The modern-day advertising experience is enormously fragmented for both media companies and advertisers.
Media companies engage consumers across channels like streaming services, TV, radio, out-of-home, digital, mobile, social media, and more. But there is still no all-in-one way to do this without using a multitude of platforms to sell, execute, and measure multi-format advertising campaigns.
How can media companies simplify all this complexity and grow their advertising revenues? Let’s take a closer look at the challenges media companies are currently facing, and a few simplification strategies they can leverage.
Why all the complexity in cross-channel advertising?
The digital advertising world has continually evolved over the last two decades. In that time, an array of additional digital advertising channels, such as programmatic, email, mobile, and social, have been layered on top of the traditional channels like linear TV, radio, print, or out-of-home.
A closer look reveals that depending upon the market you’re in geographically, 50 to 80 percent of the US digital advertising market share is held by the big three: Google, Amazon, and Facebook. This domination has intensified the complications faced by advertisers and publishers selling advertising.
The stress levels of operating teams have grown just as rapidly as the complexity of the cross-channel advertising landscape. CROs must tap into multiple systems for data on forecasts, sales cycles, reporting, and more to gain the insights they need to accelerate business. Salesforce research reveals that companies use an average of 23 systems to support advertising functions, and swiveling between all these systems creates extra room for error.
To simplify this complex topic, we’ve boiled it down to three core pieces of what we see in the market today. These pieces are based on the major components of an advertising campaign: planning, execution, and measurement. We’ll take a deep dive into each of these areas from across the entire campaign lifecycle and share strategies to simplify each phase of the process.
Planning: Focus on first and last touch
There has been a significant trend where large and midsize companies hire multiple people to analyze all the advertising platforms and channels where their money is being spent. And it all begins with the planning process, which has become more manual and laborious. Companies take a swivel chair approach that requires teams to enter advertising data across multiple systems.
In this tangled web, it has become difficult to determine the channels driving conversions and sales, especially when all channels are jockeying for position as the driver. Moving to a single, aggregated view that supports all systems helps create a more integrated and coordinated approach to planning.
To simplify further, zero in on the platforms that focus on customers’ first-touch and last-touch interactions. The first touch is the customers’ entry point, such as the conversion, and the last touch is the exit point, such as the sale, with other touchpoints in between on the customer journey.
This thinking aligns with the marketing ‘rule of seven’ that when someone sees or interacts with your brand seven times, they are more likely to purchase it. This rule is an older concept, but it still holds substance in today’s complex advertising world.
Execution: Connect the silos
There are silos everywhere we turn. They exist across media, countries, IT systems, and teams. These disconnects create overly complicated order management and operational workflows at the execution stage, resulting in a lack of timely campaign optimization insights.
Some of the consequences of having no single view of accounts:
- Lower inventory utilization and revenue per customer
- Higher operational costs
- Poor customer experience
You don’t have to be stuck with a scattered and inefficient system, though. Silverline recently worked with a global media company that had multiple silos within its business to develop a cohesive execution strategy.
The company was unable to gain visibility into what was happening in each area of the enterprise. They needed a platform that would allow them to maximize selling across all their inventory types and pitch campaigns smarter by leveraging data and analytics.
Silverline implemented our Media Ad Sales Solution powered by Salesforce Media Cloud, and the converged platform helped the media company integrate their disparate systems into one seamless flow. The industry-specific application improved the management of cross-channel planning and execution.
Measurement: Establish a single source of truth
The measurement phase may be the most complex of them all. This is because companies tend to have data coming in from numerous systems that measure multiple channels with many different methodologies. Without unified cross-platform campaign analytics, organizations deal with error-prone client reporting, missed cross and up-sell opportunities, and revenue leakage.
You will develop a better overall holistic view of your campaigns by bringing these individual measurement systems into one single source of truth. Then you can quickly look at campaign performance and test, track, optimize, and make changes as needed.
Implementing a centralized measurement platform is more important now than ever, with a cookieless future on the horizon. This will bring major changes to the advertising industry and add even more complexity to digital advertising.
Innovative solutions, such as FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), will likely enter the space to try and solve for the absence of third-party cookies, bringing with them even more data to measure. We don’t know the impacts of a cookieless world yet, but going into it with a centralized system is a smart move to help set you up for success.
Simplify ad sales with the Silverline Media Ad Sales Solution
The key is having an end-to-end platform that brings the entire ecosystem together. The Silverline Media Ad Sales Solution powered by Salesforce Media Cloud accelerates sales, streamlines operations, and optimizes campaign performance on a single converged platform.
This modern technology aims to simplify the complexities of cross-channel, multi-format ad sales by centralizing planning, execution, and measurement. It is the next step in the ongoing evolution of ad sales, helping businesses uncover revenue growth opportunities, drive operational efficiencies, and automate industry-specific workflows.
