Presentation by Ben Ilfeld @benilfeld
  • via
  • What is Audience and Revenue Strategy?
  • Consults with content creators to drive core business objectives with a focus on revenue optimization
  • collaborates with multidisciplinary delivery teams to implement recommended strategies.
  • Ads are an experience problem
  • Ad tech erodes the experience of the open web
  • Mal-advertising has created fundamental security concerns
  • The publishing industry is much slower than the rest of the web
  • Greater than 3 secs to load = abandon for 40%
  • Chews through data plans
  • “We are shrinking … our audience” by using bad ad tech.
  • The way we are treating our users is foundational.
  • If we’re partially responsible, how do we fulfill that responsibility
  • Responsibly experiment
  • Improve user experience
  • add revenue opportunities
  • create real value for partner brands
  • leverage existing technology to control cost
  • Create opportunities for brands to become partners and sponsor content.
  • Not advatorials, but content sponsorship
  • Little logos we apply next to partner content.
  • Taxonomies allows for granular targeting ad management and reporting in your ad manager, like DFP
  • Little logo gets counted as an ad impression
  • Don’t have Supported By and Advatorial stuff live on the same site; if you must be VERY clear about what is advatorial.
  • It’s all about the context - using sponsorship has to fit.
  • Build a sponsorship taxonomy.
  • Can be further administrated with other taxonomies, like teams, tv shows, pre-game, in-game, post-game, etc…
  • Sell a game 3 times.
  • Doesn’t require you to cookie the user.
  • My job is to ‘set ad ops teams up for success’
  • Clickthrough CURL, logo, manage creative, all that done in DFP. You take the taxonomy and send it to DFP as a key value for the unit and get returned the correct logo, controlled by the ad ops team, complete with tracking pixels.
  • “Fluid” size in DFP = “native style”
  • Set up the ad once inside DFP w/engineers and then the ad ops people can populate the template
  • native style
  • truely responsive ads.
  • creative template to be set up with html and CSS inside doubleclick.
  • Uses professional tools
  • Affiliate links
  • Recognize that affiliate links are content
  • leverage custom post types
  • Collect links into a post.
  • Create templates that are clearer calls to action, picture, price, etc…
  • A very familiar interface - custom post type - for editors
  • Product categories for what it is, connections for what it connects to (posts the link is in.)
  • Use media screen shortcode ui (shortcake, I guess), put affiliate link in to there.
  • Script to migrate existing links into the system automatically
  • Connection with Amazon’s API to bring in product meta and images.
  • ElasticPress for better automated curation
  • Replace aging or sold out Etsy links automatically.
  • “Publishers have agency here, they’re part of the problem & they should be part of the solution”
  • It has to be more automated otherwise it doesn’t get used.
  • Marketers - is any of this [targeting] working at all?
  • If you’re working for brand awareness professors believe you shouldn’t be so hyper focused.
  • Brands don’t need to track you everywhere, they can figure you out with just a few data points.
  • Corporate partnerships are harder to sell and maintain.
  • If you want to do partnerships right IMO - you should not sell partnerships around total volume of ad impressions and clicks - you should know what the client needs (brand awareness) and how to measure it and deliver that.


This post is specifically my own thoughts & not representative of my employers past or present.