Why you don’t need a naming convention
Yes that headline is clickbait. No I’m not sorry.
It would be fairer to say that you shouldn’t need a naming convention.
A naming convention is simply a way to allow a machine to read and process something it otherwise wouldn’t be able to do by giving it a fixed structure and limits to some of the values.
Think about the sorts of things that tend to be put into naming conventions for a placement:
- Site name
- Start date
- Placement size
- Billing reference
- Placement objective
- Billing type
- Targeting
For the most part these are all pieces of information that are either already stored in another field or should be.
Rather than present a user with a single scary box called “Name” with an endlessly flashing cursor and not enough time it would be better to have multiple boxes and fields. Use drop downs where appropriate, automatic prediction, date selectors, etc.
That isn’t to say that there is a one size fits all approach to names that can be applied across all clients because there isn’t. Some clients will have additional information that needs to be captured at certain points to allow reports and dashboards to work correctly. It would be nice though if systems were flexible enough to allow per advertiser custom fields with validation.
In the same way that most adservers allow you to name and use a number of extended data variables (often referred to as “U variables, used to capture things like number of tickets, departure airport, product code, etc.) a system could allow for a number of fields to be created at each level.
e.g.
- Custom Placement Field 1 = Client Placement Reference – Must be a letter followed by 6 numbers.
- Custom Placement Field 2 = Client Business Unit – Drop down list, set and locked at advertiser level.
These extra fields are dynamically rendered on the required screens as columns or input sections.
An issue will occur though when moving data around between systems. To avoid this all systems need a similar level of flexibility, data formats need to be soft not hard. Using modern XML like formats, where the format the data is in is declared at the top of the file and then processed accordingly, data can be passed around and processed on the fly without necessarily having to build custom solutions each time.
Generic reports, media plans, dashboards or anything else for that matter could be created that dynamically grow and change based on the information provided.
Don’t spend weeks or even months trying to decide what a master set of data points looks like across all your clients, simply accept that they will all be different and spend the time building tools and systems that embrace customisability at scale.