The biggest pain point for media companies with regard to cross-media campaigns remains execution. \u201cThe execution systems for every single media type may be different,\u201d says WideOrbit\u2019s Susie Hedrick. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/a> Connect conference.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere 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,\u201d Hedrick<\/a> says.<\/p>\n She describes the rise of sales organizations that are matrixed, \u201cso 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\u2019t that the sales team can go wide and deep.\u201d<\/p>\n Her take on data is that there\u2019s \u201ca ton\u201d of it, but \u201cwe haven\u2019t quite figured out how to use that data in the day-to-day sales effort and adding value to the products that we\u2019re trying to sell. It\u2019s there, we can present it. But we haven\u2019t automated that through software.\u201d<\/p>\n While there\u2019s plenty of technology available to make selling easier and more efficient, automating that process is a big driver at WideOrbit. \u201cBecause 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we don\u2019t want is to promote an industry where we\u2019re doing a bunch of busy work, or we\u2019re swivel chairing between systems because we can\u2019t enter something in one system and have it go out to digital and traditional broadcast,\u201d Hedrick says.<\/p>\n