‘PubTalk’ is a new program highlighting publishers’ perspectives on display products and industry trends. In our first installment, we spoke with Billy Shipp of Flixster on managing ad operations in the face of rapidly changing technology.

If you love movies, you’ve probably visited Flixster or RottenTomatoes on your desktop or mobile device. Every month, over 30 million people visit Flixster communities to post comments, read reviews and watch movie trailers. Managing ad operations across these sites for different devices and formats is complex. Billy Shipp, Director of Ad Operations at Flixster, is always on the lookout for solutions that increase his team’s operational efficiency. Accordingly, Flixster recently upgraded to the next generation of the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad serving platform.

For Flixster, many aspects of DFP increased productivity, including improved user interfaces that are familiar to users of other Google products, faster reporting and better forecasting. “A lot of this business is built around emerging platforms and emerging ad formats”, says Billy. Having to use multiple ad serving platforms to manage ads across devices created a lot of inefficiency. DFP helped Billy solve this problem by seamlessly integrating with DFP Video and DFP Mobile.

“Not having to go to a separate interface to manage inventory, to set up campaigns, to pull reports, to optimize campaigns - having all of that in a single workflow makes it so much easier for ad operations folks to be effective,” remarks Billy. “It gives them that global view of how a campaign is performing, without having to manually download reports and aggregate them.”

40% in time savings with DFP Video
The Flixster team reduced the time spent managing video campaigns by 40% after switching to DFP Video. “We can just take a video file, upload it to DFP and throw in any third-party tracking. You guys encode it in all the various formats and have it just work across different browsers and plugins and we don’t even have to think about the connectivity of the user - you guys will handle all that. With other video ad serving solutions I’ve used in the past, there’s usually a lot more effort that goes into setting up video ad campaigns,” says Billy. “When we’re reporting on campaigns that have video line items as part of the IO, you can see the whole IO - display and video - in one set of reporting.”

Operations scale easily with DFP Mobile
Although Flixster is currently in the process of migrating more of its mobile inventory to DFP, Billy isn’t too worried about the move. “Because we’re using a single trafficking interface for mobile in the overall DFP workflow, that enables us to train new folks on a single process and have them intuitively know what to do,” says Billy.

As advertising continues to expand to new formats and devices, ad ops teams need a solution that can evolve with their needs. For Billy Shipp, that solution is DFP. “The upgrade platform allows, from my experience, for a faster cycle of iteration and development, and really will be the platform for the future of ad delivery.”

Read more about Flixster’s experience with DoubleClick for Publishers here.

About Flixster:
Flixster is the leading online destination for movie enthusiasts with over 30M unique visitors per month and 2 billion movie ratings. In addition to Flixster.com and RottenTomatoes.com, Flixster also operates the leading movie applications on iPhone, Google TV, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry.


Posted by Yamini Gupta, Product Marketing Manager