23 November 2022
5 min read
Leveraging ad tech to handle the digital media buying process can be a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming task that requires in-depth knowledge and experience with the ad platforms. The benefits of these platforms are that they work with great details and thousands of settings for your campaigns, but how do you ensure that the ads that get into the ad-server or DSP get created, approved, validated, or trafficked efficiently into these ad servers? And at the same time also stay on top of your bid strategies, KPIs, white lists, brand safety, and audience settings. Let’s take a look at the ad-server and DSP services.
Ad ops tasks
Managing your ad ops consists of very specific tasks (e.g. managing URL parameters and naming conventions) that follow certain guidelines - which makes it prone to mistakes when setting this up in an ad-server environment. An ad-server is an exact and nuanced tool with a steep learning curve that handles all requests from your buying platform for serving creative assets. But hosting your ads in the ad-server is not as simple as 1-2-3 when you have an extensive set of ads that hold different products, audiences and markets ánd need to be trafficked accordingly.
Also, the possibilities regarding creations are limited, as you can only change minor things for A/B testing. So you still pay designers or agencies to create (the majority of) your ads. Ad servers have limited to no workflow management, which makes approval flows and review processes difficult. In addition, ad servers often include reporting that is designated for a media buying team - so designers cannot implement any changes quickly, which is not beneficial for workflow.
Programmatic tasks
Managing your media spend, defining your KPIs and your audiences, is part of the campaign activation process that needs a human touch. A DSP helps with your programmatic media buying that includes real-time bidding, audience management, ad placement and ad payments so that publishers and advertisers don’t need to negotiate prices.
DSPs are part of most advertisers' ad stack for programmatic advertising activities, both video and display. Even though a DSP is easy to use, the full programmatic set-up is still a lengthy process and is subject to errors. A DSP has limited creative possibilities, which can cause lower quality of inventory. DSPs also have limited to no workflow management, which makes approval flows and review processes difficult. Too much valuable time is put into repetitive and time-consuming tasks like setting up campaigns, instead of focusing on optimization and learning.
Cape
This is where Cape comes into the equation. Cape is tech-vendor neutral and integrates with your existing infrastructure, including your ad-servers and DSPs. Our goal is to make your omnichannel digital campaigning process easier and more efficient so that you can focus on what’s most important: campaign performance across all your media activation. We take care of the correct set-up so that your ads are created foolproof and can be sent to the ad-server or DSP error-free according to preset media strategies.
What features does Cape have where your other tools are missing out? Take back control over your campaigns and even move your campaigning in-house. Use Cape like an umbrella over the platforms, automate the processes and make them error-free.
Where ad-servers and DSPs are not built for complex custom configurations, Cape allows you to make any custom creation and tailors your workflow and campaign set-up to fit your company’s ecosystem. Where the ad tech platforms offer no workflow management, Cape offers in-tool communication, approval flows, (re)view processes, and the ability to assign roles and rights. This means less context-switching, faster cycle times and fewer errors.
With Cape, you also have endless creative possibilities, as we offer foolproof custom-made or self-service dynamic templates that follow your brand guidelines. The assets you create automatically obtain obligatory ad validation and URL parameters, so only ads with the correct product specs enter the ad servers
Getting all ads to the various ad platforms can lead to high ad ops costs. Setting up a proper campaign in Google Marketing Platform can easily take a couple of hours of your time. Cape simplifies your campaign setup with direct integrations with ad platforms to save time, eliminate manual tasks, and optimize the campaign process from end-to-end.
When you have your base setup, you can use automation to template your media buying strategies. Capture your campaign strategies in publication profiles and re-use these over time. With a 100% error-free outcome and more precious time to focus on special campaigns, testing and innovation - after all, some human TLC is crucial for optimization and getting to know the best practices.
Cape doesn't push you through a full list of all the settings (like in the ad platform) because that would still result in high error rates, lengthy processes, and a steep learning curve before people can use the platform to set up the campaigns. Instead, we ask the user to make the decisions or complete that information in the interface that is necessary to decide what strategy is to be used and what setting results from it… fully API-based.
