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The accompanying video unpacks how sellers of linear TV advertising should adapt their inventory management, pricing and data practices in response to the COVID-19 crisis. It’s the fifth in a series of educational videos Furious has produced in collaboration with Beet.TV. Below is a sampling of Part 5:

Here are three universal truths of linear TV advertising sales:

1. One of the largest causes of revenue leakage is price variability.

2. Sellers have tended to be overly reliant on live sports and other high-value programming, resulting in high operational costs and inefficient inventory utilization.

3. Data isn’t readily accessible to make real-time pricing, revenue and inventory management decisions.

Our industry, like most, is in the middle of a crisis, and the response thus far has been steeped in traditional thinking. We’ve seen linear TV sellers discount spot prices to drive volume and introduce shiny new objects (i.e., new ad products) to attract incremental revenue. This is in lieu of doing the more difficult but profitable work of implementing data-driven pricing and inventory management practices.

For starters, if you haven’t redone your rate card across your organization’s portfolio of linear, spot-sold inventory during the lockdown period, you’re leaving money on the table. And now that live sports and other high-value programming are gone for an extended period, sellers need to redefine premium inventory.

To minimize revenue leakage due to pricing variability, sellers also need to implement pricing controls to ensure that inventory is sold for its correct value. This is especially important now that the value of some inventory has sharply increased due to constrained supply and less competition for viewers.

To learn more about how pricing controls can prevent revenue leakage in the era of COVID-19, click here.

– Ashley Swartz
CEO & Founder, Furious Corp.

This video is part of #BeetU – our weekly educational series for advertising and media during the COVID-19 crisis, hosted by Ashley Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp, longtime Beet contributor and the Dean of #BeetU.

Whether a newcomer or a titan, we invite you to join us for this educational series during this reset – live-streamed Wednesdays at 1p ET on Andy’s LinkedIn and Ashley’s Twitter feed.

By Katy Charles on @