial than ever before.

Advertising | Innovation | Perspectives

Automating O2C processes will resolve pain points and ensure scalability

March 16, 2021 Jennifer Choo, Senior Marketing Manager — Theorem Inc.

From a 10,000-foot view, order-to-cash (O2C) is a seemingly simple process. However, the O2C cycle causes pain points across a number of business in various industries — notably in the media marketing and publishing industries. Orders are received, processed, sent through billing, and revenue is recognized. But anyone using order-to-cash in their business workflow will tell you that it’s much more complicated than it seems. This is particularly true in the digital age.

Reviewing the O2C workflow in any company reveals that a number of processes are involved. Many of these include manual aspects that create higher costs, elevate error margins, increase delays and limit scalability. This is especially true in the media and publishing industries where growth is critical and scalability hinges on resolving O2C pain points. Fortunately, many of these processes are repeatable and scalable, which makes them prime candidates for automation.

That being said, the thought of reengineering long standing order-to-cash processes can seem daunting. For many this involves enabling new systems, integrating different business units and systems together, updating to a modern data collection model, and syncing a proper tech stack. All of this is required to execute a well-functioning automated O2C process.

Often, the perceived complexity of such an undertaking will drive companies to put off automating their O2C processes. However, it is becoming more and more evident that the order-to-cash process must automated in order to simplify and streamline them, especially for industries with media buys.

Identifying O2C pain points

Media industry players are encountering a need for scalability in their ad campaign business now more than ever. Order volume is out-scaling manual elements of existing processes to execute campaigns. This is particularly true in companies with an ever-growing large daily volume of short-lived ad placements.

No trafficking team, no matter how skilled, has the ability to execute 100% accuracy when manually processing hundreds of ad campaigns daily. From tag checkers, to the volume of unique URLs needed for creatives, to requests for targeting large sets of DMAs, to endless rule sets and executing a wide variety of product packages for their clients, it all comes down to reducing the manual aspects of these repeatable processes. These are all essential to allow for scale with ease. This will also limit error margins almost completely. The good news is that all of this can be achieved through automation.

In reality, the repeatable aspects of trafficking workflows are all prime candidates for automation. These include target sections, creating unique targeting rules and UTM trackers, DMA cloning, and establishing rule sets. Executing a well-rounded automation strategy to address these aspects of O2C will free up bandwidth for tasks and process that must be manual. Thus, the process also facilitates scale.

Why automating O2C Processes is crucial

Order-to-cash issues in publishing and media can be both internal and external. However, they all involve the ad placement campaign cycle. Internal processes involve inventory management, subscription management, order process, and ad placements. Processes that are external include order processing, ad management, programmatic, and audience management.

Of course, there are some crossover points between the two. Some processes involve the client needs (advertising) and the means to flight ads (audience management and inventory management). All effect the bottom line in terms of profit.

O2C processes regularly involve segmentation which generally tends to be a manual process. The more manual the process, the longer the campaign completion times. This results in extended periods of time between order placements and recognized revenue.

Streamlining an ad placement campaign cycle in the order-to-cash workflow, with automation will make processes faster and more efficient. Creating smaller to zero error margins while enabling publishers and media marketing companies to complete order cycles and recognize revenue faster.

Real world examples

Consider, for example, the process of manually selecting rule sets in ad trafficking. Rule sets are a standard element in the O2C process and often come with a high margin of error pain point. For each campaign, ad, and platform, a particular rule set must be implemented to meet the client’s targeting criteria. Multiply this by hundreds or thousands per day and you have the perfect scenario for errors to occur. These types of errors effect ad performance and tracking UTM’s causing significant inaccuracies in reporting.

Thankfully simple and repeatable aspects of the ad trafficking workflow, like rule sets, are perfectly constructed for automation. Although the particular type of automation will vary depending on the use case, automating these elements will greatly reduce inaccuracies and speed up campaign cycles.

In addition, many publishing, media and streaming companies offer a vast array of product packages to their ad clients. Some offer 50+ types of product packages, each with their own set of guidelines for trafficking, enabling a host of issues that can occur during campaign setup, deployment and reporting.

In this instance, trafficking appropriately and enabling the correct tags for reporting is key to successful campaign execution. Reducing manual efforts and human error margins is essential and the best way to do so is through automated DMA updating capabilities.

The payoff

The order-to-cash process has become more arduous as the digital ad market has grown. This is particularly true within the publishing and media marketing industries. As the scale of ad business increases, the need for simple and accurate solutions to O2C pain points has become critical.

In markets that rely heavily on order-to-cash workflows for recognized revenue, the answer is simple: Optimize your O2C workflows with automation to eliminate error margins, reduce delays in revenue recognition, increase bandwidth, and ensure scalability.