Most publishers in this situation are cautiously testing and iterating, but are hamstrung by the ad hoc and highly manual spreadsheet analysis of their results.  Some channels, like exchanges and SSPs, are quite good at optimizing the value of the impressions they receive, but only see part of the picture. To really solve this problem publishers need a revenue management platform that allows them to get more out of their direct and indirect sales across all their channels.

Take for example the relatively simple challenge of comparing inventory value across channels.  Each third party system can report on what impressions they received, and how they valued them, but publishers don’t have a holistic view of direct and indirect CPMs in one place.  Sales should know the opportunity cost of the impressions they are bonusing as “added value” to get a deal done. They should be comparing the CPMs of the sponsorship deals they do with the potential CPM they could get on an exchange, to make sure they are covering the cost of sales.  And they should make sure they are pricing their guaranteed, rich media ads appropriately relative to a third party channel that offers neither benefit.

Inventory conflicts are also difficult to manage manually.  For example, the audience-targeting sales force may do a great job selling high-net-worth individuals for a high CPM.  But if that audience overlaps 90% with the sold-out Finance section, then there will be under delivery and finger-pointing.  A revenue management platform should forecast these overlapping inventory conflicts and resolve them before they become a fire drill.  Clear visibility into cross-channel sell-through also enables better packaging of inventory, such as including more audience-targeted display inventory with every video buy.

Many different channels can offer value to publishers when allocated appropriately, and a revenue management system can help make sure publishers make the right decisions.  This is not a zero-sum game – good revenue management can actually increase the value of many channels at the same time.  Every day we work with publishers tackling these issues, to help them ensure they are getting the full value of the audience and content they have invested so heavily to create.

 By Tom Shields, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Yieldex

Publishers need a way to leverage the “best of breed” systems to sell and deliver advertising across these channels without creating multiple islands of inventory. They need to be able to:

• Forecast Capacity and Availabilities
• Manage Demand and Pricing
• Create Products
• Set Rate Cards 
• Grow Overall Revenue

That’s why a Unified Inventory Model is a smart solution that efficiently drives a publisher’s advertising model. Publishers need a tool that will make it easy for them to sell, manage and optimize their entire ad inventory as one cohesive unit. Trying to manage each component individually takes more time, energy and staff resources.

Unified Inventory Model: A single Unified Inventory Model that supports the selling, management and optimization of all of a digital publisher’s ad inventory as a single unit, independent of the multitude of delivery systems, data sources and sales channels.

The Unified Inventory Model is the fundamental building block that enables a publisher to package inventory and maximize yield while being agnostic when making decisions for the underlying systems and channels. It is the mechanism that allows every department that touches the advertising process to understand and optimize ad revenue as a single system instead of trying to manage individual channels and hoping for the best.

Publishers should consider integrating a Unified Inventory Model solution if they are looking to leverage their current assets and grow revenues by bringing efficiency to their yield management process.

 By John Barr, Chief Operating Officer, Yieldex

Establish Overall Inventory Value

The first step in establishing a pricing policy involves evaluating the overall value of a publisher’s inventory based on supply and demand, independent of context or buyer:

• Where are there hotspots in demand?
• Where is there oversupply?
• What is the inventory overlap?

When evaluating demand, it is important to account for overlapping sales requests for inventory.  For example, let’s say you have two segments – “in-market cell phone” and “in-market GPS” that are both highly sold through and overlap 30%.  This means that one third of the people who are in-market for cell phones are also in market for GPS so by selling one segment, you are taking away from the other.  It also means that Verizon and Garmin are technically competing for audience.  Publishers can leverage this type of competition to create upward pressure on pricing.

While most premium publishers average around 30% sell through across their network overall, most also have hot spots of demand where sell through reaches 100% during certain times of year.  These can be specific content areas, behavioral segments or geographic segments like DMA.  These areas represent the greatest opportunity for leveraging pricing to maximize yield.  The challenge for publishers is discovering where these hot spots of demand exist and having the discipline to stay firm on price to take advantage of the demand.

