What’s in a Name? That Which We Call a New Product…
February 14th, 2006
As we are developing Media Guard and figuring out how to make things work best, we have realized that we need to come up with names for all of the different parts we are developing. Yes, it seems obvious and incredibly simple but has taken more effort than I realized it would.
We talk about so many of these small moving parts of the system, often developing ideas as we discuss, that it has been difficult to stop and name each of them as come up with an idea – who knows if it will change. So far we have just described each of them while we talk - “you know the part with the human audit, the results that come from that� - but that gets quite confusing after a while, “wait you mean the tags the publisher would set or the parts that Media Guard would set?�
Now, however, we have started to create a more solid form to Media guard and to become more certain about what features it will have, and as such, there are certain concepts that we can start naming – in fact we really need to. Especially, as we have started to map out what changes will be made to internal user interfaces and future changes to YM interfaces, we really need to come up with names for some of these ideas.
So we have started on the process, but at times I feel like some OCD bureaucrat in discussion. Should something be called a “standard� or a “spec� or a “profile� and what do the nuances imply? Is it an “attribute� or a “classification�? Do we define the focus as on publishers, networks, or site-related?
One big struggle we have been having is about using the term “audit.� For the first part of Media Guard, which we are calling Media Guard – Creative Reviewer for now (MG-CR) we have a two-step process, the automated review of a creative for the Technical Attributes and then, if a creative “passes� that first part, i.e. it doesn’t have any “bad� things like Active X or viruses, then it gets sent to our human auditing team to review and classify the Content Attributes. The good news is that we are comfortable with the terms Technical Attributes and Content Attributes and are starting to use those consistently. However, that is but the tip of the iceberg.
For now we have been saying that once a creative “passes� based on technical attributes it is then “auditable� and then has a human audit. But are those terms ok? Is it too pejorative to say that a creative “passes� a review? Would we upset too many advertisers if their creatives were to not “pass� our technical review and be termed “unaudited� – especially in light of the fact that rotating 3rd-party tags will all be “unauditable� (see next post for more detail.) Or would publishers like this strong language, that we are “auditing� – conjuring up images of a stringent IRS audit that reveals everything?
At this point, we are not sure what the reaction will be to this term and for now we are using it, because it is what we have been using and it is very effective at conveying the concept. We will just have wait and see what others think about it. But for the time being we are able to start to communicate with each other using a lot fewer confusing descriptions – until next week, at least!
February 14th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
It’s good that you’re obsessing over nomenclature. (Remember that a thing doesn’t exist for us humans until we give it a name and can store it in memory and relate to other named things!)
One point about “audit” is that it has a very specific meaning in media. For most publishers and advertisers, “audit” is more likely to connote a review of numbers (e.g., unique visitors, page views, sessions, etc.), not content - whether editorial or commercial. So you risk confusing some with this terminology. Keep thinking about it! You’ve got some great ideas developing here.