How is the media advertising landscape changing with proliferation of new FAST channels?
NextTV Series: Automating the Future of Ad Sales
The articles within the series highlight how the proliferation of new revenue streams has resulted in a need for more aggregated, accessible, and accurate data in order to sell media advertising smarter, faster, and more efficiently.
Broadcasters Shifting to Support New Ad-based Services Declining linear TV viewership and increasing use of mobile devices for on-demand content viewing have put pressure on the revenue streams of many broadcasters. The pandemic has greatly accelerated this long-term trend, by simultaneously increasing viewer demand while reducing the ability of media companies to produce new content. As audiences shift to viewing media in new ways, advertisers are redeploying their spending to follow. Success in this evolving market requires a multi-pronged approach to help advertisers better reach their target audiences. In response, media companies are taking a number of steps: • Impressions-based digital and linear ad buys are replacing those based on gross ratings points, particularly for blended digital and linear campaigns. These help ensure that ad buyers’ goals are met without the headaches of make-goods. • Many broadcasters are creating new linear channels to provide viewers with ad supported content over traditional broadcast, satellite, and web-delivered channels. These channels are collectively called “FAST” channels, for “Free, Ad- Supported Television,” and can also be referred to as “dot channels” or “diginets” when they are broadcast within the spare spectrum in a 6 Mhz ATSC channel. One good example of this is Circle, launched as a new ad-supported OTA channel by Gray Television in 2020. Many broadcast groups are offering regional sports channels and news programming. Other services like “Local Now” from Allen Media Group are delivering localized news and premium content in 225 markets across the country. • Sponsored podcasts and social media posts are opening up a range of possibilities where content can be customized to support advertiser messages. Web-based content is also being monetized, including broadcaster websites that provide banner, sidebar or in-line advertisements (or sponsorship recognition for non-profit broadcasters). On- demand OTT videos can include pre-roll ads, sponsored overlay graphics and embedded web links. • Broadcasters can also form alliances with other types of media outlets. For example, radio and television broadcasters can cross-sell inventory on each other’s platforms, or create customized packages combining both media types. Hyper-local newspapers and websites that service individual communities are also ripe areas for establishing collaborative sales efforts.
Increasing levels of automation are delivering improvements for both ad buyers and sellers. Programmatic ad buying and selling, long a staple of web-based advertising, is starting to become a force in broadcaster ad sales. These help buyers get the coverage that they want without having to laboriously execute discrete ad buys in multiple local markets. They also help give broadcasters better control over their ad inventory, and open up the realm of dynamic spot pricing.
“We have first-hand knowledge of many broadcasters and networks who have been able to increase their top-line revenues and bottom-line profits by giving their sales organization the ability to offer a wider range of advertising services,” said Mark Gorman, CEO of Matrix Solutions, a provider of media-specific CRM and sales management platforms. “Not only are the multi-pronged ad buys convenient and accessible, but they extend the media companies’ inventory offerings, while simultaneously giving them the ability to optimize the value of that inventory in a broader marketplace and to generate corporate value.“ Media company account executives can directly benefit when they have the ability to offer a wider range of choices in their portfolios, thereby allowing ad proposals to be tailored to meet specific goals. Multiple ad options can enable sales staff to provide a higher level of service and engagement with their customers, allowing them to more easily align with emerging trends even as audiences shift view habits. By broadening their portfolios, broadcasters are better equipped to capitalize on the rapidly transforming marketplace. By embracing a diverse set of product offerings, and closely tracking new trends, media companies can more easily ride out the inevitable bumps in their revenue flows. Explore how you can centralize and leverage all your media advertising 1st and 3rd party sales data to optimize inventory opportunities and value here.
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Ad Decisions Driven by Better Data Today’s advertisers have more options than ever before. Choices for television viewers are expanding due to an ever- growing array of FAST (Free, Ad-Supported Television) linear channels and on-demand OTT services that offer an astonishing variety of fully or partially ad-supported tiers. Broadcasters also have a range of other ad-supported products to sell, including advertising on their websites and other public-facing properties such as social media accounts and sponsored content outlets. Making decisions about where to place ads has become more complicated for advertisers. Long gone are the days when simple CPM/GRP (cost per thousand/gross rating point) analysis drove ad buying decisions. Instead, advertisers are looking for actionable data to use when developing RFPs for ad placements. Measuring CPI (cost per impression) is increasingly possible on new technology platforms, particularly for OTT and on-demand content. Click-through rates can also be measured in many instances, particularly for viewers using CTV (connected TV) devices. Note that a growing number of consumers use devices such as a Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, or Google Chromecast for older displays that do not have built-in CTV capabilities.
Broadcasters and media companies can benefit by upgrading their infrastructure to enhance the range of viewer data that their media sales organizations can provide to advertisers. One step that can greatly improve information flows is to simplify collecting and organizing the streams of data generated by new ad technologies, including web sites and social media platforms. Many of these outlets provide comprehensive data sets that can report on viewer locales, viewing habits such as page count and view duration, click-thru rates, incoming link sources, and other viewer activities.
