Ad ID, Tracking Needs To Be Standardized

Media sales teams are going to have to adopt a uniform means of identifying and tracking ads if they are going to keep up with the technology they’re selling.

“We have a situation like the packaged goods industry choosing not to use the UPC,” said Harold Geller, chief growth officer of Ad-ID.

Leading a panel on the subject Wednesday at the Content and Communications World convention in New York, Geller said the industry will continue to hamper its progress — and ability to keep up with rapidly growing number of content platforms — if it doesn’t adopt new standards, such as including uniform metadata on ads and updating its workflow.

The industry is being hurt by its current inability to identify and track ads across platforms, meaning sales teams can’t offer advertisers crucial data like measurements. In many cases, ads, or the content they are airing on, are not even called the same name by sales teams that sell different media for the same company, panelists said.

“If we make good trans-coding decisions we can actually make media and advertising more accountable,” Geller said. The tools to implement such a system already exist, he said. Convincing people to do it is another matter.

Janice Finkel-Greene, a Magna Global EVP, said the media ad sales are suffering from a long history of keeping sales forces separated by the medium they sell, or whether they work national or spot ads.

But conducting business in those separate silos doesn’t cut it anymore, as the number of platforms, as well as the amount of content — including advertising — being distributed across them has surged, she said.

“Massive data without master data is tyranny,” she said. “The scale of this cannot be underestimated.”