Evaluate Inventory Within the Context of a Deal

The second step in establishing pricing policy involves setting guidelines around pricing inventory in the context of a specific transaction or deal.  This level of analysis needs to take into account the specifics of the transaction:

• Who is buying, how do they value the inventory?
• What is the size/length of the deal?
• How far in advance are they purchasing?

Based on the overall value of the inventory previously established, it might make sense to tweak the price up or down based on the specifics of a particular deal.  For example, if a particular advertiser is placing a very large buy, it may make sense to offer a volume-discount based on the size of the deal.  But again, discounting only makes sense if the inventory is not high-demand.

Summary

Publishers need to think about pricing at two levels – establishing an overall value for their inventory and understanding how the specifics of a deal should influence inventory value.  Yield Management Solutions like Yieldex can help with establishing the overall value of inventory as well as surfacing pricing analytics at deal-time.

By Anita Khosla, Director of Product Management, Yieldex

Publisher perceptions vary before undertaking a Yieldex implementation. They range from eagerness to get started, to misunderstanding the time and resources required to implement, to concern with the scope of organizational change required to realize the full possible benefits. Fortunately, Yieldex has significant experience managing successful implementations across numerous publishers.

The Yieldex team is trained to guide each publishing partner through a phased implementation while allowing them to realize the benefits of improved visibility and building on each previous phase. Here are the suggested steps a publisher should take to improve visibility into the data necessary to help maximize the value of their inventory and boost revenues:

Embrace the Need

It’s critical that publishers embrace the need to implement a yield optimization solution. They should accept that they operate in a complex environment that’s highly unintuitive and they need tools that provide the necessary insights to be successful. They must have confidence that their organization would benefit from accurate availability forecasting, effective pricing polices, deal evaluation and upfront optimization.

Define Success

Every publisher is different. For some, the ability to forecast accurately and with confidence would mean success. Others want to better understand their sales data and quickly evaluate the value of their deals. Some want to price with confidence or manage under delivery. Publishers need to define what they are trying to achieve in order to solve sales, inventory, or pricing related problems. That’s where the Yieldex implementation and services team comes in. They help create a phased approach that meets a publishing partner’s goals and brings additional value with each implementation step taken.

Build the Foundation

Implementing the Yieldex platform involves getting connected to a publisher’s primary ad server’s campaign and traffic data. The Yieldex implementation and services team guide a publisher through this process and performs all of the heavy lifting. This allows a publishing partner to start harnessing the real value of their inventory and provide the foundation for expanded data utilization. Once integrated, Yieldex trains the publisher team to use the platform to meet the goals of the implementation phase. Benefits enabled during this phase include:

• Sales and Inventory teams immediately begin to see the benefit of accurate forecasting to sell with more confidence.
• Operations team can leverage data to maximize delivery and resolve issues with the assistance simple to use recommendations.
• Improved analytics allow senior management to understand their business more profoundly than ever before.
• Increased ROI can impact a publisher’s business in a few short months.
• Identification of data consistency issues improves the ad operations process.

Integrate Sales Pipeline Data

As a subsequent phase, publishers often want to understand how their sales pipeline will affect the future of their business. Yieldex is unique in its ability provide insight into the future of a publisher’s media business by introducing sales pipeline data from multiple sources, including sales and workflow systems. This allows them to evaluate this data in the context of their inventory. Yieldex Sales and Revenue Planner functionality gives publishers increased control of their business upfront and pricing accordingly. When a publisher completes this step, they enable their team to evaluate every potential deal and ensure that each is structured to maximize overall revenue. At this point, they are well on their way to taking control of their business through upfront optimization.