Automating the delivery of ad performance data can further enhance the benefits for advertisers. By eliminating manual processes, the timeliness and accuracy of the data can be improved. Normalizing the results can also improve advertiser experience by making data sets easier to compare across different media types. Media-focused ad sales platforms such as the Monarch system from Matrix Solutions offer ad performance data integration and reporting. These tools can help maximize value of ad inventory by helping advertisers make better-informed choices. Of course, there are a few challenges that need to be addressed in providing actionable data to advertisers. One challenge is correlating impressions across different media channels to measure overall reach of an advertising program, and to ensure that results are reported in formats that are easy to compare. A recent market study showed that 78 percent of media salespeople report data inconsistencies as their number one frustration. Another highly desirable objective is expanding the range of metrics provided to support consumer conversion rate measurement where possible. “Modern advertising campaigns are frequently designed to achieve a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), as opposed to simplistically counting eyeballs”, said Brenda Hetrick, CRO of Matrix Solutions, a provider media-specific CRM and sales management platforms. “By providing a rich variety of fine-grained, actionable data in an automated, easy-to-use platform, media companies can offer advertisers the ability to fine-tune their ad buys to better achieve the specific results that they are seeking.” Automating the process of viewership data collection, consolidation and delivery benefits both ad buyers and sellers. When a media company makes it easier for advertisers to choose and buy what they want, relationships improve between buyers and sellers, which can help make advertisers more likely to return for future ad placements. Plus, by helping advertisers recognize and select the niche audiences that may otherwise be hidden within viewership data, media companies can more profitably position their inventory within the increasingly well-informed, selective advertising market.
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Automation is Transforming TV Ad Buying Television advertising is a high-volume, transaction-oriented business. Every hour that a linear channel is on the air, new inventory is generated in the form of ad “avails,” each of which can be sold individually or as part of a larger campaign. In many cases, purchases require a series of back-and-forth communication steps between buyers and sellers, including RFPs, proposals, orders, confirmations, log reports and invoices. Each of these steps must be executed accurately and properly documented for tracking and accounting purposes. These processes are made even more complex due to inventories and prices that can change rapidly, and a growing trend among advertisers of making ad buys closer to airtime. Manual processes based on spreadsheets or paper logs are virtually impossible to scale, and their preparation consumes valuable sales resources that can be better utilized for other tasks. For example, one of the more tedious steps is reconciling an actual ad placement confirmation (or log, which is generated by the broadcaster) with the corresponding insertion order (generated by the advertiser). If done manually, matching can be time consuming, particularly if any changes have been made to the scheduled ad run times. This process may need to be repeated several times for a long-running ad campaign with multiple insertions. This activity can be even more overwhelming for a national advertiser who is placing ads in multiple local markets, as the number of transactions that need to be reconciled can become quite large.
Fortunately, automation can help make the multi- step ad placement process more streamlined and less demanding of human intervention. New technologies and services are coming online from both the buy side and the sell side that can greatly reduce staff workloads. Tools provided by Hudson MX, Media Ocean, Freewheel’s Strata, Open AP, the TIP Initiative, and several others have led to measurable improvements in transaction efficiency. One example of the drive to automation is the “Logtimes” report defined by the TIP Initiative, which is an industry work group that was created to develop and publish open transaction interface standards for the broadcast industry.
Logtimes reports provide detailed “as-aired” records by way of a common data framework for each ad that is run by a broadcaster. According to recent press releases, Logtimes reports are now available from thousands of local broadcast stations, including those from Hearst Television, Nexstar Media Group, Gray Television, NBCUniversal Owned, Sinclair Broadcast Group, TEGNA, and Tribune Media. For broadcasters, automation in the form of advanced CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems can support account executives in their dealings with advertisers, and provide a valuable source of consolidated customer intelligence that can transform sales management. For example, the Monarch media ad sales platform from Matrix Solutions offers a range of capabilities that can: • Provide a dashboard of key indicators that are relevant to media ad sales • Enable improved tracking of data to support trend identification and exception reporting • Simplify the quarterly account planning process, by helping to make it more data driven • Improve order pipeline management for high-volume buyers, including advance planning for RFPs • Offer better ad sales intelligence to senior managers in TV broadcast groups that cover multiple local markets As automation continues to spread throughout the ad buying and selling process, transactions costs and times will decrease, information quantity and quality will improve, and buyer satisfaction levels will increase. Together, these trends should help rejuvenate the television advertising market and enable more effective competition against other ad-supported media outlets. Discover how advanced CRM and Sales Intelligence technology can help generate revenue, while simultaneously enabling faster and smarter business decisions here.
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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.
Monarch Global Media Ad Sales Platform
Monarch is a media-specific ad sales platform that provides robust CRM and Sales Intelligence.
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Aggregate and normalize data from disparate systems in the workflow, such as CRM, OMS, and Traffic/Billing, to produce one source of master data.
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Monarch surfaces cross-sell and upsell opportunities enabling users to optimize media ad sales.
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