A day in the life of an ad guy (if your name is Don Draper)
- Arrive at the office at 10:30 (yesterday you had dinner with a huge client and you got a bit wasted).
- Pour yourself a whisky.Get a nap on the couch (yes, your office has a couch).
- Repeat until 5 minutes before the oh-so-important-meeting.
- Clean yourself up.
- Enter the meeting.
- Say the mind-blowing and lasting quote for the ad that has just came up to your mind.
- Make your clients cry of happiness.
A day in the life of an ad guy (today)
- Check the status of campaigns in a single view dashboard.
- Review the configuration of a campaign running behind schedule.
- Increase its priority and optimize the targeted profile based on the CTR of particular segments.
- Check how the bids are doing.
- Adjust a campaign pacing criteria so it makes room for a new campaign that is about to be launched.
- Check your clock.
- Only five minutes have passed.
In the time it takes Don Draper to light a cigarette, thousands of bids are being made, millions of data points are being processed and hundreds of algorithms all over the world are deciding if you might more interested in this brand new car because you are a motor fan and are in the market for one, or if they should show again that book that you almost bought in Amazon last week.
The ad landscape has changed brutally in the last 5 years. Now, data is king. Brands and agencies live on top of a whole tech stack: Demand Side Platforms, Ad Exchanges, Data Exchanges, Third Party Data Providers, Campaign Analytics, Predictive Analytics… The ecosystem is growing, and each day new companies are launching tools that move from “What’s that?” to “OMG! How did we live before that?!” in a matter of months. The (big) data approach has paved the road to a new way of life: if it cannot be measured, it didn’t happened.
