VIEQUES, PR — TV companies are trying to adapt to a world in which the sale of their advertising is being up-ended by new possibilities – but doing so involves challenges as incumbent workflows are not up to the job.
That is according to one ad exec turned software founder, hoping to help solve some of those problems.
“We’re all looking for ways, across the entirety of the television ecosystem, to better productize premium products, to continue to grow and to create more revenue,” says Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz in this video interview with Beet.TV.
But Swartz also sees a problem. “As you add more products and audience segments and that gets increasingly more difficult, the reality is Excel can’t be the tool that powers that business,” she says.
So Swartz’s Furious – headquartered in Israel and operational in the US – developed Prophet, a software-as-a-service platform aiming to help customers see inventory, sales and audience data from multiple channels, all in one place.
Earlier in March, Fox, Viacom and Turner teamed to form OpenAP, a system in which they will allow ad buyers to define audience segments that are targetable across the networks, not just individually, whilst NBC plans to sell $1bn of its upfront inventory through its own Audience Targeting Platform.
That is part of the revolution Swartz is talking about. “The productization, pricing and management of inventory – all those really difficult business operational workflows – is exactly what we built Prophet to address,” Swartz says.
“There’s a huge opportunity for us to step in and do what we’ve seen a lot of other industries, (introducing) systems that connect enterprise and automate workflow, use data, math and data science to ensure that, at all times, you are maximising the yield of all your portfolio of advertising products across all your channels, markets and customers.”
This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
