SME Perspective: 4 Strategies to Enhance Ad Tech Stack Integrations for Your Retail Media Network (RMN)

Best practices for achieving maximum operational efficiency for an RMN

Integration is a complex problem to solve at the enterprise level. Software vendors take different approaches to connect the order management system (OMS) to other solutions in the modern tech stack while juggling various publisher needs and requests. At its heart, integration is about creating a flow of information between each platform, eliminating silos, and facilitating decision-making. “Naturally, publishers want to connect their CRM and OMS pieces as they grow. They want everything to talk to each other,” says Nic Conforti, Senior Director of Integrations at Boostr. 

Developing an integration layer can be tedious at best and mind-boggling at worst. “In our years of work at Boostr, we’ve seen it all,” Conforti says. “We’ve done a lot of integrations, and we’ve encountered all kinds of practices—good and bad. Regardless of approach, the goal is to maximize efficiency.” When done well, integrations allow for more than just communication by facilitating greater automation and delivering new insights. 

To reach peak performance, Conforti, who has nearly a decade of specialized ad tech integration experience, offered four best practices to get the most out of your integrations.  

The best advice for your integrations? Be sure you are using the right tool for the job. You are not going to manage impression-by-impression delivery in an OMS, and you are not going to manage a campaign sales lifecycle in an ad server. When deciding what to integrate with and how to do it, make sure you are designing it to have the proper tasks performed in the proper platform.

#1: Lean into “containerization”

“Containerization” is a deceptively simple concept with big implications for managing your tech stack integrations. The idea is that data can be used more quickly and safely when code works the same on any system or platform. This approach means you don't have to create processes in one environment and then change them for others. Containerization helps reduce bugs and avoid errors when moving code around.

For your RMN, the idea is to pick the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) objects and fields to connect with and automate as much of the build process as possible. Then, containers and custom field configurations will help manage the type of fields and data points used on the campaign or line level during setup.

But containerization doesn’t address the challenge of getting disparate datasets to speak to one another—especially if they don’t share a common “language.”  

“The way to approach this,” Conforti explains, “is to have a product that allows you to store data during the integration and then translate it into whatever format the next system—say a DSP connection—expects. By doing this, you’ve stored your data in a particular way that makes your communication easier and your systems overall more agile.” 

Conforti also states that, too often, RMNs use several different platforms to try and extend their reach and dedicate time to building these integrations, only to realize that it was a short-term solution. In the long term, it's better to devote time to integrate with services that are more of an aggregator or have reach across several DSPs such as The Trade Desk. Prioritizing this strategy will give you the flexibility to access the different DSPs and try different programmatic strategies without a lengthy scoping process of directly integrating with a DSP (or multiple) that you will later need to rip out and replace as you are still in your growth phase.

#2: Let the experts build your tech stack

Most retail media companies are not in the business of building software—and they shouldn’t be. “I’m a big believer in the idea that we’ve moved on from the need to engineer in-house solutions to meet requirements,” Conforti says. “Building a proprietary system can work if you have the resources to build and manage it, but if you want to build something that will stand the test of time, you need to look outward.”

Conforti says there are significant differences between software built by the company that will use it and software built by a partner. 

“Typically, whoever you partner with is still going to be able to give you a high level of customization, and they can probably do it better because you’re still a business with a whole different objective—your job isn’t to be building and managing an OMS or CRM,” Conforti continues. “That’s what companies like us do. We know all the ins and outs.” 

Additionally, when you don’t need an internal team to manage a proprietary system, you free up resources and never risk losing crucial system knowledge to churn. 

However, Conforti recommends keeping campaign management in-house. It's common for RMNs to outsource their campaign management of certain buys to other platforms, such as Facebook. Often, the RMN owner has an external agency to manage the execution and building of the campaign directly on the platform. The issue with this is that it becomes difficult to integrate an OMS into a scenario where the order and lines are being built outside of the workflow. 

Trying to connect delivery from that order or lines built externally somewhere else without a clear way to identify and map back the delivery object becomes incredibly difficult. Strategically, it makes more sense to work to connect an OMS directly to the ad server/DSP being used and have the agency either build the campaign directly in the OMS or have the internal teams at the RMN build the campaign in the OMS and push out to the ad server/DSP for the external agency to manage there. 

#3: Embrace change 

Too often, publishers are attached to the way things have always been done instead of trying to create better, more efficient processes. Companies might recreate flawed processes in a new platform even when seeking new software to address existing problems. Boostr Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer Katie Schuele calls this the ethos of “your mess for less.” 

“Everyone wants to carry over what they used to have, even though the reason they got a new one was to do it better,” Conforti explains. “This is a pitfall that I still see businesses always fall into. We can build it if needed, but we often advise otherwise.”

#4: Engineer smarter 

Failure to launch effectively integrated systems is often the result of over-engineering. “They have developed integrations as product features that live in the cloud, and ultimately, no one has visibility,” Conforti says. “These integrations are used as stopgaps to solve for what’s missing in the product, increasing a business’s expenses and product list. Instead, the aim should be to level up while slimming down. 

“We don’t want to solve problems with an integration that is overengineering something,” Conforti says. “We want to solve them with a feature set that will improve operations for you overall.” 

Don’t get hung up on your campaign setup and targeting granularity. There’s still value in standing up a Multiple Viable Product (MVP) integration between your OMS and ad-serving platform. Two big misconceptions exist around integrating an ad server into an OMS, which holds true even for DSPs and DSP marketplace providers. 

• Our campaign setup is too complicated to make strategic sense to scope/build a direct integration between the platform and our OMS. 
• There won’t be enough business value if we can’t automate the process. 

There is value in automating the minimum viable workflow for your business to have systems interconnected, even if additional targeting steps need to take place outside of the OMS. What's often overlooked is the fact that by connecting your OMS to the ad serving/buying platform, you have an end-to-end connection that ultimately will allow you to pull in delivery and run complex reporting. Even if you have to add some additional targeting parameters directly to a campaign, you still automate most of the process.  By storing your campaign data in an OMS, you have one source of truth for everything in that campaign.

There is also value in the business workflow to ensure orders to go to an external DSP/DSP marketplace are not overlooked or missed. By having the connection from the OMS to the external ad platform, you can ensure that when internal workflow and processes are managed and followed in the OMS, it will result in a campaign getting pushed/created and avoid the risk of a campaign sold in the OMS not getting built-in DSP/DSP marketplace due to user error and the fact that the systems do not speak to each other. 

Smart retailers should engineer their tech stack in phases, ensuring each integration aligns with their business processes. Over-engineering can lead to increased expenses and complexity. A phased approach allows for streamlined, strategic growth. If they focus on minimum viable workflow integrations, retailers can achieve end-to-end connections that improve operations without unnecessary complications.

Level up your integration game 

Conforti says the key to successful integrations is to begin with practicalities. He suggests starting your integration discussion with the following questions: 

• What do you want to automate? 
• What are you trying to solve with automation? 
• Where do you want to eliminate double entry?
• How do you want things to work? 
• Compared to your current workflows, where do you want to send data? 
• Whose time are you trying to save? 

“Before you get to field mapping, objects, and the tedious details, you should start with these questions. Get clear about what you want to do in plain English,” Conforti advises. 

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Ready to engineer next-level ad sales tech stack integrations alongside a team that puts practicality first? Let’s start a conversation. 

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