Furious's Blog

It might surprise you to hear that most linear TV sellers are still driving 80% to 90% of their topline revenue from traditional, Nielsen-measured TV. While the future of TV is surely audience-driven, data-heavy and technology-enabled, it’s coming at us in slow motion. Rome is falling but only one brick at a time.

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Transformed by changing audience behaviors and the proliferation of data on both sides of the value chain, the TV advertising industry is in flux. As a result of increasing complexity, television has gotten harder to buy and harder to sell.

I spent last week in London at the Future of TV Advertising Forum. These were the final days leading up to the election to determine the future of Brexit, and in speaking to British colleagues, I noticed a similar sentiment to what I hear in the U.S. about politics: fatigue. They had lost interest in the outcome and just wanted it to be over. 

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As the media landscape expands and the technical needs of organizations grow, partnering with highly specialized experts is increasingly necessary to succeed. The amount asked of individuals today is so much greater than it was in the past that having true domain expertise in every facet of your role is nearly impossible. But how do you ensure you’re working with the right people? With so much on the line, what steps can you take to set yourself up for success?

Below is a list of questions to ask yourself while engaging with outside resources to set your team up for success.

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Anyone who lived through the boom of digital video is sure to have opinions, memories, and potentially some nightmares of the creation, growth and eventual adoption of viewability. It was a necessary step but one that was wrought with loosely defined and adopted standards, competing “definitions” and, ultimately, heavy lift for operators and publishers.

And still, to this day, as Open Measurement comes to fruition with an ever-expanding set of delivery standards, there will be challenges ahead.

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The most important asset to any sales organization is talented salespeople. What’s their most important asset? Time.

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We all know that TV has gotten more complex—or, from my perspective, ripe with more opportunity. There are more commercial and distribution models than ever for TV (hello content!), which, in other industries, would spell opportunity to most incumbents with a strong portfolio of assets. 

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In today’s media organizations, core business decisions are often made using Excel as the habitual tool of choice, overlooking the power of modern data science to improve outcomes. Big data can help you and your team forecast inventory more accurately to reduce makegoods, create data-backed rate cards that maximize value for each placement, and unearth insights from new, proactive reporting.

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Our recent white paper, “Spinning Data Into Gold with Data Science” lays out how media sales organizations, including broadcasters, operators and cable networks , can turn their data into useful and actionable insights, resulting in higher earnings per share (EPS). Companies that aren’t effectively harnessing their data risk lower performance through missed revenue opportunities and inflated costs.

Here are a few examples of areas that might be leading to “revenue leakage” and cost inefficiency. Gaps that may be closed by effective use of current data management techniques and data science.

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Now that summer has come to an end, it's time to revisit our goals for 2019. To help you attack the rest of the year, and set your media sales organization up for success in 2020, we are pleased to announce the release of our new white paper, “Spinning Data Into Gold: How Data Science Improves Earnings per Share for Media Sellers.”