The biggest pain point for media companies with regard to cross-media campaigns remains execution. “The execution systems for every single media type may be different,” says WideOrbit’s Susie Hedrick. “You have a different ad server for digital versus streaming versus TV. The more that fragments, the more work there is to do on the back end.”
The SVP of North America Sales talks about reconfigured media sales teams and the desire for a unified system serving both digital media and broadcast TV in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.
“Where it really gets complex is where you have different media types and you have to go through the execution process, through delivery, invoicing, attribution, back into the system and collection. That full process, the more complex the sale the more complex the buy, the harder it gets,” Hedrick says.
She describes the rise of sales organizations that are matrixed, “so you have a team that may go across many different products and then you have specialists that come in and go deep within those products. But the expectation isn’t that the sales team can go wide and deep.”
Her take on data is that there’s “a ton” of it, but “we haven’t quite figured out how to use that data in the day-to-day sales effort and adding value to the products that we’re trying to sell. It’s there, we can present it. But we haven’t automated that through software.”
While there’s plenty of technology available to make selling easier and more efficient, automating that process is a big driver at WideOrbit. “Because if we can solve that, we can create an environment where salespeople are able to use their time doing more revenue generating activity and more strategic activity.
“What we don’t want is to promote an industry where we’re doing a bunch of busy work, or we’re swivel chairing between systems because we can’t enter something in one system and have it go out to digital and traditional broadcast,” Hedrick says.
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
