You may have noticed that we’ve been rolling out a number of products and feature enhancements to help you make sure only creatives you deem appropriate serve to your sites.

We have Creative Tester, Media Guard (in beta), and now Creative Reviewer – our new and improved creative approval workflow.

Before we get to the new features, you might ask, what’s this all about? Why would I want to manually review creatives if I’ve already set up creative content restrictions?

This is a business decision that should be carefully considered because there are costs and benefits to either banning or approving all new creatives by default.

What Happens to a Creative When it’s Uploaded?

When a creative is uploaded it is run through Creative Tester (CT) and tagged according to the creative’s technical attributes. A full list of CT tags and functionality is discussed in the Knowledge Base articles found here: http://kb.yieldmanager.com/article.php?id=424 (login required)

In addition, if you are a Media Guard client in the beta program the creative will be tagged according to its content. More information can be found here: http://kb.yieldmanager.com/article.php?id=421. While Media Guard is in beta, creative specs and offer types are still available for everyone on the exchange.

These descriptive tags allow you to set up creative content restrictions so new creatives that have a particular tag won’t ever run on your site. For the creatives that pass your content restrictions, you need to decide whether to ban or approve them to run on your site.

Approving New Creatives by Default

When you approve all new creatives by default this means that creatives that pass your technical and content restrictions will automatically start serving without any further checks by you.

Pros

You don’t have to manually review creatives before they start serving. This reduces the human resources needed on your side to participate in the exchange.

Cons

You may have to be more conservative in your creative content restrictions. This may mean fewer creatives flowing through to your sites/sections, potentially impacting revenue. While we have made every attempt to be as granular as possible in the content tag categories, there are inevitably gray areas that are best left to the discretion of exchange members to decide what is ultimately appropriate for their audience.

Banning New Creatives by Default

When you ban all new creatives by default, this means the creatives that pass your technical and content restrictions will be subject to an additional manual review by you. The creatives won’t start serving until someone at your organization goes to the Creative Reviewer, looks at the creative and approves it. If they click the ban button, the creative remains banned and is marked as reviewed by the user with a time/date stamp. If the ‘approve’ button is clicked the creative it is marked as reviewed and will start serving after the next traffic push.

Pros

When you ban new creatives by default you can be less conservative with your creative content restrictions since new creatives will not serve without your explicit approval. For example there may be tag categories where some but not all of the creatives are appropriate for your audience. By manually reviewing these creatives you may be able to increase the number of creatives that are eligible to serve, potentially increasing revenue.

Another benefit is that you will have an audit trail for every creative that is serving from the exchange to your sites/sections. There won’t be any surprises and if an inappropriate creative is accidentally approved, with the audit trail you can see when and who approved the creative.

Cons

Additional resources are necessary to manually review each new creative. A best practice is to have a dedicated person who is very familiar with your content guidelines review creatives at least once per day. This provides a single point of contact for disputed creatives and helps to ensure consistency in reviews.

Creative Reviewer Features

If you choose to ban creatives by default there are a number of new enhancements that streamline the manual approval workflow. Some of the major improvements are:

1. We’ve added reviewed/unreviewed status to creatives. This allows you to search only for unreviewed creatives which speeds the approval process since you are only looking at creatives that haven’t been reviewed.
2. When a creative is reviewed (by pressing the approve or ban button) the date, time and reviewer name is recorded. This creates an audit trail, which is valuable if it’s necessary to later find out when a creative was reviewed and by whom.
3. There is now an escalation path. When there’s a borderline creative, you’re now able to mark it as ‘Needs further review’. This allows another person at your organization to easily search for all creatives that need further review and give a second opinion on these creatives.
4. Search queries can now be saved, reducing the time necessary to run frequently used searches.

The Creative Reviewer is now in the Network Media Exchange (NMX) and Publisher Media Exchange (PMX) products. So take a look and let us know what you think. Comments, suggestions, and feature requests are always appreciated!

More information about the uses and benefits of the new Creative Reviewer can be found on the Knowledge Base (login required)

Choosing the Creative Reviewer’s Default Setting
http://kb.yieldmanager.com/article.php?id=439

Creative Reviewer: About
http://kb.yieldmanager.com/article.php?id=442

Reviewing Creatives in the Creative Reviewer
http://kb.yieldmanager.com/article.php?id=440

Finding Specific Creatives or Problem Creatives
http://kb.yieldmanager.com/article.php?id=441

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Publishers, Network Media Exchange, Publisher Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.