Sponsored Content by Matrix
Buying television ad space can be a complicated, frustrating process for buyers. Local advertisers, such as auto dealerships or furniture stores, may want to have the same ad distributed in multiple markets, on multiple channels in one market, or a different ad on multiple channels in multiple markets to promote an event such as a holiday sale. The space booking process typically involves contacting the appropriate account executive within each media organization, requesting a quotation, placing an order, reviewing the resulting as-run data and paying the invoice(s). These steps are repeated thousands of times each day in hundreds of media markets across the country.
Unfortunately in today’s environment, the particular details for each step of the ad buying process vary from one media organization to another. For example, one station may have a web portal for submitting an RFQ, whereas another might ask ad buyers to send them an email or a request by fax. While these differences may appear to station owners as a way to “lock-in” ad buyers to their specific media properties, in reality the added friction of working with multiple systems increases the intangible costs to buyers, making TV media buys more difficult than they need to be. For national advertisers, who may want to place ads across a swath of markets simultaneously, these headaches are compounded a hundredfold or more.
Moving Towards a Single Supply Point
The fundamental idea of an SSP (Single Supply Point) for television advertising is to allow aggregation of ad purchases across multiple media delivery systems and regions for both local and national ad buyers. With such as system, ad buyers would have a single, uniform way to research ad avails, request quotations, place orders, and receive as-run results across multiple media properties using a consistent, uniform process.
One major benefit provided by an SSP is to improve the competitive position of traditional media properties when compared to the digital media giants such as Google and Facebook. Those platforms already offer almost instantaneous ad placements, and can support advertisers who want to react quickly to changing markets or important news events. By deploying an SSP to provide real-time data, broadcasters can more effectively compete with the digital giants and automate many tasks that are currently done by hand. By doing this, media companies can free up their sales team to focus on cultivating new business.. Automation can also be harnessed to help traditional media properties migrate towards dynamic pricing to optimize their rates to an ever-changing level of demand.
Delivering Common Metrics
Another area where traditional media companies lag behind their digital competitors is in providing audience data to advertisers. The data sets that are provided are often difficult to utilize, due to mismatches in the ways that the audience is sorted into categories, the ways in which viewers are counted, and how the data points are aggregated across first- and third-party sources. Remedying this will require media companies to adopt a consistent taxonomy/vocabulary and to agree on common metadata templates and data models. The ultimate goal is, of course, producing a standardized API that can be used across the industry, which will enable advertisers to roll up summary results from many sources while still supporting the ability to drill down to get important local audience details in customized segments.
By working together to offer an SSP with improved audience metrics to ad buyers, media companies can streamline their sales processes, improve their responsiveness to advertisers, and enhance their competitive position against the digital advertising giants.
Explore how you can automate your ad sales and customer relationship management processes. Read more.
About Matrix
Matrix Solutions is a forward-thinking technology company that empowers the media ad sales world with intelligence, technology, and expertise. It provides the technology back bone for the end-to-end workflow for sales organizations, transacting in the media marketplace. Its flagship solution, Monarch, is the only global ad sales platform built specifically for media, delivering the CRM and business intelligence necessary to optimize inventory, while the Matrix Sales Gateway, serving as a sell-side dedicated platform allows for the ingestion and dissemination of data from all providers in the ecosystem that participate in the negotiation and execution process. Matrix manages more than $13 billion annually in media ad revenue, has over 10K users, maintains over 95% renewal rate, and has founded the annual Media Ad Sales Summit and Media Ad Sales Council (MASC) – both of which bring together industry leaders to advance the future of media ad sales. For more information, please visit matrixformedia.com.
