Furious's Blog

When live sports disappeared before our eyes in mid-March, many of us in the industry saw the pandemic in a dramatically new way. The virus became real. Aside from wondering how it would affect us and our families, there was real worry as to what advertisers and broadcasters would do in the absence of sports.

Golf returned to tournament action with the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas, earlier this month, which was a watershed moment for live sports in the wake of the pandemic.

I’d like to begin with a bold statement. If you haven’t redone your rate card across your entire portfolio of linear, spot-sold inventory during this lockdown period, you’re missing revenue opportunities.

The marketplace for buying and selling TV advertising has never looked like this before.

As if struck by a tornado, the majority of Tier 1 programming was wiped out. Live sports are gone entirely with no certain return date, and the volume of new primetime programming available for networks to unveil in the fall will be limited due to ongoing production delays.

At Furious, we focus on helping TV sellers maximize the yield of their advertising portfolios. We’d like to unpack that concept for people who are more familiar with portfolio optimization in the context of finance.

image credit: HAKINMHAN/shutterstock.com

TV ad sales is a high-volume, fast-paced business with many clients to please, KPIs to track and deliver against and sales budgets to hit. As a result, TV sellers are pressured to come up with creative plans to reach their clients’ goals at the right price, all while leveraging their inventory. Too often, they are forced to rely on what they know advertisers will respond to, rather than exploring their entire house of wares. This is mainly due to the inability of systems to deliver quick and accurate information.