Salesforce Expands Media Cloud with Advertising Sales Management to Automate Ad Sales, Improve Campaign Performance, and Streamline Workflows

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud, a new industry-specific application for managing cross-channel advertising sales. Now, with Advertising Sales Management, cross-channel planning and execution, automated client reporting, and campaign optimization converge to help drive revenue for publishers.

Publishers such as online and print newspapers, social media platforms, streaming networks, television and radio stations, and even retailers are increasingly generating revenue by selling advertising campaigns to brands. As the number of channels for advertising increases, so too does the complexity of managing available advertising inventory and tracking campaign results. What publishers demand most today is one place where they can track campaign performance while having a view into available advertising sales inventory across a number of different channels. Managing these functions across an average of 23 systems can be cumbersome and cause errors due to frequent switching and distributed capabilities. To streamline, today’s publishers need one platform that integrates workflows and campaign reporting into a single view.

Introducing Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud

With Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud, publishers can maximize advertising revenue by converging media planning across channels and analyzing campaign performance from multiple first- and third-party sources. This includes:

• Growing Advertising Sales with a Unified Platform: Previously, when publishers ran a campaign using different media channels, such as digital, audio, and television ads, they had to log into different systems to book and run ads. Now, they have a single platform to plan and monitor campaigns across different formats and platforms, without needing to jump across different systems, ultimately minimizing errors and reducing time spent logging into different systems. 
• Streamlining Ad Operations and Sales with Automation: Publishers are burdened with manual processes and data entry, such as inputting data from insertion orders into different linear and digital systems. This can often be error-prone, resulting in costly makegoods such as advertising credits and ad re-runs. Now, data can flow across advertising systems consistently while automated approvals along the workflow provide visibility at each phase of the campaign. 
• Optimizing Campaign Performance with a Single View of Truth: Analytics and dashboards embedded within Advertising Sales Management provide timely, actionable insights, all in a single view, to optimize campaign performance. Publishers can easily fix pacing and campaign performance problems in real time, while their sales teams can analyze historical performance to uncover upsell opportunities, like recommending new and niche channels for incremental reach. While a campaign is running, publishers can monitor if one channel running ads is under-performing. They can then decide to re-allocate remaining resources from that under-performing campaign to another channel performing more strongly, maximizing their return on investment.

“We understand the complexity that comes with managing advertising sales in today’s increasingly digital world, especially with publishers managing data across so many different advertising channels and formats,” said Christopher Dean, VP and GM, Media Cloud. “With Media Cloud’s industry-specific applications built natively on top of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, we’re giving publishers what they’ve been demanding for years—one simple platform to help their teams manage everything in one place.”

Extending Advertising Sales Management through the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem

Salesforce partners are now equipped to implement Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud for publishers globally. Global strategic partners like Accenture, Deloitte and PwC, in addition to partners like Dentsu, Shift CRM, a Silverline Company, and V2, can leverage their deep industry expertise to accelerate customer deployment and adoption of Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud.

I’m excited that Shift, a Silverline Company, is featured as a launch partner for the Salesforce Industries Media Cloud Ad Sales launch today. The partnership we have established with Salesforce and Salesforce Industries has allowed us to be part of the development and innovation behind Media Cloud. We’re proud to be involved in the continued investment that Salesforce Media Cloud brings to the media industry. – Jonathon Millman, CEO, Shift CRM, a Silverline Company

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