This week I attended the Admonsters Cn-us-22 conference in New York Metro. It was my first Admonsters conference, and was very interesting mainly from publisher, pain point, mobile and industry landscape perspectives.
I guess the key observations that I had were:
- No-one is remotely happy with their mobile adserving products, mainly around consistency and reliability across mobile platforms and agency/advertiser understandings and future trends.
- There is a huge chasm between the buyers and sellers of advertising, which is now being filled with a wide (and fluctuating) range and depth of vendors offering to optimise, sell, shift, validate, track, forecast or report on your inventory.
- Publishers are concerned with their decreasing level of inventory control (lots of finger pointing at ad networks) and are looking for ways to use partnerships (scale) and technology to take back control of their premium inventory.
- The Adops role has no formal certification or education, but requires sales, technical, marketing, advertising, contracting, client services and research skills in an ever changing market (day-to-day firefighting makes vendor/industry research and process implementation a ‘nice to have’). These two factors also combine to make it difficult to hire new people.
I was at the conference to observe and learn, and I am still digesting everything thoughts from some serious industry experts. Personally my favourite presentation was the keynote by Jason Kelly, who provided a great overview and vision for the online advertising landscape. From an outsiders perspective my overall impression was that many challenges being faced are the result of a marketplace in turmoil. A transparent, all encompassing advertising exchange for a standardised set of ad specs is the obvious capitalist solution, but until then the mash-up of solutions to help you get as close to the supply-demand curve are getting better.
The next Publisher US forum will be in Sonoma on August 15-18th.
Each year Google runs a GoogleServe week, where we each choose a non-profit project we would like to contribute to. I chose to present to a group of 30+ non-profit organisations here in Sydney on how they can benefit from our recently launched YouTube non-profit program. Despite being only a small contribution it was a very rewarding experience, and I was really impressed with how sophisticated many of the charities are.