Integrate Additional Ad Server and Data Providers

The online publishing business is always changing and so are the media services that publishers work with. What remains constant is the need to incorporate, analyze, and understand the data that comes out of video, mobile, display ad servers and data management platforms. Yieldex is able to integrate data from each of these data sources and provide data visibility that that fits a publisher’s business needs. These additional data integrations enable a publisher to build upon and further increase the benefits of the visibility enabled by each prior phase.

Achieve Full Data Visibility Everywhere

Yieldex can help transform the way a publisher runs their business by providing the flexibility to integrate data throughout your organization and systems to empower decision makers at every step of the sales, inventory, and operations processes. Spreading the visibility throughout the publisher organization may be achieved through integration with a publisher’s workflow, sales, and other existing systems using Yieldex APIs and tools. This is true data nirvana.

Summary

Every publisher’s business is unique. Every path taken to achieve full data visibility will be distinct. With Yieldex’s experienced implementation and services teams performing the heavy lifting, training, and supporting API integrations why not take the first steps towards improved visibility and realize more revenue today?

By Craig Miller, CTO Yieldex 

The Challenge of Audience Data

Many publishers today are enriching their inventory with anonymous demographic and behavioral data to increase the value of their inventory. The combination of well-branded content and quality audience data produces higher value inventory –  particularly when that inventory is sold as guaranteed, where CPMs are much higher and where typically the majority of publisher revenue is created. But it’s one thing to create inventory with more potential value, it’s quite another to be able to capture its full value.

Just selling across content already makes the problem too hard for spreadsheets to solve. One order line targets a content category, one a section, another a group of zones most of which overlap. If that weren’t bad enough, order lines consume different quantities over different time frames and at different price points. It’s a familiar problem to online publishers. As the number of uniquely targeted order lines grows so does the complexity of the problem. Even at a few hundred order lines, let alone thousands, it’s beyond the limitations of a two dimensional tool like Excel, even in the hands of the most sophisticated users. If demographic data like geo-targeting, age and gender enter the picture the problem gets much worse since user attributes cut across content. This can become especially acute when granular geo-targets like zip and DMA targets are sold.

Behavioral data takes inventory challenges to new levels. Consider that in a typical office many of the people will fall into a relatively small handful of demographic buckets; same DMA, two genders, and a few age buckets, etc. but in the case of behavioral data it’s unlikely that any two people will have the same set of attributes – especially when purchase intender data enters into the mix since many major data providers are providing thousands of “in-market” segments. When you sell against these, inventory complexity explodes.

This is the kind of problem that Yieldex was created to solve and where we excel today.

An Industry Example

With limited options, many publishers have tried to use either their order management system or their ad server to manage inventory, often with poor results.  For example, a well-known publisher that we’ve started to work with recently integrated behavioral data into their site and has very successfully sold inventory targeted as a combination of user data and content.  But as the use and sell-through of behavioral targets increased, the forecasts from their ad server became very unreliable.  Both under delivery and under utilization of high demand, high value segments had became a significant problem, causing significant revenue leakage.

Because their advertisers are trying to reach potential consumers specific to their market, and many in-market segments represent less than 1% of inventory, this publisher typically targets groupings of related in-market segments. This strategy has the dual benefits of creating compelling products customized to the advertiser’s marketing needs and additionally aggregating multiple targets to create significant volume.   It’s a powerful strategy that we seen several publishers using but to successfully deliver on the potential, you need the best solution in the marketplace to manage it.

Yieldex InventoryIQ  vs. Your Ad Server

Recently, Yieldex conducted a study with this publisher to compare the forecasts out of InventoryIQ against the forecasts coming out of their system – the industry’s leading ad server. The study was performed against the ad server’s recently upgraded technology which was touted to address its well-known inventory forecasting accuracy issues with orders that target multiple key/values – which in today’s environment is becoming the norm.  We compared the predictions from Yieldex InventoryIQ and the ad server predictions for a sample week, and used MAPE analysis to compare the average absolute percentage prediction error against the actual delivery numbers collected afterwards.  The results were dramatic.

