MediaPost reports that a new study is out that says more than a third of ad execs say their digital ad insertion orders do not run according to their plans, at least some of the time. The study included 300 advertiser and agency executives was conducted by Advertiser Perceptions. Twenty-nine percent said orders “occasionally” do not run as planned and 8% said they “rarely” do. One percent said they “never” run as planned.
Also, a big number of those advertisers that responded said they also experience discrepancies between what their ad servers report and what the publishers they do business with provide in their delivery reports. Forty-three percent of the execs said that occurs “occasionally,” while 24% said it happens “frequently,” and 15% said it happens “all the time.”
This is nothing new, and in fact happened to me more in Radio than selling any other media. Go ask any major market AE how often their schedules run “as ordered”. I worked in radio sales for over 13 years and rarely did campaigns run 100% “as ordered”. Dealing with bumps was a weekly battle. in fact, the %’s are inline with those listed above. Spots get bumped, traffic managers input the wrong day-part, station runs the wrong commercial, AE makes a mistake on the order, etc. This happens in every medium. Now, due to things like this, most digital vendors and publishers allow clients to bill of of their own tracking numbers.
Vincent Vega, (Pulp Fiction?)
I’m in radio sales… my orders run incorrectly maybe 0.1% of the time. It shouldn’t happen. Yes, sometimes things need to be bumped and moved… but usually not a big deal. If the order is set up properly (which that shouldn’t be an issue)… everything should be golden. What I notice is that there are many media reps who don’t give a hoot about the details. If you get the details right from the get-go… there should very seldom be any problems. If it happens a lot where you work, then your company just needs to get their crap together. We don’t need to give clients any other excuse to pull dollars from radio and move them into digital.