“The biggest thing that I hear from sellers right now is that it just takes so much time for them to sell,” White says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think the biggest problem they have right now is just trying to get out into the streets.”
So why not just junk the old systems and start fresh? “We talk about that a lot and I think the answer is no. I don’t think that’s the answer at all. As a product person, again what I think about is the gaps. What can we do to sort of make these systems work together a little bit better and just fill some of those.”
In other words, it’s about progress as opposed to disruption. “I don’t want to disrupt anything. I just want to make things easier for people. And I think we have the ability to do that right now,” White says.
Such progress requires patience and collaboration but it will ultimately do eliminate things that handicap sales and deliver a way to achieve yield optimization across an organization. “That’s not a small feat and it requires a lot of people and those people are doing a lot of manual work.”
White would rather “shoot the gaps, find small wins that you can make a huge difference in and just free your talent and empower the people to go do what they do best.”
The solution at Furious, which helps TV broadcasters and premium publishers manage pricing and planning of cross-platform video inventory, is called PROPHET, which aggregates and normalizes data across disparate data sets. “And so it’s about taking a really, really easy approach of ‘let’s not over-complicate things.’ What Profit does is it talks to all those systems and it puts you in the position where you get to drive.”
Just because he isn’t advocating disruption doesn’t mean that White suggests that TV sellers can just let things slide, given major sales opportunities that include the 2020 presidential election cycle. “I think if you’re not acting right now you’re doing a huge disservice not only to your sellers and your sales org but also to your bottom line. It’s not going to be simpler six months from now. It’s certainly not going to be simpler two years from now, when addressable really kind of hits its stride, audience buying becomes kind of the norm.”
]]>Which is precisely why two years ago she founded Furious Corp., of which she is CEO, to offer an advertising enterprise management platform for TV broadcasters and premium publishers called PROPHET.
“Our business has gotten so complex,” Swartz says. “There’s so much technology, new channels and vertical ad stacks, there’s nothing tying it all together to help someone run their business.”
When Swartz is asked for her opinion about census versus panel data for making advertising decisions, the answer is yes and yes. Meaning, media sellers have to be agile and flexible.
“The reality is that everybody’s looking for an easy answer, and there isn’t any easy answer,” Swartz says of a common currency. “The idea that you need to be able to sell in multiple currencies and equalize.”
This is because while a TV buyer probably will want to buy against a traditional Nielsen guarantee, a digital buyer who might be “foraying into television” will most likely desire a buy based on impressions, according to Swartz.
“So we need to be able to do the math with ease and make informed business decisions based on data, regardless of what the currency is,” says Swartz.
She goes on to discuss her efforts to help operators in Europe develop a road map and strategy for building out a sales house, of which there are few and mostly large. Operators are in a “unique space” because they don’t have two minutes of inventory to sell like their U.S. counterparts, while they have or ultimately will have set-top box data with which to sell inventory.
“So the question is, do they enable broadcaster partners to sell their inventory using the addressable data, or do they aggregate and then build a sales house and sell it? There’s a lot of business questions that have to be asked,” says Swartz.
She is heartened by the news that addressable ad platforms provider INVIDI has been acquired by AT&T, DISH Network and WPP.
“I’m so happy for the Invidi team because they have been committed to our industry and its success and they’ve been in the boat rowing for a long time,” says Swartz. “It makes my heart smile and as a founder it encourages me. That’s an awesome sign that we are moving forward.”
We spoke with Swartz at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>By using one more platform that connects all the others together, answers Ashley J. Swartz, the digital video expert whose company, Furious Corp, is launching a brand new solution to do just that.
To launch its forthcoming product, Prophet, Furious has just received a $1.1m investment from Nielsen’s Innovate fund, an early-stage investment fund and incubator backed by Nielsen Ventures, along with Laconia Ventures and several angel investors to be “the Switzerland of media and advertising”.
The plan is to help publishers combine data from their content management system, inventory, pricing and more information in combined dashboards. Swartz says the idea is about “visualizing it in a beautiful front-end experience and making it actionable by delivering an integrated cross-platform planning tool”. Actions include forecasting, planning, workflow management and optimization tools.
More than that, she says Prophet is about helping the digital video industry catch up with other industries, which have long since adopted new-style business tools whilst publishers, for planning their business, cling on to Excel spreadsheets.
“Other industries … have solved these problems with enterprise-level solutions that connect the entirety of their business functions … to work more efficiently.
“Our mission is to empower the systems that power media. Excel was launched in november of 1990. Regardless of how much upgrade Microsft has invested, it’s not robust enough to do the job of tying together an $85bn television industry and an almost-$10 to $12bn digital video industry.”
Mexico’s TV Azteca is using the system. Swartz has helped outfits like Digitas, PHD and Double Fusion on digital and advertising programs in her career, and is a friend of Beet.TV who frequently hosts panel events and provides insightful commentary on the state of the emerging digital video advertising sector. Prophet development will be carried out in Israel.
“Nielsen Innovate led the investment round in Furious because their product vision and platform align with one of our key investment mandates – to identify companies and entrepreneurs building promising technologies that can help our clients optimize revenue,” according to Bruce Haymes, Managing Director, Nielsen Ventures.