The Yieldex forecast produced a 10-fold relative increase in accuracy when compared to the ad server numbers, with the ad server’s worst case off by much as 34% vs. actual while InventoryIQ never faring worse than 92%. But the most relevant metric to compare is the overall average accuracy, with the ad server delivering only 68% average accuracy and InventoryIQ coming in at a very impressive 97%. This results in Yieldex producing a 29% absolute accuracy uplift between forecast and actual numbers. How does this difference relate to yield?

The Value of Confidence

This increased accuracy translates to a real opportunity to increase revenue. The reasoning is simple.  If a publisher relies on forecasts with an average error of over 30% and wants to avoid under delivering to contract, then they should only sell up to 70% of reported sell-through, which would leave on average 30% of inventory unsold. This is the common approach. On the other hand if they want to be more aggressive and sell to 100% reported sell-through, they will on average under deliver on 30% of budgeted advertiser spend, and risk damaging the advertiser relationship. In either case, the effect is a 30% impact on effective yield out of the potential value of the inventory. The bottom line is that the greater the confidence in the prediction, the greater the opportunity to book at high sell-through levels and still deliver to contract. Does it make sense incur the expense of integrating user data into your network just to let 30% of that value go to waste?

How much is a 30% confidence uplift worth to you per year? At many publishers a significant percentage of earned revenue is associated with high sell-through products due to the higher prices associated with high-demand products. This is especially true in peak demand periods where it is critical to capture as much potential revenue as possible while you can. So if half of your annual revenue comes from high sell-through product, a 30% increase in confidence could translate to 15% of revenue.

At Yieldex, we’re focused on being the leaders of yield management for guaranteed inventory – which is typically responsible for 80% of revenue for leading publishers. Managing sell-through is just one aspect of yield management. There are many others that you probably don’t have the visibility into but which are critical to maximizing yield. Does increasing yield matter to you? If you’d like to learn more about how we work with publishers, both to assess the opportunity, and to learn about opportunities to maximize revenue, contact us so we can help.

By Doug Cosman, Founder / Data Analyst at Yieldex

Ad Operations:

This is the nerve center for driving delivery for all those campaigns that the sales group has worked so hard to bring in. But just delivering isn’t enough. The ad operations team must have a clear vision of actual inventory on a real-time basis to ensure they don’t hold back too much inventory. This prevents under delivery, a practice that leaves money on the table for many publishers. Ad operations also has to manage their most valuable inventory and make sure premium impressions are monetized in the most effective manner. Having an effective yield management process allows ad operations to maximize the value of their inventory before it gets released to networks and exchanges or, even worse, goes unsold.

Sales:

These are the people on the front lines and they need to have ongoing transparency into the available inventory to effectively do their jobs. Sales also needs to have the confidence that the inventory projections are accurate and they will be able to provide a great customer experience by delivering on their client’s campaign expectations. And, increasing demands by advertisers for more targeted audiences and contexts makes the problem worse – it’s harder to effectively project inventory for smaller segments, but these can often be the most valuable. Effective yield management allows a sales team to sell more complex and profitable programs to their advertising clients.

Product Management and Pricing:

Sales people can only handle so many products on a rate card. Product management needs to understand the whole inventory, and decide what products should be retired and what new ones to add. Setting rate cards and pricing rules requires a deep understanding of how inventory overlaps and a highly accurate yield management solution, with both historical and predictive capabilities, can be invaluable in providing the insights needed to guarantee maximum value is realized.

Marketing:

Acquiring the most profitable audience and driving it to the optimum content areas is a true art that requires a combination of creativity, skill and accurate data. The days of sending loads of cheap traffic to a site in an effort to boost unique visitors and hopefully CPM rates are long gone. Marketers today have to focus on bringing in the right kind of traffic to fulfill the increasing mix of sponsorships, targeted campaigns and rich-media programs. Effective yield management gives skilled marketers the insights they need to adjust their acquisition efforts on a timely basis to deliver the most profitable audience to consume the page views necessary to satisfy campaign commitments.

