Continuing my theme recently of detailing work flow issues and the resultant work flow solution, an issue that had been cropping up over the past several weeks and months is how to deal with third party ads changing creatives mid-campaign and breaking in production. Let me begin by flow charting exactly how these campaigns make it into production.

The main site that currently comes under my purview is www.comcast.net.We have several predetermined spots on our site that ads are inserted into. The ad insertion mechanism uses unique IDs to demarcate categories of content, and the ad provider uses these unique IDs to associate ad campaigns with categories of our content and to specific sections of our site. In such a way our ad sales team could, for example, sell ad space targeted only for the entertainment section of our site.

Usually campaigns are sold for weeks or months at a time. Since we some times deal with ad aggregators, what we sometimes see is that during the lifetime of a single campaign the ad source or aggregator might change the creatives used in a campaign as frequently as once a week.

One week we could be getting a jpeg banner served, the next week it could be a Flash banner, the third week it could be a combination of banner and side rails.

Where this starts to fall apart is when the format of what gets inserted from the source is drastically different than what is expected. The ad source delivers a snippet of mark up, and if IDs have been changed or are non-existent, the creative could be compromised. Usually this entailed the art asset not showing up, but when part of your revenue is ad sales, and ad aggregators being on the hook for their ad sources, ads not showing up is a big deal.

To fix this first I opened up communication between engineering, ad sales and the ad source. I rallied for a single agreed upon format for the code snippet to be delivered in, but the diverse types of ad systems in use made that an impossibility.

Next I reasoned that the ad source must have, first a schedule for new creatives and second their own QA cycle. This was indeed the case.

I negotiated with the ad aggregator to get a copy of their creative schedule and for them to schedule new creatives ahead of time to a test ID. I then spun up a QA environment and set the global ad ID to this new test ID in perpetuity.

This allowed us to preview new creatives ahead of time and either make any code adjustments we would need or push back on the ad source to adjust their deliverable, well before the new creative ever hit production.

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