An issue that we commonly hear is that ad sales organizations often struggle with early-stage sales pipeline recognition and reporting. The creation of a media plan can be a time-consuming process involving multiple teams, and is often put off until the end of a deal cycle. This leads to an underreported or inaccurate sales pipeline as well as a lack of insight into early stage opportunities that may require the attention of ad operations teams.
Ad sellers need a way to effectively make a high-level revenue projection of the value of an opportunity, and visualize how this revenue will be distributed over the potential flight dates of the campaign. All of this before they’ve had time to scope out a full media plan and determine the precise ad products a client is going to buy.
The Media Catalyst, powered by Salesforce Media Cloud, is designed to get your advertising sales process up and running on Salesforce faster. Built on Salesforce Media Cloud’s media-rich data model foundation, our pre-built configurable package accelerates your time to value with centralized ad sales planning and revenue forecasting.
What does the Media Catalyst do?
The Media Catalyst enables ad sellers to save time and gain insight into high-level revenue forecasts earlier for upfronts, scatter, and more on early-stage opportunities without the need to input vast amounts of media plan details.
Once the Media Catalyst has been installed and configured, users gain the ability to navigate to a Projections tab within the Opportunities they are already using today. They can then add multiple Projection rows to represent different categories of revenue (e.g. Digital Display, Events, Linear Spots, etc.) and define high-level details surrounding flight dates, impressions and total values of each line.
Once completed, the Media Catalyst will automatically generate a complete revenue schedule for each Projection. Users have complete control over the scheduling frequency (i.e. monthly, quarterly, one-time) as well as the amount of revenue attributed to each schedule entry.
While the Media Catalyst automatically distributes revenue across your campaign based on a daily prorated value, users have the ability to shift revenue around throughout a schedule to account for scenarios like high-traffic months or front-loaded campaigns. These schedules also provide a framework for downstream integrations with sources of campaign delivery data such as an ad server, order management system, or other repositories such as your own proprietary data warehouse.
See the Media Catalyst in action
This demo video shows how an ad sales executive uses the Media Catalyst to accurately represent his sales pipeline in Salesforce Media Cloud. Discover how you can forecast in minutes — without the need to build a robust media plan!