Editorial:

Content is the lifeblood of a website and making informed decisions on the most profitable type of editorial content to create has a direct effect on a publisher’s revenue. The editorial team has to be in step with the needs of ad operations and sales when they make decisions on what type of content to develop. Effective yield management provides an accurate roadmap that informs the editorial team on where they should focus their efforts to help ad operations and sales to deliver profitable campaigns.

Finance:

Accurate inventory data is a must-have for the people who pay the bills. The ability to forecast inventory on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis with confidence is a critical component of every publisher’s revenue projections. Effective yield management provides the finance team with the necessary insights to forecast and make investments in areas of the business with growing opportunities and reduce spending on less profitable sections.

Technology:

The IT group needs to always be one step ahead of a publisher’s current technology needs and make decisions to prepare for changes that may arise in the future. Some tech teams are always ready for the worst-case scenarios but it can come at an expensive price if they don’t have accurate inventory data. A thorough understanding of the site’s inventory helps the IT department make wise investments in people, hardware and software. Effective yield management gives a tech team the insights they need to build the right site infrastructure to optimize traffic growth, inventory utilization and, ultimately, site revenue.

Summary:

Publishers are dealing with an overwhelming stream of data that’s increasing on a daily basis combined with the ongoing pressure to cut costs and grow revenues. These pressures do not lie solely on the shoulders of the sales and ad operations teams, but on every department working for a digital business. Therefore, it makes sense to consider a solution to optimize yield management. Learning to better optimize inventory could be the low hanging fruit that certain publishers can grab and take their business to the next level.

 By Andy Nibley, CEO Yieldex

• Optimizing campaigns to minimize under delivery / maximize performance

OR

• Optimizing remnant inventory to get the highest price possible before the value of the inventory goes to zero

While the above two methods are important aspects of a total yield management strategy, they focus on optimizing revenue late in the digital workflow – at the time of delivery. In reality, a publisher’s greatest chance to influence revenue happens during the sales process, well before the IO is ever signed or trafficked.

Sales optimization is about bringing together product and price at the point-of-sale to provide the optimal outcome for both advertiser and publisher. In order to optimize a deal at the point-of-sale, a publisher needs three things:

1. Accurate availability forecasts

Understanding what you have to sell is the first step in being able to put together an optimal deal. Inaccurate forecasts result in lost revenue opportunity if the forecast is too low, and under delivery downstream if the forecast is too high. Accurate availability and historical sell-through are also important signals for pricing and discounting, as noted below.

2. Effective pricing policies

In order to maximize utilization of inventory, pricing policies must be designed to direct demand away from areas of high sell through towards areas of low sell through. For example, if your Technology section typically sells out and advertisers in the software industry are willing to pay $40 CPM for that inventory, then selling Technology inventory to an automotive advertiser, who wants to reach a tech-savvy audience but is only willing to pay a $20 CPM, does not make sense.  An effective pricing policy should drive the automotive advertiser to alternative products, preserving the Technology inventory for those software advertisers that are willing to pay the high CPMs.

3. Ability to find and recommend alternative products

The goal of sales optimization is to create deals that make sense for both the publisher and advertiser given price and availability.  In the example above, if the automotive advertiser is price sensitive at $20 CPM, what alternative products can you offer that will meet the advertiser’s goals and price point?  Perhaps you have a “Gadget Lovers” behavioral segment that overlaps with the Technology section but also overlaps with the much less demanded Entertainment section, and is therefore priced lower. Being able to easily explore your inventory set and identify similar products based on overlaps and audience composition is critical to being able to find the right product and construct the optimal deal.

Summary

By “optimizing” during the Sales process, publishers have a greater ability to impact revenue as compared to “optimizing” during delivery.  Solutions like Yieldex enable publishers to access the data they need to put together smart deals.

