Inforte Delivers First Fully Integrated Ad Sales System To Large Television Syndicator

Company Background

As one of the largest television syndicators in the television industry, our client sells both traditional 15 and 30 second commercials as well as 10 second solutions, such as Closed Caption and Fee Spot sponsorships. The 10 second solutions are an evolving business that the Company recently acquired. Additionally, this solution comes with a variety of policies and procedures that need to be flushed out.

With 30 employees in their advertising sales department across New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, this large television syndicator sells more than $350 million in advertising revenue yearly.

Business Issue

The advertising sales industry has become much more competitive, in the past few years. Alternatives, such as the Internet (online services) and cable television, are now viable contenders that have entered into the advertising sales space.

As a result of the increasing competitiveness in the advertising sales industry, our client has suffered from client satisfaction issues. The previous advertising sales system was maintained on an old mainframe which did not provide flexibility or the reporting information needed. Many of the reports were manually managed as Excel spreadsheets, which made it difficult to determine which deals were over or under. This led to not being able to accurately offer and plan for recapturable units. Additionally, the Company had multiple non-integrated systems for both their sales and trafficking function. Since these systems were not integrated, manual intervention was required which led to errors in running client commercials.

Inforte's Solution

To handle this challenging situation, Inforte was called in to partner with this television syndicator for 18 months. Inforte was originally engaged to analyze and re-design business processes related to the advertising sales process. After re-designing the business processes, however, it was determined a better advertising sales system was needed. Upon this realization, Inforte continued its work to analyze the benefits of various software options for our client to implement. After thorough analysis, Invision's DealMaker application was ultimately chosen to be implemented and Inforte was again retained to lead the program management efforts of the implementation.

With Inforte's program management, our client launched the first, fully integrated advertising sales system in the syndication marketplace. The new system manages the entire advertising sales life cycle from program creation and deal negotiation to advertising spot stewardship, trafficking and invoicing. From the moment the television show is produced to the dubbing of the tapes that are aired on stations across the country to invoicing and payment of each advertisement, the system and re-designed business processes will support each facet of the studio. The system will manage over $350 million in annual advertising revenue for the studio and is targeted to achieve over $10 million in cost savings in the first year through more effective management of advertising spots and inventory. The project re-designed and streamlined more than 20 processes spanning across five departments, including sales, traffic, finance and planning between New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Furthermore, the system is integrated with a comprehensive executive dashboard to provide live, up to the minute forecasts of revenue and inventory to our client's board.

Business Benefits Delivered

Our client was able to achieve the following benefits:

• Better reporting to make better business decisions: DealMaker provides real-time reporting options. At any given time, the Company's management team can determine how each deal is performing and what recapturable units will need to be offered.
• Fewer manual errors from integrated system: Many of the Excel reports are no longer needed. The traffic function is now integrated to the sales system which will reduce the number of errors caused by human intervention.
• ROI of $10 million in cost savings in the first year through more effective management of advertising spots and inventory.

Words of Advice

As additional advertising outlets continue to be discovered, the pressure will continue to increase for national television syndicators. Syndicators must continue to ensure the highest customer satisfaction.The new system will allow our client to make better decisions and react more quickly to client demands. Additionally, the re-designed processes will allow for more efficiency throughout the advertising sales process and rely more on the new system as opposed to manual processes.