When we talk about the selling motion changing, we used to call it simplified selling. You bought print, digital, or out of home in a simple way. But multiple technologies are required to support that “simple” model, making it completely siloed.
It’s time to reimagine digital ad sales.
For companies to be successful today, publishers need to automate the backend sales processes and move toward an automated, modern platform — all in one place.
I sat down with Jeanette Galloway, Executive Director of Business Operations at VOX Media, and Christopher Dean, VP of Media and Development at Salesforce, to discuss how digital ad sales have transformed in recent years and what your business needs to know. You can watch a recording of our conversation here, or read on for the key takeaways.
The next generation of ad sales is converged
One of the biggest challenges publishers face today is the sheer number of media types available — and they keep changing based on your audience. Besides traditional television and print, new channels like retail, media, and gaming networks make advertising more complex. To be successful, you have to be able to bring that all together.
That’s the common challenge, inefficiencies associated with a swivel chairing across different systems. We’ve got a campaign launched and then people spend 60 percent of their time triaging challenges once that’s been sold. – Christopher Dean, VP of Media and Development at Salesforce
It’s impossible to deliver personalized omnichannel campaigns at scale if you don’t have your data and channels coordinated behind-the-scenes. Without the right technologies to support this complexity, you’re going to end up with a lot of manual, siloed processes. Some media companies have more than 23 different systems to make this happen today — 23! — so it’s no wonder that it’s hard to find the right data at the right time.
The future of digital ad sales is instead a converged model, where publishers can see a single view of all of their campaigns across media types and placements, tinkering with copy, imagery, and timing based on overall performance.
That future of digital ad sales is already here
You don’t have to rely on manual, outdated processes to drive digital ad sales anymore.
We used to spend more time reconciling and aligning the data within multiple systems, which was an exhaustive amount of time we could have spent doing other things. Partnering with Shift, a Silverline Company, allows our sales team a way to get smart, meaningful data that allows them to engage with clients in a better way. – Jeanette Galloway, Executive Director of Business Operations at VOX Media
With Salesforce Media Cloud, you can access a converged platform that plugs right into the rest of your operational systems — in fact, your sales team might already be using Salesforce. Media Cloud gives you a single source of truth for your ad campaigns that help bring your organization more effectively together.
If you’re asking yourself, how can we work better together? How can we sell more inventory? How can we deliver the best of breed plans to customers?
Media Cloud is the platform to do that. You can cross-sell and upsell easily by account with functionality in an advanced way that most sellers haven’t seen before. You can target your ideal audience and access detailed analytics to make sure you’re maximizing your performance.
Collaboration = acceleration
If you want to accelerate this digital transformation and build converged media plans, you have to collaborate. Salesforce Media Cloud gives you an easier way to bring your team together so you’re all working from the same information.
What’s relevant for our business today, especially one like VOX that’s growing quickly, is we need to reimagine collaboration. We want to have a solid order-to-cash process and we need to be able to effectively communicate with all of our teams, from finance to planning to ad ops, for every campaign. – Jeanette Galloway, Executive Director of Business Operations at VOX Media
Salesforce integrates tools like Slack and Quip directly into the platform so that the salesperson, the media planner, the agency, and the brand can work together in real-time, with access to data right when they need it.
At Silverline Media and Entertainment, we’re in the middle of helping a big American media company with a major digital transformation project, and so much of what we’re doing has to do with process change and people change just as much as it has to do with technology. But having a unified product is exactly what enables them to build in that change for their work and work behavior. It’s not easy — but with the right technology partner, anything is possible.
We’re here to help agencies and companies alike revolutionize the way they go about media buying — putting you back in the driver’s seat.
