Salesforce Media Cloud – a way to manage inventory and advertising sales from A to Z (and much more)

Anyone who has had the opportunity to participate in implementing a CRM system realises that it is a significant challenge involving many strategic decisions, continuous analysis of key business processes, and integration of systems operating in different areas of the organisation. Typically, after preparing a business case, one of the first questions an organisation must answer is, “Do we go OOTB or custom?”

Building a CRM system (as well as any other system) in-house has always had some significant advantages. First, this way, we can meet our most unusual requirements and handle all peculiar processes. Such a solution seems most reasonable if we work in a strongly specific industry, but… Well, there has to be “a catch”. There are two critical limitations here – time and budget.

First of all, building a CRM from scratch requires a lot of work and entails a high cost. Furthermore, the more specific the industry, the more this cost increases. In addition, we have to design and implement from scratch many of the processes which are readily provided by off-the-shelf solutions instead of capitalising on the work that someone else has already done for us. In the process, we may miss out on the benefits of implementing functionalities that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own, even though ready-made software provides them “out of the box” and our competitors use them.

So, how do we reconcile cost optimisation, speeding up implementation, handling unusual use cases, and adopting best practices?

There are some niche industry-specific solutions, but understandably, the spectrum of their sales functionalities cannot match the leading large CRM systems. That’s why their implementation usually involves continuous expansion of the functional scope anyway, so that, in the end, they are not much different from an entirely tailor-made system. Often, the specialists from our IT architecture department start referring to the system as “custom” a few years after its implementation, gradually forgetting that the original assumptions concerned a ready-made product and its instant configuration.

This is where Salesforce Industries comes to the rescue – a suite of CRM solutions on the Salesforce platform intended for industries whose operations may be overwhelming after an initial analysis due to the sheer number and intricacy of processes.

In the media industry, this package takes the form of Salesforce Media Cloud, which supports not only advertising sales and ongoing customer service but also media campaign planning in various channels, booking TV listings, the use of advertising space on websites and mobile apps, integration with ad servers, and many other functionalities that form the basis of our day-to-day work.

What are the main advantages of Salesforce Media Cloud over other ad sales support systems?

• Integrated platform: we can plan and monitor advertising campaigns in different channels and formats on several platforms and different ad servers without having to log into multiple systems. With built-in integrations, employees from various departments use the same data and reduce the time spent switching between different tools.
• Automation of advertising operations: Publishers using outdated systems often have to perform manual tasks, such as entering data from ad orders into different systems. Advertising Sales Management automates these processes, allowing for efficient handling of the process from creating a Media Plan to synchronising the campaign and setting it up on the ad server.
• Industries Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ): by taking a modular approach to the product catalogue, implementing the product as a set of attributes, and separating the business rules engine for calculating the quote price, we can handle the sale of a wide variety of ads – from a single product placement broadcast on a TV show, to a weekly campaign that includes banners in mobile apps, prints in the upcoming issue of our magazine and programmatic orders executed automatically on external servers.
• OmniStudio for Vlocity: with Media Cloud (and Advertising Sales Management), we get OmniStudio’s suite of solutions for accelerating implementation by building the system declaratively from components configured through an intuitive interface. This can be compared to manufacturing a car by specifying the drive, exhaust and interior based on off-the-shelf components without having to design every possible seat arrangement and manufacture every nut and bolt yourself. For the publisher, this means faster implementation of the system. In addition, we can use ready-made components for our industry, such as a Media Plan, with which we can build an offer step-by-step by planning an advertising campaign in various channels.
• Salesforce platform: by embedding CRM on a mature platform, we can quickly and painlessly deliver further functional areas with the availability of products dedicated to marketing, customer support, building partner platforms and data analysis.

Today, a great advertising product or access to multiple distribution channels is no longer enough to achieve sales success. The key factor is the customer’s experience when interacting with our company. Continuously collecting information about customers and their needs is essential. Thanks to the Salesforce platform, knowledge of both the customer and ongoing processes becomes available to all units of the organisation. With Media Cloud, these functionalities support Publishers with full consideration of the specific nature of their work.

The one success factor we need to secure is finding an experienced implementation partner who understands our pain points, knows the readily available solutions and has the ability to discover that extension of business value that will prove unique to us and will be our competitive advantage.

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