Raymond Reid, founder & CEO, Digital Ad Lab
The digital advertising industry has a skills problem. Between the dozens of new technologies for buying, delivering and reporting online ad campiagns, recent graduates and even established media professionals are coming into their jobs woefully underprepared for the modern realities of digital advertising. Agencies and publishers have gotten used to investing years and dollars getting new hires up to speed — only to watch them get poached by a competitor.
That’s the problem digital ad industry veteran Raymond Reid wants to address with his new startup, Digital Ad Lab, launching this week in Toronto. The private, self-funded company provides a post-graduate certificate program in digital ad operations, where students can get hands-on experience buying and managing live media campaigns, using the widely used DoubleClick Digital Marketing Platform from Google.
“If you wish to enter the arena of digital advertising, here’s where you can go to learn the skills and use the tools that professionals on the job do,” says Reid. “That can take you in a number of directions — whether it’s working for an agency, working for a publisher, or increasingly, advertisers themselves.”
Reid has worked in various roles in digital media over the past five years, on the media side at Alliance Atlantis, on the agency side at Neo@Ogilvy and Starcom MediaVest, and most recently on the tech side at AcuityAds. He plans to bring on other working professionals from around the industry to teach courses and share their expertise, and says several announcements will be coming over the next few weeks. Funke Fabunmi, joining Reid from AcuityAds, is currently heading up the digital ad ops program.
Reid says in the various roles he’s had over the past decade, he’s seen how the knowledge gap is a pervasive issue that affects everyone in the digital ad industry — from the publisher who has to understand how to sell inventory and optimize yield, to the media planning team that has to apply targeting tools and cost metrics, to the advertiser that needs to interpret performance reports and decide what channels make the most sense for their brand and bottom line. All of these stakeholders have had trouble finding qualified new hires, in part because colleges and other educational programs haven’t been able to keep up with the rapidly evolving technology landscape. In most cases, he says, agencies and publishers have been forced to rely on on-the-job training to get entry-level employees up to speed on programmatic buying, analytics and other technologies key to digital media.
The result is that ad ops employees often have inconsistent training across a patchwork of technologies, and big gaps in their knowledge of how the ecosystem works. More importantly, those that do learn how to use the tools — for example through the training programs vendors often provide — aren’t necessarily learning the strategic skills to meet their clients’ objectives.
Digital Ad Lab is designed to give students a combination of hands-on experience using ad buying technology, as well as strategic instruction from seasoned industry professionals from both the agency and publisher side of the industry. Using DoubleClick, students of Digital Ad Lab will be able to launch live ad campaigns in a closed environment on several domains owned and operated by Ad Lab, analyze their performance, and learn how to modify and react to in-market changes. “To really grasp how these tools works, you need to be in an environment where you can have direct interaction and context about why certain things happen,” says Reid.
Reid is committed to teaching classes only in person, not relying on online tutorials like Codecademy or Lynda.com. “Certainly people who are self-directed can go online and download documents and so forth,” he says. “But it’s still missing a key component that is only gained through an in-class curriculum.” Specifically, hands-on experience with live media.
Focus on strategy, not platforms
Ad Lab’s curriculum is designed to teach students not just the basics of how ad buying technology works, but best practices and strategies for success that transcend any specific platform. Reid says he chose Google’s DoubleClick suite to train students because it’s the most widely-used platform in the industry, and the one new staff are most likely to encounter, but also because it’s the most straightforward general-use platform out there. Reid thinks it will provide a good framework to teach common concepts and skills that can be applied to the bulk of the technologies the industry uses.
Matt Thornton, head of media platforms at Google Canada, has reviewed Digital Ad Lab’s curriculum and has been working with Reid and his team to onboard the DoubleClick platform. He says while Google has always wanted to provide this kind of training to clients, it has a lot more credibility coming from an independent company. “We work closely with the IAB and other industry associations around trying to develop some of the certifications, but the difference that we saw with Raymond’s project is that he’s going to take it beyond the generalist certification and get into more tactical, practical use of tools,” Thornton says. “Which is where we think the college programs end — at that practical level of getting into the tools.”
Google already provides a certification program for its DoubleClick Digital Marketing Platform, but it recommends that media planners have significant experience with the platform before taking the exam. While Digital Ad Lab might give students some of the necessary knowledge to take the exam, Thornton says the curriculum Reid has come up with doesn’t delve deeply into platform-specific capabilities, but focuses more on skills that media planners could apply to their employer or client’s platform of choice.
He’s also enthusiastic about the opportunity for marketers to use the program as a faster and more comprehensive way to get familiar with the programmatic space. “Over the last 10 years, digital advertising has grown from nothing to be larger than television in Canada, but those advertisers don’t necessarily understand what’s going on behind the curtain,” Thornton says. Digital Ad Lab plans to roll out an “Ad Lab for Business” offering tailored to enterprise advertiser clients that want a brief but intensive introduction to programmatic.
The company is looking to reach potential students through partnerships with agencies and publishers looking to train new hires, as well as universities’ and colleges’ advertising and media programs. But, it will have some competition for those opportunities. For example, Toronto tech education startup BrainStation, owned by the Konrad Group, provides a 12-week live course on digital marketing technology that covers many of the same topics at a comparable price-point (BrainStation’s course costs $2,500, while Ad Lab’s costs $2,000 for the full three-stage program).
Tech vendors have also been getting more sophisticated in the training that they offer. The Trade Desk, one of the market’s leading programmatic buying platforms, announced this week it’s launching an online certification course for agency media buyers, which it says covers all the essential context to understand programmatic. Amnet Group, the programmatic arm of the Dentsu Aegis Network, has partnered with The Trade Desk to make the course a part of their employee training program, Amnet University. According to Trade Desk, it’s also piloting a hands-on training program for new hires, where they launch and monitor live PSA campaigns for the Ad Council.
Like Ad Lab, The Trade Desk says its certification course is platform-agnostic, and teaches skills and knowledge that apply to any ad buying platform. “The goal of the Academy is to produce the most knowledgeable talent in programmatic, which means that industry context is essential – telling every side of the story is essential,” writes Kathleen Comer, the Trade Desk’s general manager client services, in an email to Marketing.
Depending on how much traction Digital Ad Lab is able to get, Reid says his goal is to expand the live classes to other North American markets over the next 12 months. He’s hoping to keep class-sizes fairly small — around 15 people per session — but says the business is built for growth and can easily accommodate a lot more students if necessary.
