What motivated Opera to adopt a self-serve ad sales platform?

Opera has grown exponentially in the past 3 years in its Ad division, but noticed that 80% of sales and operational efforts were spent on 20% of the revenue generated. After careful analysis, we decided that in order to reduce the amount of time spent, it was crucial to implement a self-service tool in order to focus our efforts on bigger advertisers and buyers.

In your opinion, what are the benefits for a media owner working with a self-serve model?

With the self-service model, media owners reduce the bottleneck of advertisers with smaller budgets and focus their time and resources on those who bring in larger potential. This, in turn, enables the sales and operational teams to provide hands-on support to premium advertisers. The self-service model also allows advertisers who want to test the platform before deciding on a higher threshold and opening up to premium resources and support.

Why do you think there has been an increased demand from media owners for self-serve models?

With the self-service model, media owners allow small-to-medium-sized business owners to have total autonomy over the campaign setup from start to finish. The technology gives them the opportunity to fully comprehend each phase and take control of it, maximising overall deliverability and campaign success. Self-serve is also hugely helpful for media owners to efficiently drive minimal budgets to the overall revenue stream.

What advice would you give to a media owner considering self-serve as an option?

Self-service enables media owners to reduce time spent on low hanging fruit, but must not forget that the model is not a plug-and-play and thus cannot expect immediate results. The solution needs to be nurtured by a key lead for day-to-day marketing, operations and support to ensure great customer service, and retention for SMEs.