Chartbeat had a blast at the OPS New York conference last week. Our team loved hanging out with ad operations and digital revenue teams and learning all about what everyone’s working on these days.

Big crowd thinking about big issues
There are a ton of major questions on the minds of the Ops community, and it showed. From programmatic to non-human traffic to new site redesigns, there were a lot of interesting discussions going on and ideas shared about all things revenue and ads.

Engagement is a “logical extension of viewability”
At least that’s what Michael Silberman, the General Manager of Digital at New York Media thinks. Michael joined fellow bright minds Shenan Reed (MEC Head of Digital, North America), Michael Sebastian (Reporter, Ad Age) and moderator Romy Newman on the OPS Chartbeat panel, “Beyond Viewability: Making Engagement Tangible”.

Discussing this topic to a packed crowd, the panelists agreed that while there is still work to be done in standardizing viewability metrics amongst brands, agencies, and publishers, measuring and monetizing engagement will continue to grow in popularity. Michael Silberman echoed this when he commented on reporting on attention data to clients,

“There is no question that our clients and their agency-partners want more information – want to better understand how our audience is better connecting with their brands.”

Multiple Shoutouts to the Financial Times
The Financial Times Cost Per Hour metric and time-based selling system got much love at OPS. Multiple speakers mentioned the Financial Times’s success in selling time as one of the most exciting initiatives in the industry.

Additionally, widespread interest in time-based selling was apparent at the Financial Times’s session at OPS – many questions were asked about the how-tos of selling time – while the audience got fired up discussing about the benefits of monetizing time over impressions.

We’re already so excited about next year’s OPS! Shoot us an email if you’d like to chat in the meantime!