at Denver, Colorado

Notes from: Destructive Ad Tech and Practical Solutions

Presentation by Ben Ilfeld @benilfeld

• https://2017-denver.journalist.wordcamp.org/session/destructive-ad-tech-and-practical-solutions/
• What is Audience and Revenue Strategy?
• Consults with content creators to drive core business objectives with a focus on revenue optimization
• collaborates with multidisciplinary delivery teams to implement recommended strategies.
• Ads are an experience problem
• Ad tech erodes the experience of the open web
• Mal-advertising has created fundamental security concerns
• The publishing industry is much slower than the rest of the web
• Greater than 3 secs to load = abandon for 40%
• Chews through data plans
• “We are shrinking … our audience” by using bad ad tech.
• The way we are treating our users is foundational.
• If we’re partially responsible, how do we fulfill that responsibility
• Responsibly experiment
• Improve user experience
• add revenue opportunities
• create real value for partner brands
• leverage existing technology to control cost
• Create opportunities for brands to become partners and sponsor content.
• Not advatorials, but content sponsorship
• Little logos we apply next to partner content.
• Taxonomies allows for granular targeting
  ad management and reporting in your ad manager, like DFP
• Little logo gets counted as an ad impression
• Don’t have Supported By and Advatorial stuff live on the same site; if you must be VERY clear about what is advatorial.
• It’s all about the context – using sponsorship has to fit.
• Build a sponsorship taxonomy.
• Can be further administrated with other taxonomies, like teams, tv shows, pre-game, in-game, post-game, etc…
• Sell a game 3 times.
• Doesn’t require you to cookie the user.
• My job is to ‘set ad ops teams up for success’
• Clickthrough CURL, logo, manage creative, all that done in DFP. You take the taxonomy and send it to DFP as a key value for the unit and get returned the correct logo, controlled by the ad ops team, complete with tracking pixels.
• “Fluid” size in DFP = “native style”
• Set up the ad once inside DFP w/engineers and then the ad ops people can populate the template
• native style
• truely responsive ads.
• creative template to be set up with html and CSS inside doubleclick.
• Uses professional tools
• Affiliate links
• Recognize that affiliate links are content
• leverage custom post types
• Collect links into a post.
• Create templates that are clearer calls to action, picture, price, etc…
• A very familiar interface – custom post type – for editors
• Product categories for what it is, connections for what it connects to (posts the link is in.)
• Use media screen shortcode ui (shortcake, I guess), put affiliate link in to there.
• Script to migrate existing links into the system automatically
• Connection with Amazon’s API to bring in product meta and images.
• ElasticPress for better automated curation
• Replace aging or sold out Etsy links automatically.
• “Publishers have agency here, they’re part of the problem & they should be part of the solution”
• It has to be more automated otherwise it doesn’t get used.
• Marketers – is any of this [targeting] working at all?
• If you’re working for brand awareness professors believe you shouldn’t be so hyper focused.
• Brands don’t need to track you everywhere, they can figure you out with just a few data points.
• Corporate partnerships are harder to sell and maintain.
• If you want to do partnerships right IMO – you should not sell partnerships around total volume of ad impressions and clicks – you should know what the client needs (brand awareness) and how to measure it and deliver that.

at Denver International Airport