Aram Zucker-Scharff

The Washington Post is taking a proactive approach to digital display advertising issues with a new project that is set to fix bad code, while saving brands from code errors and cross-platform bugs in ad code. The Ad Performance and Safety Protocol (AP…

The Washington Post is taking a proactive approach to digital display advertising issues with a new project that is set to fix bad code, while saving brands from code errors and cross-platform bugs in ad code. The Ad Performance and Safety Protocol (AP…

Presentation by Ben Ilfeld @benilfeld

• via
• 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.

I’m now keeping a collection of terrible awful no-good ad-tech code. This isn’t just code that tracks you, I mean code that is actually written terribly and breaks sites all around the web.

All of this is simply obtained by clicking on the link in the console to the file that contains the terrible ad code when it is executed on the site. Occasionally I run it through jsbeautifier for your pleasure.

Many of these scripts are run (usually breaking themselves, if not the sites they are on) daily across the web.

So here we go:

• AdapTV
• TruEffect
• Moat Video