Chief Operating Officer
Colony Logic
@andyvogel
How to Think Differently About Something You’d Rather Not Think About
In the race to extract cost-savings out of their operations, many media companies make missteps that lead to long-term pain, loss of key personnel and diminished standards that hurt their credibility and levels of engagement with both audiences and advertisers.
We all know that in order to engage audiences we need to reach them through multiple platforms — and perhaps even across different brands — and oftentimes this is executed by staff specialized in social, mobile and traditional platforms. In reality, the specificity model doesn’t necessarily fall in line with how new media ownership views our business. Most department heads now consider staffing levels almost quarterly.
Media companies reflexively often look to headcount as the main component to saving margin, without realizing that there are areas where they could reap savings without impacting the quality of the products they produce. In fact, you could really view this as an opportunity to leapfrog competitors, retain key personnel, increase opportunities for advertiser activation and engage better with your audiences, as well as gain significant insight into better ways to run your business.
I’m primarily talking about systems and integration. Because so many media companies have grown through acquisition and have often chosen to “build their own” internal systems, they often see these systems as little more than a necessary evil. What they should be seeing is an opportunity to make their sales force, internal operations, and business intelligence integral to their path to profitability.
And, that’s really just the start
This focus on systems is not just a boring attempt at becoming more efficient. It can also be a competitive advantage to build engagement. Yes, that’s right…a competitive advantage. Many of the new competitors are working off of the same hodge-podge of internal and external systems without any “Single Source of Truth” to pull it all together.
By pulling together all of your systems and better defining target key audiences, you give yourself a chance to create an algorithmically driven business advantage.
The complexity of the typical media operation usually has at a minimum these components:
• Large product catalog
• CRM and CMS
• Data enhancement
• Order entry system
• Multiple vendor order entry systems
• Multiple billing systems
• Data intelligence gathering
• Business analytics
How to approach sales with a learning algorithm
Today, most media companies sell at least several dozen different products representing a complex product catalog that is often difficult for field sales reps to represent to their clients. This catalog may or may not be filtered through a CRM that has varying degrees of compliance among different selling teams. Once the products are selected (also typically in an inefficient manner), then the order needs to be configured and placed in an order queue.
The order then needs to be entered into multiple order entry systems, sent out for fulfillment, and quality checked before it’s set live.
So, you end up with multiple points-of-entry and multiple points-of-failure. All of this is backed up by human QA — often resulting in thousands of dollars being lost to bad data input and human error.
As I’ve looked across and spoken with leaders in media, the financial services, automotive, e-commerce, and other industries, I’ve found that this is more the norm than I would have expected. Deloitte sponsored a piece in the Wall Street Journal that walked CIOs through the thought process for making the decision. The full article is here.
Does misery love company?
Okay, you’re not alone. Does that make you feel any better? I didn’t think so. The fact that many businesses have come to expect difficult integrations with technologies and/or companies that they’ve acquired is just a business reality. Right?
My experience with many Fortune 500 companies is that they’d rather silo a new acquisition rather than look for aspects of mutual gain via any integrations.
It’s really not a question of centralization
Centralization was always thought of as an efficient means to streamline decision-making on strategy, products and go-to-market strategy. Why haven’t we seen the same with operations? The reality is that through cloud computing, every business unit has the opportunity to gain efficiencies, grow margin, and increase engagement with field sales results. One system to integrate all of the powerful tools that media companies have deployed is possible and doesn’t necessarily need to cost millions and take long to implement. It’s more a question of resolve.
On the sales front-end, a typical sales rep has to keep multiple product configurations in mind without a lot of support from an automated product catalog. That means that they need to remember all the products, all of the industries that those products match and how to package in a cost-effective manner for the advertiser. Utilizing a smart catalog product configurator or sales recommendation engine is the best way to make sure sales is selling what’s actually available to fulfill.
Having a back-end reporting and analytics engine that drives results back into the front-end isn’t just possible today, it’s almost necessary given the high amount of turnover most media companies face going forward. What if you had the ability to enter in KPIs into a BI tool that then fed data back into a sales recommendation engine so that you were sure your sales reps were selling the latest configuration based on results that increased customer retention?
Where do you start?
If you looked at your capital budget not as a way to keep the status quo, but rather as a way to invest in your ability to streamline your frontline sellers and back office operations, then you would make different decisions. When the new owners of media companies today need to increase engagement with audiences across multiple platforms and grow the level of activation for advertisers they will need to have technology solutions in place of headcount. It’s the only way for them to be responsible with their investment.
Many of the new owners come from different worlds and have less appreciation of the why and of how long it took to get to the current state where silos are the norm across both departments and technologies. Media ownership today has an opportunity to start with a blank slate. If you started your media company from scratch today, your capital investment would certainly resemble something other than exactly what your business looks like today. You need to start thinking this way in order to not just survive, but to really claim a role in the future of media.
Andy Vogel is Chief Operating Officer at Colony Logic, where he is responsible for marketing, communications, strategic planning, operations, and business development across the company. Previously, Mr. Vogel served as Senior VP of Digital & Mobile for Tribune Company, including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune and 39 broadcast television stations, including WGN America on national cable and KTLA. He was part of the launch team at cars.com, created the first group online function for Gannett, and ran digital strategy and sales for Journal Communications and PackerInsider.com (the second largest paid subscriber base after ESPN Insider). He has been on the North American Board of the Mobile Marketing Assoc., Google’s Publisher Advisory Board and the Board of the IAB’s Mobile Center.
Next: Video Production is on the Rise — But Who’s Watching? by Josh Schwartz, chief data scientist, Chartbeat
