As television companies struggle with the complexity of tracking content and ad sales efforts across multiple platforms, RSG Media has launched an overnight reporting service that tracks data for on-air TV, online, mobile, and other digital media from a variety of sources. This data is then combined into customized reports that are designed to help clients improve their ad sales and marketing efforts.
The new service grew out of RSG Media's existing businesses of supplying a variety of software solutions to media and entertainment firms for their ad sales efforts. Over the years, clients for those services include such firms as MTV Networks, Discovery Communications, Turner, NBC Universal, the NBA, Major League Baseball and others.
One of those clients had such success with RSG's sales optimization tool that it asked the company to produce all of its sales reports. The client said "we need someone to bring all of this data that is scattered all over the place together for us and you guys know our data better than we do," explains Thomas Siegman, vice president of client services at RSG Media. "After we set that up we realized that a lot of our clients could use similar service because they have all these silos of data and it is a real burden to pull together all of these reports. A lot of the new sources [of data and information] in the digital areas aren't easy to pull together."
For the new service, RSG will typically have one or two staff members embedded in the company who attend the client's meetings and provide reports to a variety of divisions. In addition to those dedicated employees, RSG also has offices in New York, North Carolina and India where a team of over 20 people can access all the latest data and analytic tools to produce additional information and reports on short notice.
A key selling point for the new service is that it allows companies to have a centralized source for reports that can synthesize data from a variety of sources covering different platforms. "If you are dealing with a company like P&G, their brands on linear and digital may be tracked on different systems and it is difficult to see a single brand tracking across all media types," notes Siegman. "Our reports allow them to see all that in one place."
The system also offers potential cost savings as clients are outsourcing the process of producing reports to RSG.
"They are essentially taking different groups of [people who had been doing those reports] out of their organization and handing that work over to us," Siegman explains. "We have teams of people in different places to make sure they get what they need" in addition to the RSG employees located in the client.
