#4: Quo Vadis Education Session

Get A Winning Hand With Premium Automation — Mar 31, 11:00am ET

Mar 23, 2021

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Get A Winning Hand With Premium Inventory Automation

Education Session with AdSlot

Wanna learn a few tricks about getting the most bang for your display ad bucks? Then join our webinar on Premium Inventory Automation with AdSlot — March 31 at 11:00 am ET — you won’t regret those precious 30 minutes you spend with us.

You’re a brand marketer, but you’re worried.

How can you buy the best ad inventory in a post-cookie world? How do you get the most viewable display ads? If you could get more guarantees, you’d sleep better at night.

You’ve been conditioned to believe in programmatic auctions because you think the price is right. You love the promise of automated audience targeting. But when there are no guarantees on inventory quality, you’re just not sure what you get.

Wanna Know a Trick?

Whether you’re running brand campaigns or trying to reinvent retargeting without cookies, there’s a trick you should know. It goes by many names:

Guaranteed inventory
Sponsorship deals
Insertion order buying
Priority 4 or 6 in DFP (now Google calls it Google Ad Manager)

Stop listening to advice that always puts auction thinking first. They’ll all tell you, “Don’t worry, we’re finally doing supply chain optimization… we don’t buy 8 gazillion non-viewable sites that only bots could visit. It’s all good now, we get auction guarantees.”

Look, if you like taking bets with no upside and paying winner’s curse prices, then stick with that advice. But if you do, just know that publishers sell all their good stuff first. All the rest of the “remnant inventory” goes into programmatic auctions. Yes, pre-bid auctions are supposed to compete with guaranteed deals in the ad server, but do they really?

Anyway, that’s where audience targeting comes into play. A publisher’s unsold inventory is basically worthless, or else the publisher would have sold it beforehand. When audience data is layered in, it becomes valuable again, but only if the audience data is good and you use it correctly.

But Old-Fashioned Insertion Orders Are a Big Pain!

You’re right. Buying premium guaranteed inventory with old-fashioned insertion orders is a pain. Endless email threads, last-minute dramatic phone calls, lost PDF attachments, and messy spreadsheets are all fertile ground for mistakes. It’s expensive, annoying, and unnecessary.

Get The Buying Job Done

Forget about all the manual work. Try innovations like AdSlot instead. Get direct ad server connections with all the top publishers and automate your buying processes. Get after those productivity gains you keep talking about. It’s a no-brainer.

Wanna Learn More?

Invest 30 minutes of your time to make your ad buying better, faster, and cheaper.

Join our Quo Vadis Education Session on March 31st. Your truth-seeking host, Tom Triscari (CEO, Lemonade Projects will interview Cary Dunst from AdSlot on how to gain productivity on those premium ad buys.

We’ll Put Some Aces In Your Pocket

Brand Marketing Masters

We’ll show you how to blend attention metrics with premium buying.

Direct Response ROAS Freaks

We’ll show you how to turn premium inventory into ever-fresh retargeting pools with first-party data.

Advertising Is a Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD)

News flash: You don’t need a microwave to heat your leftovers. You just want to heat it up fast. That’s jobs-to-be-done theory in a nutshell.

Your microwave is just a tool to get a job done. Of course, there are other ways to heat up that leftover mac and cheese — you could use an oven, a stovetop, or even build a fire (preferably outside). But if you’re in a hurry, nothing gets the job done faster and more painlessly than a microwave.

The same notion can be applied to any product (like adtech) or service (like media buying). It turns out that consumers and businesses don’t actually “buy” anything at all — instead, they “hire” products and services.

For example, if the adtech tool (say, a DSP or managed service offering like a trading desk) doesn’t get the job done better than some other alternative (such as direct buying or going in-house), then it eventually gets fired and replaced. That’s the way it goes — in reality.

Underserved Outcomes

If you ask a media buyer, “Is buying premium inventory important to you?” They’ll usually answer, “Very important.”

And if you also ask, “How satisfied are you dealing with manual insertion order processes?” They’ll likely say, “Very unsatisfied (because it is a mundane, mistake-prone pain in the ass).”

Anytime you pair a top-priority outcome with total dissatisfaction, you’ve found an underserved outcome. What a gem! Since buyers will always pay to fill the gap, you’ve also found a well-defined, addressable market opportunity.

Tell Me More

Quo Vadis runs adtech education sessions a bit differently than what you’re probably used to. We start by disentangling the job you’re trying to get done, and then we research the best tools to help do it better, faster, and cheaper (aka productivity gains, more knowledge faster).

Step 1: We define the campaign use case. This is the thing you want to achieve, like buying premium guaranteed inventory without all the hassle of manual insertion orders.

Step 2: Since you want your use case to work as planned, you look for the right adtech and data tools that maximize your chances. The better the tools at your fingertips, the better, faster, and cheaper the job gets done. The more you achieve the desired outcome, the more satisfied you’ll become.

The Programmatic Rub

In programmatic land, Steps 1 and 2 are reversed. Supply chain agents routinely put the cart before the horse. We call this “programmatic-as-usual.” It’s like walking into Home Depot with no particular DIY project in mind and walking out with a drill press, a bathtub, and a banana tree plant.

Here’s what happens:

Advertisers get mesmerized by the shining light of adtech and data offerings. Who doesn’t like an amazing sales pitch?
The next thing you know, tech deals are signed. Everyone is giddy and can hardly wait to put the new tools to work on some fancy “holy grail” use case.
One calamity leads to another, various agents work in tandem to come up with temporary workarounds, the workarounds are almost always terrible solutions that become permanently swept under the rug, and everyone finds out the hard way that pre-selected tool commitments can’t get the job done.

Rinse and repeat… see Einstein’s definition of insanity (which he actually never really said).

And since nobody can admit failure in programmatic land — which creates a natural arbitrage opportunity for supply chain players to extract value (often with zero value add) — everyone escalates commitment and doubles down on a well-beaten path to “scaled” ad spend and zero advertising results.

There’s a Better Way

Start with a well-defined advertising use case — one your grandmother can understand — and then go find the tools, data, and measurement approach you need to run it.

Your use case can be as simple as answering two questions:

What specifically do you want to achieve?
How will you determine/measure achievement?

Alternatively, you can write down the five or six main job steps and then list out a handful of desired outcomes for each step. It’s more work, but not only will you save yourself a giant headache and avoid workarounds, you’ll also have a much better chance of getting the actual advertising job done.

Of course, if you prioritize making sure all that ad budget gets spent ahead of achieving actual advertising outcomes, then there is not much hope for you or your horse.

Adslot Is a Better Way to Get the Job Done

Media buyers don’t need a tool like AdSlot to buy premium guaranteed inventory — they just want to buy premium inventory in the most efficient way possible.

Why settle for endless emails (with unstructured excel files and endless PDF attachments) when you could have a fully automated experience and a direct line of sight into the publisher ad server avails. Throw in native communication tools to hash out deal terms and now we’re really talking about productivity gains.

At the end of the day, productivity gains will replace all that unnecessary labor — often unskilled and poorly trained — and the mistakes that come along with it

Get more. Get an edge. Join our webinar to learn more.

Ask Us Anything (About Programmatic)

If you are confused about something, a bunch of other folks are probably confused about the same exact thing. So here’s a no-judgment way to learn more about the programmatic ad world. Ask us anything about the wide world of programmatic, and we’ll select a few questions to answer in our next newsletter.

Quo Vadis