By Anita Khosla, Director of Product Management, Yieldex

Click Here – 2011 YES Audio – Joe Apprendi Panel – Click Here

Knowledge is Power Today’s publishers are often operating blind (or nearly so), with multiple layers of technology that have publisher- swimming in data, but drowning in complexity. They are forced to make strategic decisions without having the unified tools in place to analyze audiences and performance across multiple delivery and sales channels. How can you turn all the available tools and data into meaningful insights in order to make more profitable decisions? Joe Apprendi, CEO Collective, brought together a distinguished group to debate this issue at YES 2011 that included:

• Joe Apprendi – (Moderator) CEO Collective

• Lauren Wiener – SVP Meredith Corporation

• Dave Madden – SVP Global Mobile Solutions at Electronic Arts

• Pete Longo – CEO IDG Syndication & Networks

The key is knowledge. Hear from leading publishers who have learned how to turn data into knowledge, and knowledge into action. Click the link below to listen to audio from the panel.

Click Here – 2011 YES Audio – Joe Apprendi Panel – Click Here

Click Here – YES 2011 Audio – Jason Kelly Panel – Click Here

Where is the Value in the Chain between Buyers and Sellers? 

Ultimately, we are all in the business of either selling or buying, which implies that the intermediaries between the seller and buyer provide value to one or the other. Our goal as a publisher advocate is to ensure that publishers are transacting with buyers in the most efficient and profitable ways possible. This ensures that an agency’s clients are confident that their transactions are mutually successful. Jason Kelly brought together a distinguished group to debate this issue at YES 2011 that included:

• Jason Kelly  (Panel Moderator) – Chief Revenue Officer, Admeld

• Mario Diez - CEO, quadrantONE

• Matt Straz - Founder & CEO, Namely

• Josh Jacobs – President, Accuen

This panel discusses the value of each link in the chain as we hear reactions from one end with Publisher, SSP, DSP, and Trading Desk, to the other the Agency and their client.

Click Here – YES 2011 Audio – Jason Kelly Panel – Click Here

]]> http://revenuerealized.com/2011/11/03/jason-kelly-chief-revenue-officer-at-admeld-explores-the-value-chain-between-online-ad-buyers-and-sellers-at-2011-yes-event/feed/ 0 yieldex Jason panel headshots.ppt-1 http://revenuerealized.com/2011/11/01/at-2011-yes-publishers-share-strategies-for-growing-revenue-by-effectively-managing-channels/ http://revenuerealized.com/2011/11/01/at-2011-yes-publishers-share-strategies-for-growing-revenue-by-effectively-managing-channels/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:35:43 +0000 yieldex http://revenuerealized.com/?p=798 ]]>

Click Here – YES 2011 Channel Management Panel – Click Here

The 2011 Yield Executive Summit brought together some of the top people in the online publishing business who are responsible for effectively and profitably managing inventory for major media brands. The panel focused on channel management included:

•  Tom Shields, (Panel Moderator) – Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Yieldex

• Alisa Bowen - GM, Wall Street Journal Digital Network at Dow Jones

• Rob Byrnes - Director of Inventory Management; NBC Universal Digital Media Ad Sales

• Jay Wright - Yield Management Group Leader at Cars.com

This panel explores the most popular direct selling channels for premium publishers and strategies for allocating inventory, analyzing results and growing revenue.

1. Listen and learn how publishers balance inventory allocation and manage the threat of cannibalizing premium sales.
2. Discover how publishers set business rules around business channels, including advertiser blocks and price floors.
3. Gain insights on how publishers approach pricing premium inventory and the effect of secondary channels on this process.
4. Analyze the RFP process and solutions publishers can use to solve inventory and targeting challenges.

Click on the link below to listen to audio stream from the panel.

Click Here – YES 2011 Channel Management Panel – Click Here