AdMonsters will host an online technical forum to discuss best practices of implementing, managing and enforcing a successful late creative policy on April 23rd from 11 AM EST/4 PM GMT. So called “late creative” is a major problem in the execution and delivery of online advertising campaigns and arises when media or creative agencies deliver advertising assets–Flash files, rich media, or video–past the deadline laid out in a media owner’s terms and conditions, usually between three and five days before a campaign is to begin. This window allows media owners sufficient time to check that creative works correctly on the areas of the site on which it is scheduled to run, links are correctly defined in the creative, and that all tags and other embedded assets function properly.
In March 2006, IAB UK and AOP UK jointly published a set of guidelines for media owners and agencies to follow to help alleviate the problem. These guidelines can be found online and state:
Creative, correct to publishers’ specifications, should be delivered to the media owner within the standard IAB guidelines of three to five working days depending on format or to publisher specific guidelines. The industry bodies have agreed that charges will be made for creative received after 12.00 on the day before the campaign start date.
Charges will be at the publisher’s discretion and could take the form of:
• Fixed charge and/or
• Full cost of campaign invoiced with impressions pro rated down for each day creative is not live
While an important step forward in addressing the problem, the guidelines have yet to receive wide-scale adoption in the industry, as demonstrated by a 2008 AdMonsters survey of its UK members. This survey reveled that over 1/3 of campaigns started late due to problems with creative and that 85% of all creative received had some sort of problem that needed to be fixed before the campaign could go live. The scope and scale of these problem creatives required, on average, that the average mid-size publisher dedicate the equivalent of one full time employee to chasing creative for campaigns. Overall, the combination of these factors cost media owners and agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue per year.
AdMonsters will be hosting an online technical forum to discuss how implementing and enforcing a late creative policy can create efficiencies and save lost revenue. The presentation will outline the issues around late creative policies, and demonstrate with real life examples that both publishers and agencies benefit when implemented. Both perspectives will be represented and demonstrate that such policies can in fact be enforced.
The standard IAB/AAAAs Terms & Conditions v2.0 require that creatives be delivered to publishers on time. A late creative policy outlines the steps that follow if creatives aren’t on time. Best practices do exist, but are rarely followed which makes the standard requirements ineffective. The result is that both agencies and publishers lose efficiencies and publishers can have valuable inventory go to waste and not be monetized.
“There was a time when you could ask a room of Ad Operations professionals if they had ever heard of a late creative policy being enforced and not a single hand would go up,” said Rob Beeler, Vice President of Content and Media for AdMonsters. “There has been a lot of trepidation about following through, but we’re now seeing publishers and agencies working together to make it happen and it’s having real results.”
Joanne Bathurst, Head of Advertising Operations for Sulake Ltd (http://www.sulake.com) in London will be presenting her experiences in implementing a late creative policy from the publisher side. Formerly, Joanne was Head of Advertising Operations at Conde Net (GB). Joanne will be joined by a peer from a leading digital agency.
The AdMonsters online technical forum series will provide an opportunity for the online ad operations community to explore specific aspects of the industry in-depth throughout the year. Each event will be hosted by senior ad ops executives and will focus on a particular aspect of the industry. Some topics will be technology specific, others will examine a particular piece of software or workflow solution. All will be led by our members and, in the AdMonsters tradition, will be open discussions among peers that will leave attendees with specific takeaways.
Online technical forum will be recorded live including a question & answer segment. This recording will be made available on demand on the AdMonsters website after the event.
Further event information and registration is located here: http://www.admonsters.org/ws/ws-us-02.php
