Adtools

I’ve been working and programming within internet related projects & businesses since 1996. I joined the Advertising Operations Team at the Electronic Telegraph (as it was known then) in 1999 and currently head-up Advertising Technology & Development. I’m an active member of the IAB, Admonsters (Europe) & the Dart Enterprise UserGroup and have been an active contributor to numerous advertising/marketing based groups, forums and mailing lists over that time.

I take a unconventional yet pragmatic approach to technology and how it can best support and extend the function of Advertising Operations. I believe firmly that a well resourced, trained & motivated AdOps Team can significantly build and add to a company’s bottom line & that the Advertising Operations function should be a key driver of both commercial and technological innovation within a media organisation. Through this blog I hope to be able to gather together many of the ideas and practical solutions I have developed over the past decade for use by the wider Advertising Operations community.

Seán Dillon

About Adtools.co.uk
Adtools started life approx 7 years ago as an in-house project run by myself. It was a simple collection of pretty basic tools which we used in the day-to-day trafficking function. Delivery calculators, tag manipulation tools etc… Over the past 7 years though Adtools has grown to become an integral part of our daily AdOps/Client Services life. We now use it as our interface to our Doubleclick Enterprise data, that is we export large amounts of data to Adtools which has numerous scripts which make sense of the naming conventions and product names and generally does a lot of the grunt work that Excel does in so many other AdOps Departments. There are four main modules within Adtools, Inventory Managment, Workflow Manager, Campaign Manager Report/Revenue Manager. There are also a wealth of other tools and scripts which are used in our day-to-day trafficking of orders, from 3rd party adtag desconstructors (detaggers as w call them) through to Remnant Network creative authorisation tools.

Inventory Managment:
We export approx 3m lines of availability data every 120mins. We pre-query all availability data for each primary MarketSegment across all active sityes at 3 different priorities to obtain as best a picture of current availability as we have ever had.

Campaign Manager:
We export every order/flight/creative with corresponding targeting information delivery/click data, this is imported into Adtools. This enables us to create concepts such as ‘Dealtype’ or AdProduct which are not supported by DE. we’re able to analyse things such as the FLIGHT_TARGET_DESCRIPTION fields and attribute new fields and values against these based on some simple rule sets. More importantly this also exposes all the data of every order, Flight Names, Creative Names, Advertiser Name, Flight Numbers, Agencies, Sales Exec etc. We have a simple search feature which has proved very powerful when combined with good naming conventions eg; We insert the name and unique adID of every 3rd party adserved deal we run, ie; [DART B9898776.2] would identify the Dart DFA network with the unique adID of B9898776.2. Not only does this mean we can then start to group/filter DART deals but importantly we can easily identify which ad is being called. We also dump raw data from the ADMANAGER_NG tables. We are then able to tie this data in with each order meaning that we can then create our own tearsheets by displaying the actual ad code input by the trafficker. As we will also klnow where the ad is supposed to show we are then able to create on-the-fly screenshots of any ad in any page massively reducing workload on our AdOps team. Campaign manager is also used as the basis of monitoring and reporting Page Takeovers & Email utilisation which is woefully inadequate within DE.

Workflow Manager:
Workflow Manager is a system that generates tasks for staff to complete each day. Based on our KPIs it will create tasks such as Chase Creative, Run Mid-Campaign report, Generate ScreenGrab etc… It does this automatically based on the status of each order as it enters the system. Each user has a unique login and can see at a glance those tasks delegated to them, Managers can also see other peoples Workflow and see what work/tasks are outstanding. Importantly each action when completed is recorded and logged and used as the basis of individual and team based performance reports/KPIs. Workflow Manager

Report/Revenue Manager:
We also export large amounts of delivery data. For each order we export ads delivered by channel and by country. This is good as we can bring this data into an environment where we are better able to manipulate and display this as opposed to the default reporting system from DE which has (unless you’ve invested in bespoke reporting) some limitations. We also export data delivered by each MarketSegment by each country by site. This enables us to be able to gauge the effectiveness of our inventory forecasting model as we are able to lookm bcak at historical forecasts and then plug this MarketSeg data into it after the fact.