Sometimes it can be hard to see the glimmer of light at the end of the media industry tunnel. From two Hollywood strikes to declining ad revenue to money-losing streaming businesses, media companies face a lot of uncertainty as they try to get their share of advertising dollars.

The multiple unknowns in media have led many advertisers to strategically not limit themselves to just one channel or platform, such as minimizing spend in linear TV’s limited fall schedule in the wake of the strikes. And media companies are launching more and more lines of business to meet advertiser expectations, such as adding apps, gaming, and podcasts.  

But with the expansion of more advertising opportunities across the media landscape comes more challenges – that often fall on the shoulders of publishers’ media planners. Here we share how Salesforce Media Cloud can help media advertising teams automate processes, manage ad inventory, and build media plans so they can accelerate time to value in today’s complex media ecosystem.

Media companies focus on bottom-line profitability

In the advertising race between traditional and non-traditional media, non-traditional takes the lead. In the U.S., retail media ad spending is expected to reach $45.15 billion this year, a 20% rise over 2022. Connected TV (CTV) advertising is escalating rapidly and is poised to grow by 13.2% globally in 2023 to $25.9 billion.

This trend towards non-traditional may be because where consumers go, advertising tends to follow. And consumers are not flocking to the more traditional linear TV, which is forecast to see ad spend in the U.S. decline from $61.31 billion in 2023 to $56.83 billion in 2027. 

To facilitate ad revenue growth and retain audience share, media companies are:

• Driving product innovation by launching new lines of business, such as Meta’s Threads
• Expanding subscription models to allow for continued audience growth, such as NBCUniversal Peacock
• Introducing ad-supported models as new revenue streams, such as Netflix

These initiatives hold promise for media companies to stay competitive, but only if they can be executed quickly and successfully. Media ad sales teams will have to adapt to the changes in the diverse delivery mediums and the faster speed to market. This approach means optimizing and streamlining media planning systems and processes to best meet the company’s current and future needs.

Media Cloud: Create, automate, and monetize 

Salesforce Media Cloud is designed to improve operational efficiency across the media value chain with industry-specific processes, data models, integrations, and UX templates. Media companies can accelerate advertising sales, streamline ad operations, and optimize campaign performance – all on a single platform for multiple lines of business. 

Media Cloud allows media companies to:

• Accelerate digital transformation and innovation with a purpose-built, ad-sales-specific data model 
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and realize overall savings in time and development resources by leveraging Salesforce’s investment in product development based on industry best practices
• Simplify the integration of external data from downstream order management, ad serving, financial, or other systems with drag-and-drop configuration

Media Cloud OmniStudio provides guided experiences for industry-specific processes across a media company’s channels and ensures consistency between actions and processes across sellers. The sales team selects from a menu of prebuilt guided processes and templates, such as obtaining key contacts by agency, advertiser, and brand. 

Media Cloud streamlines the media planning process

Media planners often deal with time-consuming processes that slow down the sales cycle, such as disconnected data sources for rate cards and pricing, multiple users making contributions to complete a plan, or complex product configuration logic.

Media Cloud’s industry-specific workflows and built-in automation help to minimize manual errors and eliminate a lot of the back-and-forth communication with the media planning team. Media planners get unified visibility into all advertising inventory across the company’s channels so they can easily navigate and visualize the key agency, advertiser, and brand relationships.

Media Cloud’s intelligent recommendations allow planners to monetize underutilized cross-channel ad inventory. An ad campaign’s performance is easily optimized with timely and actionable insights powered by AI, and planners can modify the campaign in-flight. Revenue leakage is minimized with harmonized reporting across disparate data sources, real-time pacing updates, and automated alerts. 

Here are some other Media Cloud features that empower media companies to maximize cross-channel advertising sales with converged planning, execution, and measurement: 

• Advanced order management: Insertion order orchestration and decomposition to insert and launch the multimedia ad campaign into the underlying ad servers
• Digital contract lifecycle management: Speed media plan approvals, contract redlining, and digital signatures on insertion orders
• Always-on analytics and reporting: Get timely alerts and real-time views of your campaign performance across all of your data sources and teams
• Flexible integration with third-party systems: Fast-track time to market with prebuilt integration into Google Ad Manager (GAM) for digital ad sales

Find out how Media Cloud can maximize your ad sales and media planning performance and scalability. Contact the Silverline Media Team for a demo.