Why CROs Should Invest In Ad Operations

Imagine you are a media sales CRO: your sellers are bringing in good deals, but you’re not collecting on 100% of the revenue you’re booking. You can see revenue leaking out of your organization, but you can’t determine why.

Why do you bill significantly less than you book?

The problem lies in ad operations, which is where CROs are becoming increasingly invested in seeking solutions for revenue retention.

Why Order Management Increases Revenue

A week ago, Publishing Executive posted my article “Streamlining Digital Ad Workflows: What Every CRO Should Know About Implementing an Order Management System.”  The article outlines the benefits publishers can expect from an OMS, including business control, intelligence and transparency, as a result of having a unified platform across the organization.

What the article didn’t cover is why it’s important for a CRO to have insight into their operations. What many publishers don’t realize is how much money is slipping through cracks that can easily be filled.

The Problem of Underdelivery

The bottom line is, if you don’t deliver on 100% of the promised campaign, you can’t bill 100% of the deal you sold. Underdelivery can stem from any point in the process, from IO to invoice. For companies that don’t have an OMS, typical reasons why the process breaks include:

• Selling incorrectly (usually from a lack of inventory data)
• Trafficking incorrectly (lack of insertion order data)
• Managing the campaign incorrectly (lack of client audience data — are you seeing a trend here?)
• Billing incorrectly (you guessed it — due to a lack of delivery data)

When this many spokes of the wheel are broken, the cart can’t move forward. Since the CRO is responsible for driving a company forward, they have no choice but to get involved with the technical aspects of ad operations.

Understanding and forecasting a company’s revenue is no longer just about closed deals, its about ensuring that a sold program successfully makes its way through the ad server and out the other side intact.

What Are Publishers Saying About Leaking Revenue?

At our recent client summit, I discussed the publisher “leaky bucket” phenomenon with Curt Hecht, CRO of the Weather Company. You can watch the video of our conversation, along with stories from our other top clients, on our event recap website. You’ll get advice and insight from 6 digital advertising leaders about how they’re introducing new revenue streams into their organizations.