Editor’s note – continued from Part One: Advertising Transformed: The Publisher’s Dilemma
To solve this dilemma, publishers must transform their advertising operation. Publishers must integrate print, web, and all other advertising divisions into a single unified operating system. A complete advertising solution sells, packages, manages, traffics, optimizes, tracks, and bills advertising—all advertising—on a single consolidated platform.
A publisher must be able to handle an advertiser’s sales order that contains multiple ad types, multiple inventory queries, multiple insertion points, and aggregated feedback on campaign performance—all captured on a single invoice. To accomplish this, product, sales, logistic, and financial processes and systems must be unified across all advertising operations.
To begin the transformation, publishers first need a holistic view of operations across current digital, emerging digital, and print operations, including order flow, payment flows, content flows, user response, customer data, product data, and contract and pricing.
Publishers must then adopt a unified technology platform to consolidate advertising operations into a single automated, efficient, and agile system directly accessible to advertisers on a self-service basis, as well as to the publishers’ entire sales force. This is the foundation for the future.
The right platform manages an integrated view of order, payment, content, and user response flows against a comprehensive view of customer, product, contracts, and inventory. Integration points to surrounding systems are simplified—a single interface to finance, a single interface to automation tools, etc—and further simplified by well defined API’s and out of the box connectors.
With a core operations platform in place, a publisher has the foundation to begin a staged evolution to transform its advertising capabilities and deliver dramatic revenue growth, particularly in digital. With an integrated platform in place, all current print and digital products can immediately be sold via any sales channel: field sales, call centers, self-service, automated agency platforms, and more. The print sales force can easily sell online ads—including mobile, video, and other ad types—transforming the volume and pricing achieved. Without any new product innovation, sales of current online advertising can double simply through the efficiency of a unified advertising platform.
The publisher can next innovate with new product offerings and targeted audiences. As text analytics are applied to content on all platforms and then referenced against users’ profiles, publishers can better segment ad inventory into targeted, higher yield categories. This segmentation can be easily carried through the unified operations platform, providing the flexibility to package and price this higher yield inventory at ~20 – 30% premium over standard, less targeted inventory.
A unified advertising platform can also support print ad innovation, providing direct response mechanisms such as URLs, telephone numbers, and electronic coupon redemptions that can be tracked and measured. In addition, the publisher can aggregate third party blogs, websites, etc and sell advertising on behalf of these smaller scale organizations for a share of revenue – generating further premium inventory without the investment in editorial.
Lastly, the publisher can take a commission or share of sales made on behalf of search, mobile and social media ad networks, all of which are easily integrated into a single robust advertising platform. This has the potential to double or triple available inventory—and radically increase total advertising revenue without the need to expand sales force resources.
A single consolidated advertising platform greatly expands a publisher’s existing sales force capabilities. Call center operations and a 24/7 self-service ad sales portal allow advertisers to purchase packages of all ad types quickly, easily, and whenever it is convenient for them. Publishers can quickly and easily serve advertisers new packages, products, and price points across print and online. The reduced management and increased efficiency translates into a lower cost of sale for the publisher.
A single unified advertising platform establishes a powerful foundation for the future as publishers evolve to meet the advertising challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.
The Publisher’s Edge
Publishers are uniquely positioned to establish a powerful presence in the online advertising market. They have the existing relationships with advertisers. They have the resources and sales force to actualize transformative change and strong revenue growth. They have in-depth knowledge about local advertising markets. And they have extensive data about their readers.
Publishers enjoy long-standing relationships with many of their advertisers, both local and national. Publishers already often account for a significant portion of advertisers’ promotional campaigns. The stage is set to offer them an expanded array of advertising opportunities. But more significantly, the stage is set to approach a broad existing customer base with the radically expanded convenience of a single unified advertising platform that enables them to plan, schedule, coordinate, and pay for a comprehensive multimedia ad campaign across both online and print properties.
Publishers have the human resources in place to capitalize on the efficiencies of a unified advertising operations platform. Most publishers already have the sales force to realize substantial growth in the online advertising market. What they lack is a single, unified advertising platform to enable that growth.
Publishers can leverage their local expertise as the online advertising market increasingly expands to local advertising. Publishers have the local titles—and accompanying ad inventory—to capitalize on the expansion of online advertising into local markets. Smaller businesses will be attracted to the self-service convenience and ad design capabilities made possible by a single unified advertising platform.
Publishers possess a tremendous amount of data about their print, online, and subscription audience. They already have the existing information to leverage commodity-priced online advertising into higher-yield targeted marketing based on an advertisers’ desired demographics. High-value end users can be profiled by the publisher, tracked with a cookie, and retargeted. When these users turn up on third party websites, available advertising opportunities can be purchased at commodity rates and this inventory sold at premium prices– allowing the publisher to extend its premium inventory and sales beyond the capacity of its own audience reach.
The Mediaspectrum Solution
Mediaspectrum enables publishers to take the next step forward with its transformative Ad Sales platform. Mediaspectrum Ad Sales offers a complete advertising solution to sell, package, create, schedule, manage, track, and invoice all advertising—both print and online—from a single consolidated platform.
The Mediaspectrum Ad Sales platform offers the following functionality:
• An entirely web-based platform accessible from any connected device.
• A modern architecture that has been rigorously developed with leading publishers since 2003.
• A fully automated self-service advertising portal where advertisers can develop comprehensive campaigns across a range of print and online properties based on budget, specific goals, desired audience (demographic, desired region, behaviorial, contextual), or by individual ad category.
• Adobe design capabilities that enable advertisers to create their own uniquely branded advertisements—and converts them across different media channels.
• An open architecture that provides the ability to operate on any operating system or platform.
• Infinite scalability.