It wasn’t till the early to mid-’90s when news media houses worldwide began to take note of the world wide web’s impact on their readers and understood how it could forever change how people connected with and consumed content. Hesitantly, at first, media houses started making the digital transition. Soon, media powerhouses like CNN, The Chicago Tribune, and the News & Observer jumped onto the digital bandwagon and launched their own websites to nurture and grow their subscriber base. Advertisers also saw the vast possibilities of the Internet and in 1994, the first ever banner advertising was released on HotWired (now known as wired.com) to promote a campaign called ‘You Will.’
With time and the digitisation of media, the scope and growth trajectory of print media houses saw a wide-scale shift. Print circulation and ad revenue began to decline worldwide as soon as the world wide web came into the picture. The Covid-19 pandemic further accelerated the decline of ad revenue. According to Pew Research Centre, in the State of the News Media report, in 2020, print ad revenue reached a record low of $8.8 billion, down by nearly 30% from $12.45 billion in 2019.
As more and more readers started subscribing to digital news, news establishments had two choices: Switch entirely to the digital landscape or find the right balance to manage a hybrid print and digital subscriber base. The latter choice came with several new challenges because while managing a physical inventory is easy, tracking both print and digital inventories can get very complicated.
Challenges of Managing Cross-Media Ad Inventory
- Disconnected reporting on cross-media inventory performance: It’s complicated and time-consuming to understand how a bundle of advertising products performs across different channels. Analyses and decisions are often made based on siloed data from both channels. As a result, cross-channel inventory and revenue management become a matter of speculation.
- Multiple touch points across sales teams: When buying inventory across cross-media channels, advertisers often deal with multiple salespeople at a single publisher platform. This is because sales teams often work in silos, with no salesperson responsible for cross-channel sales. Repetitive conversations with multiple salespeople do not add value and can frustrate media buyers.
- Unclear Pricing and Complex Billing Systems: A bundle of multi-channel offerings makes for a complex package. This makes it challenging for buyers to understand the value they get for their advertising dollars. Billing and invoicing individual elements of a cross-channel sale only add to the complexity.
Voiro: Managing cross-platform ad revenue
Voiro tracks inventory and offers real-time insights across revenue channels to help organisations make critical business decisions.
Keep a Tab on All Inventory in Real Time
Voiro consolidates ad revenue on a single platform. This has several benefits: for example, publishers can watch their print sales, ad placements, high-performing verticals, and all sources of revenue – accurate and in real-time. This is seamless with Voiro’s own Order Management System and easily achievable via a flat file integration. For a sales team, this means getting all the data they need to make better sales on a single dashboard.
Make Bookings and Manage Pricing and Billing Cycles Seamlessly
Voiro’s Order Management System consolidates booking, approvals, and inventory management. The product monitors campaigns simultaneously and limits human errors like double-booked inventory. To efficiently run ad campaigns on print and digital inventories, media companies need to know the revenue delivered for the current billing cycle and revenue booked and projected for upcoming billing cycles. Voiro offers a single view of revenue in real-time that is easily accessible by all teams and is error-free.
Use Data Backed Insights To Set the Right Price
In response to market fluctuations and seasonal demands, agile pricing can result in clear revenue impacts. Voiro offers insights backed by data to help sales, pricing, and sales strategy teams make critical decisions to enhance revenue and grow your ad business.
Optimising ad revenue across media channels and multiple ad servers can be challenging for most media organisations. The key to addressing this problem is to be on top of your inventory management workflows at all times and have real-time insights to make informed decisions on the fly. Voiro helps simplify your ad sales and ops workflows and offers actionable insights to help you make these decisions.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on this subject or to talk to you if you’re a publisher and solving your own ad ops problems. Visit our website or LinkedIn, or write to us at contact@oldsite.voiro.com to get in touch.
