Ad Sales Pie Share Is Now A Piece Of Cake

Current trends in the ad sales pie share clearly demonstrate that mobile and desktop internet advertising will surpass TV advertising incomes in 2019.

Broadcasters must now be preparing to defend their slice of the pie in order to protect critical revenues. Paramount in this battle will be the increasing use of technological solutions to streamline the efficiency and value to advertisers within the broadcasting industry.

According to Media agency, ZenithOptimedia, global advertising expenditure is expected to grow 4.4% in 2017. That sounds very nice but, looking at the pie chart, we can see the world-wide forecast position for 2019 in which the largest portion of the ad pie will switch from TV to internet with the following projected percentages: mobile (26.7%), desktop (14.7%) and TV, which will account for only 32.7% of the market. This represents an existential threat to traditional TV broadcasters and it is important to realise that this trend away from TV advertising is expected to continue. How do we deal with this problem?

Vendula Vytiskova, Consultant, Provys, answers: "Our ad sales software solution is an important weapon in defending broadcasters' market share because it increases advertisers' satisfaction and at the same time, maximises internal workflow efficiency. The word solution in this context is not simply a management guru's buzzword but represents reality in solving a critical problem."

If we now look at the flowchart, we can see how an advanced ad sales solution actually operates. Six groups of key processes form two workflow streams. The upper stream describes the sales flow process within the sales department dealing with clients and agencies, and the lower stream illustrates the traffic workflow process defining typical traffic operations.

The flowchart shows clearly the principal components of a modern ad sales solution which is all founded on one robust database supporting all the other main operations within a broadcasting station, such as programme scheduling for playout. "CRM & Annual deals" covers a repository of agencies and clients together with their individual conditions and long-term standard commercial conditions including invoicing parameters, bonuses, rebates, etc. "Campaign management" comprises customer order management, campaign preparations, different package proposals, spot and floating campaigns, GRP and TRP based campaign pricing, price calculations, reporting and GRP balancing. "Invoicing" is the heart of the matter and must be supported by perfect statistical reporting. In the traffic stream, "Pricing & Space management" covers commercial break-patterns, day-stripe price lists, block prices and generally, a real time commercial inventory of available advertising space. Just as the ad buyers are moving towards programmatic advertising, so Provys has already developed software solutions for automated self-promotion which is only a small step away from programmatic advertising from a sales perspective. "Booking" involves media planning, contracts and archiving. "Traffic" consists of ad version description and planning, ad content management and finalisation, regulation compliance verification (hourly and daily limits), seamless integration with playout, and the very important as-run commercial log.

The inherent danger is that the young upstarts will steal the older brother's piece of the cake, and this article was written specifically to address this risk and offer solutions. Let us conclude by summarising the necessary features of leading ad sales software: a smart data model to easily find the right information from anywhere; a wide range of available configurations; a comprehensive and flexible price calculation facility with a user friendly GUI; a detailed campaign description monitoring all its aspects; and finally, a wide variety of invoicing possibilities. In a nutshell, defending your slice of the pie is now a piece of cake when your chef uses cutting-edge software.

Author: Martin Junek.

www.provys.com

This article also features in the November edition of Broadcast Film & Video.

(JP/LM)