By Donna Beasley, Atex VP of Product Management, Advertising
Posted on October 17 04:50, 2011
One of the most interesting parts of my job is the chance to meet and talk to customers. Atex serves all types of media outlets, and at first glance they look very different - radio stations, magazines, newspapers and pure digital players. But across the board I am hearing similar questions when they ask me where our advertising products are moving.
All sectors are expanding their product portfolios and providing more cross channel offerings. In years past, a media company might have offered five or 10 products or stations. But now that number has swelled to hundreds of offers. The market demands that the companies expand to stay competitive. But that puts a huge burden on the staff that has to feel comfortable selling these new advertising opportunities.
The questions I receive usually come from three different camps inside these organisations - upper management who want to preserve their place in the marketplace, sales professionals who have to understand the myriad of new options and IT staff that have to figure out how to wire these new options into their systems. All three have very different angles. But at the end of the day they are asking for the same thing – a business partner that can allow them to move where they need to move in a competitive landscape and do it quickly and effectively.
These questions have been the focal point at Atex as we looked at releasing our first update to OneView Advertising and our Tablet Ad Management app. Version 1.0 of each application was released at the end of the first quarter in 2011. Now we are on the verge of releasing version 1.1 at the end of October.
Since OneView was designed from the ground up to the next generation framework that covered all the Atex product lines, it was ‘born’ with the logic of cross-channel advertising and publishing in its genes. A few examples of this are a single browser-based console for booking print, digital or preprint orders; scheduling these combinations with a single keystroke via Package functionality; and an integration hub that allows Atex Advertising to talk directly to third party ad serving systems.
The integration hub translates to salespeople being able to book complex banner or mobile ad campaigns inside our system without having to re-key data into the likes of Double Click for Publishers, Yahoo APT, AdGear or OAS. These digital campaigns can contain all the targeting data available from the ad serving system, which means a better match between the audience and the advertiser; higher engagement rates on the ads; and potentially higher revenue for the media company.
This can be quantified and analysed because we are capturing fulfillment information from the ad serving system and keeping it in our system. This gives advertising departments the ability to analyse the results and spot trends that have been very hard to identify until now. We are just scratching the surface on this area of digital fulfillment. Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the coming months.
Another major pain point we have responded to is the need for more interaction with CRM systems. I hear this request on an almost daily basis, and it makes sense - if a site has already entered a long term agreement with Microsoft Dynamics, salesforce.com, etc., why can't they use that for all the customer management needs, including pipeline management and order conversion? Why should certain information be kept in 'advertising' systems and other data kept in a 'customer management' system? At the end of the day shouldn't they be working together to achieve the same goal - foster a better relationship with the customer and understand their advertising needs.
To that end, we have created our first CRM mashup. It allows the salesperson to enter pipeline or opportunity information in the CRM system and when that opportunity has been won, the CRM system prompts for the conversion of it to an actual order. All of this happens in the CRM system, so the salesperson doesn't have to be trained on two systems, re-key any customer or order data or wait for the order to be entered in Atex Advertising. We are very excited about seeing how the market reacts to this one. I think a lot of companies will see immediate efficiencies with this approach.
And since all these options are available in the Atex Cloud, a media company can mix and match solutions easily by subscribing to different options as their needs change.
Keep checking www.atex.com for more updates and podcasts, or contact us to schedule a demo.
