https://medium.com/@harrychaw/automate-site-serve-reporting-with-prisma-media-plan-and-python-for-media-agencies-ae1b6a1c54bf > Photo by Franck V. on UnsplashIn order to have effective media, it is essential for a media plan to utilize multiple distribution channels (ie digital display, TV, OOH). There are studies that show that having cross-channel marketing campaigns have a significant lift in performance. One key component of these marketing plans are the use of publishers who track the ads themselves rather than through an ad server. In the industry, the ads that are tracked manually by publishers are labeled as “site served”. In these cases, agencies are dependent on the publisher to provide the relevant data (impressions, clicks, etc) associated with these ads. > From my experience, the process of gathering this data from publishers often follow these certain steps: Subset media plan of site serve placement for specific publisher, create a excel reporting template with all the required metrics (impressions, video views, etc), send excel templates to publisher to fill out, publisher sends data back. Traditionally, this is a highly manual process often conducted by the media buyers themselves. The scope of this article is focused around automating all the steps leading up to the sending off of the templates to the publisher. We will be using python as our language of choice. This is part 1 of 2 part series on automating site serve reporting. Part 2 will go over sending the templates within an email.