You probably have a particular daily routine for consuming media. Perhaps you turn on a TV morning news program while you drink your coffee. You listen to a podcast while you’re working out. You run an errand, and your car is tuned to your favorite ’80s music satellite radio station.  

Your media is customized to your likes and needs. And most likely, so is the advertising that goes along with that media. The ads around the content you consume are tailored to your age range, location, or other factors based on what advertisers know about you and your media consumption. 

But have you ever noticed what happens when you wander from your media norms? Maybe you’re visiting with Grandma, and she wants to watch her favorite TV show with you. And suddenly, you’re seeing ads for denture creams. 

The capability to connect a specific audience with an advertising message via their media of choice is the foundation of advertising sales management. But getting an ad from Point A to Point B means it must travel across a vast advertising ecosystem that is complex and expansive. 

The middleman that connects advertisers with media

Want to reach men, ages 30-45, who live in Hawaii, and are looking to purchase a winter coat? I’ve got a guy for that. Think of an advertising agency as the middleman who is your “I’ve got a guy for that.” In this case, the “guy” is a type of media that can help a brand reach a certain target audience. 

Advertising agencies work with multiple brands to purchase advertising inventory across various media types – from a commercial on linear TV to a billboard in Timbuktu.  

The agencies manage the relationships with media companies. The media company could specialize in one specific area, such as a cable TV broadcaster or a direct mail company, but more and more, we see the media industry expand to offer multiple media assets under one umbrella. For example, a local print newspaper also has advertising on its website, podcast, and annual festival. 

The agencies themselves have evolved to meet these various media types. What used to be an AOR, or agency of record, that handled all of an advertiser’s media placements has now turned into multiple agencies focused on one area such as search or social media. 

The 6 Salesforce Media Cloud features for navigating ad sales

Salesforce Media Cloud helps media companies to sell advertising in today’s complex advertising ecosystem. The platform is built for the media industry, and Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud specifically supports ad sales. 

Salesforce Media Cloud has various features and tools that streamline the ad sales process under a unified, agile platform. It provides end-to-end management pre, in, and post-flight, from request for proposal (RFP) to insertion order and reporting to payment.  

A key component of Salesforce Media Cloud is OmniStudio. The suite of tools creates a digital engagement layer between your advertisers and your systems, providing guided experiences for ad industry processes across multiple devices and channels. OmniStudio has a flexible interface that enables media professionals to complete intricate advertising tasks with low to no coding skills required. 

So, how does Salesforce Media Cloud help simplify the complex world of ad sales? Check out these features that will accelerate and automate your ad sales efforts:

1. FlexCards: Part of the OmniStudio, these cards summarize contextual information at a glance and help provide a 360-degree view for relationship map management. Easily find the advertising contacts you need and see where they fit in on the advertising map, whether at an agency or brand.
2. Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ): This tool is designed for advertising sales teams to quickly provide prospective advertisers with accurate pricing for any given media product configuration scenario. CPQ applications take into account an advertiser’s customizations, quantities, and discounts.
3. Omni Analytics: Support a continuous improvement loop with this advertiser analytics feature that visualizes data in OmniStudio. You can identify trends at the process level, understand business performance, and take action to improve flows, offers, and actions that address an advertiser’s core metrics and KPIs. 
4. DataRaptor: An OmniStudio mapping tool that enables the reading, transforming, and writing of Salesforce data. It simplifies the integration of external data – such as a brand’s audience engagement metrics – by quickly loading and extracting hierarchical structures. 
5. Integration Procedures: These applications read and write data from Salesforce and from external systems. They are a way to get, save, and manipulate data behind the scenes. The structure is efficient, consistent, and works well for repeatable processes that you can templatize, such as responding to RFPs. 
6. OmniScript: With this feature, you can configure interactive business processes that are easy to use yet have complex functionality occurring behind the scenes. OmniScript provides a guided path where a user may follow a flow — for example, submitting an advertising insertion order to a media company.

Supercharge ad sales teams to sell smarter and faster

As a certified Salesforce partner, Silverline knows how to leverage Salesforce Media Cloud to maximize cross-platform advertising sales with converged planning, execution, and measurement, powered by a single platform. Salesforce Media Cloud is exactly what sales teams need to survive and thrive in the rapidly changing world of media and advertising. Find out how our ad sales solutions can benefit your organization.