Flightpath takes a stance on publisher autonomy, and ships the software to back it

Flightpath Software Inc. today announced the development of Automation Playbooks, and with it a public position on a question that is critical to the future of this industry: whether a publisher’s commercial decisions should be honored by the technology they pay for.

Podcast publishers carefully negotiate ad frequency, targeting, and priority with media buyers, but recent changes to how dynamically inserted advertising is prioritized and delivered have disrupted those commitments by repeating ads on a single download, preventing important orders from delivering, and providing no tools to resolve the issues. These failures compound across publishers, buyers, and audiences by driving unmonetized over-delivery, missed obligations, audience frustration, and costly make-goods. In short, unreliable ad delivery undermines trust, revenue, and the publisher’s ability to honor buyer commitments.

The remedy available to most publishers has been manual: an operations team opening orders one at a time and changing them by hand, then doing it again the next day. But without the tools to know what changes to make. An uphill battle.

What Automation Playbooks do

An Automation Playbook is a standing instruction attached to a live order. A publisher enrolls a set of orders, configures any requested values that the playbook needs, and Flightpath takes over management of those orders.

The launch includes two playbooks, with six more coming soon. 

• Run to Cap halts flights when they reach the publisher set cap, even on platforms without such a feature. 
• Target Best Insertion re-configures flights when a DAI platform doesn’t support prioritization, using the available targeting criteria to reconfigure flights for improved delivery.

Because playbooks change the state of live orders and cannot be undone, the product is deliberately structured around Ad Operations maintaining control and visibility on all changes made for all enrolled flights. 

A position, not just a product

Flightpath framed the launch as a change in how the company intends to behave when publishers are harmed by decisions they did not make.

“When Apple changed the rules on an entire industry overnight, like many service providers, we focused on supporting our impacted clients and chose not to take a public position. Today we are standing publicly with our publishers, and for their right to control the inventory they own.” - Sean Howard, CEO and co-founder, Flightpath

Flightpath declined to characterize any hosting provider’s product decisions, saying only that they are speaking up, giving voice to their clients’ concerns and standing with all publishers.

One publisher described their operational position more bluntly.

“Being asked to re-flight thousands of orders by hand is not a viable solution to a problem we did not create. And there is no guidance on how to implement the traffic decisions someone now needs to make for each order. My team is left to find the solution.” - Head of Revenue at a top-20 podcast network

Availability

Automation Playbooks are available today. Both playbooks are included with more on the way. Existing customers can enroll their first orders with their Flightpath account team.

For more information, contact laurie@flightpath.fm.