How to Overcome 5 Common Challenges in Converged Media Planning and Advertising Sales

Media companies have never shied away from innovation. Every new format, channel, platform, and trend pushes them harder to creatively and strategically reach customers and exceed performance goals for advertisers.

But the push for innovation over the last several decades has created a fragmented advertising technology ecosystem. Every new media type and channel comes with a different technology platform to manage inventory, monitor performance, and measure results.

After decades of adopting disparate systems to reach new audiences and accommodate consumption behaviors across new channels and platforms, media companies are dealing with a patchwork of ad hoc solutions. They don’t have the complete view they need to navigate the complex advertising technology ecosystem, fully monetize consumer habits, and measure and optimize campaigns. The result? Media planning with little-to-no visibility into available inventory. And companies must then deal with unexpected losses in revenue, poor intelligence on pricing and discounts — which are wildly inconsistent — and disconnected campaign measurement, which means they can’t assess performance properly.

Luckily, media companies can overcome these challenges and simplify the complexity with the right digital technology. The next generation of media planning and advertising sales requires an end-to-end advertising management system that brings together disparate data sources and workflows.

Let’s look at how media companies can overcome five of the biggest challenges in the industry today.

Media companies need technology solutions designed specifically for converged advertising, which means they bring together data across channels and formats – digital, video, radio, out-of-home (OOH), social, native advertising, and more. The requirements for this kind of solution include a unified view for data that integrates with all downstream systems. This allows media companies to streamline ad planning, inventory, sales, campaign optimization, and measurement. And this kind of platform doesn’t require brand new advertising technology; rather, it complements the existing technology stack.

Here’s how this kind of solution can address five major industry challenges:

Most media companies today offer a rich portfolio of cross-platform and multi-format advertising products. For example, think of a publisher that has exclusive digital and video content, new digital ad products, podcasts, brand licensing, and sponsored content.

An industry-specific data model is essential to streamline media planning, advertising sales, and campaign fulfillment – it simplifies and brings clarity to the process. The data model is important because it provides an accurate view of inventory and campaign delivery. Advertising sellers can use intelligent workflows, which leverage AI and automation, to trigger the appropriate actions based on defined sales processes. This helps media companies accelerate the advertising sales cycle while minimizing errors that impact campaign delivery, pacing, and performance. As a result, media companies prevent revenue leakage – or unintended revenue losses – and easily spot more opportunities to upsell.

Media companies need a 360-view of their audience and cross-platform inventory to develop converged media plans in line with campaign objectives and maximize revenue. Consider a new meal delivery service that partners with a publisher to run a campaign targeting “foodies” in northern California. The advertising sales team sees that digital video and display ads on connected TV, print, and OOH are the right ad formats and channels to reach this demographic based on categorical insights.

The next step is to develop a converged media plan before campaign execution so the sales team engages the advertising operations team. The advertising operations team uses an accurate view of inventory availability across downstream systems. Based on available inventory, they coordinate with the sales team to better scope campaign plans and proposals.

The sales team can also review historical and categorical campaign insights to make media plan recommendations. Finally, they can better manage leads and configure, price, and quote campaigns based on the unique needs of each campaign.

Trafficking campaigns and coordinating placements across systems and ad formats is a painstaking process. An end-to-end advertising management platform can shorten sales cycles and reduce manual efforts.

Every team gets instant visibility, no matter where they fall in the campaign lifecycle. Embedded capabilities like configure, price, quote (CPQ); order management; and contract lifecycle management streamline the proposal development and campaign fulfillment. Fully-automated and guided workflows free up sales teams from time-consuming, manual tasks like process coordination or contract approvals. This way, they can better manage their workloads and stay focused on what matters most: the customer and campaign success.

Executing change orders takes valuable time away from selling, advising customers, and optimizing campaigns. To streamline the process, the operations team can use pre-built integrations that sit between ad-serving and order-management systems. Invoicing and billing are connected to the system to ensure timely – and accurate – billing and collection and consistent pricing, discounts, make-goods, and approvals.

Let’s say a media company is running a cross-channel campaign during March Madness with TV spots, social media tie-ins, and digital advertising on targeted sports outlets. The biggest challenge is monitoring performance, uncovering insights, and optimizing the in-flight campaign in real time.

With a unified advertising sales management solution, media companies can aggregate performance data across media types and placements, improve client reporting, and connect programmatic and full-service sales to back-office billing and contracts. Teams monitor converged campaign performance from a consolidated data dashboard and use AI to get optimization insights. For example, if there is higher engagement on one social platform over the other, and more video ad completions on digital properties targeted to young adult sports fans versus a broader demographic, these insights can prompt teams to move impressions from one channel to the other to maximize performance.

Consider the case of a popular TV broadcaster that struggled with a complicated home-grown advertising technology system. The legacy advertising management system was siloed, which made integrated, cross-platform media sales challenging and prevented dynamic reporting. Simple updates took weeks and campaign performance reports were run from spreadsheets.

The company transitioned to a unified advertising sales management platform to get a 360-degree view of the customer across channels, advertising products, and formats. The cloud-based platform runs in concert with their existing systems for full contract lifecycle management. The sales team is empowered with simplified processes, including the ability to bundle, price, and quote accurately with a real-time view of data.

The company saw a 20% decrease in time spent on sales operations and trafficking as a result of the implementation. The time it took to configure new audiences, products, and contracts went from hours to just a few minutes, and they exceeded their revenue targets for 11 months of the year.

Media companies have always embraced transformation as they adapted to changing consumer habits and hang on to market share with fragmented technologies. The ideal solution to future-proof business is an end-to-end advertising management system to plan, sell, scale, measure, and report on advertising campaigns, no matter what channel or format comes next.