Software Slices, Dices Data To Boost Sales

Customer relationship management and sales data analytics have become the new buzz terms in the world of broadcast advertising.

With good reason. The escalating competition for advertising dollars and the staggering piles of data associated with just about anything a station does that’s advertising related — and what isn’t — are spurring developments almost inconceivable a decade ago.

Maybe you’re a station’s general sales manager and you want to know how a particular advertiser performs with a particular demographic in a particular daypart or whether your new account executive is following through with the new business development plan.

Or maybe you’re a vice president of advertising at the corporate level and you want a track the spending patterns of a major advertiser over five years, one of the 20% that accounts for 80% of the revenue.

Now, multiple vendors offer sophisticated CRM — customer relationship management — and data analysis software that make short work of such demands.

Among the key vendors of such software are some familiar, and unfamiliar, names. Harris and WideOrbit, whose traffic and billing systems are in broad use among TV stations, also offer CRM or data analytics in some combination with the other or their T&B systems.

At Decentrix, the emphasis is on data analytics and what’s called, in a term of industry art, data warehousing. At Matrix Solutions, the latest thrust is combining CRM and data analytics. By all accounts, SalesForce is a major player in CRM, counting the likes of NBCUniversal among its clients. But it declined to participate in this story.

First, some definitions. CRM, or customer relationship management systems, do just that — collect and manage information about a station’s customers. From when and where an account executive had a meeting with Chance Chevy’s general manager to emails exchanged, sales proposed and booked, late payments or credits given, the CRM software should cover it all.

Such software also records budget versus actual for a particular salesperson, historical performance versus other sales people, even the number of clients visited on a particular day.

Data analytics systems collect all that information, plus data from a station’s traffic and billing system. In addition, it may “normalize” it (change MacDonald’s to McDonald’s, for instance), store it in a data warehouse (aka the “cloud”) and parcels it out, according to different levels of security clearance, to everyone from the salesperson to the corporate VP of sales to the CEO.

Each of the vendors takes similar raw ingredients, then slices and dices them in various ways.

Matrix Solutions

Matrix Solutions’ CEO D.J. Cavanaugh readily acknowledges that “there are lots of CRM products out there, larger in scope.”

What distinguishes Matrix, he says, is the combination of CRM and data analytics — collecting, analyzing and normalizing all the data contained in the Matrix CRM system.

“Our pitch to a TV station is that Matrix will take a lot of activities and functions currently done on disparate systems, bring them together in a streamlined manner and allow the station to plan, measure and improve its business,” he says.

Pittsburgh-based Matrix, although small, is aggressive and making its mark in the station market. Already a Belo vendor, it recently signed deals with Gray, Allbritton and Griffin Communications.

“Everybody has a tracking system, but they’re more designed for a traffic managers’ position,” says James Killen, VP of sales for Allbritton and a top level user of Matrix, noting that the Matrix system interfaces with other vendors’ traffic and billing systems.

“This system touches different people, has a different look for sales people, business managers, new business managers, even a different look for someone at the corporate level.”

Allbritton had used Matrix at a few stations, but recently decided to go system-wide, Killen says.

“We didn’t see anything else that had the soup-to-nuts complete picture. It does TV, websites, D2-3 channels…. You could do these things piecemeal or with other software, but this allows you to do it very simply. I’m a big believer in that if you can make it easy, they’ll use it.”

Harris

While the make-it-easy approach may be the same, the focus is slightly different at Harris, a longtime vendor of broadcast and cable television hardware and software. It offers a suite of products, including OSi Traffic, AdConnections and NetGain.

While AdConnections addresses the CRM side, NetGain is a relatively new product targeting data analytics.

According to Harris, the challenge is “data silos,” separate databases for individual operations such as finance, ratings, ad campaigns and traffic and billing. NetGain allows users to tap into key data in all the silos seamlessly, while establishing a hierarchy so corporate-level executives can see more than account executives.

When Harris installs NetGain, it sends in a team of analysts for two weeks to parse the situation, determine how the station group wants to organize its reports,  help train personnel and establish the reporting hierarchy — basically, who gets to see what. 

Harris uses a process called ETL — extract, transform and load — to collect information from the various Harris OSi systems, “normalize” it and store it in the data warehouse, says Scott Criley, director of new media products at Harris Broadcast Communications.

“What we’ve built into the ETL process is a high level redundancy so that if an error occurs, we’re notified quickly to work around it, right the situation,” he says. “If you use ETL and the data doesn’t match, we have very sophisticated logic in our system to make sure it matches between source and the data warehouse.”

The real “secret sauce,” as Criley says, is a metadata layer — a media specific construct that enables sophisticated dashboards and reports in which content, specificity, granularity and access are easily controlled.

NetGain has been operational at a TV station in South Africa for about a year, Criley says, and the company has several contracts with OSi Traffic customers in the U.S. to roll it out next year.

“We think we are the sole T&B vendor offering this sophisticated capability in the marketplace,” he says.

Wide Orbit

That may be, but WideOrbit is in the hunt.

“We’re developing a next-generation analytics product,” says WideOrbit founder/CEO Eric Mathewson. “We have an enormous amount of analytics in WO Traffic, but we’re working hard to eclipse that.”

WO Analytics will be a module of WO Traffic, he says. “You don’t need a data warehouse if you have WO Traffic,” he notes. “WO Traffic works across product lines, stations and networks. You need a data warehouse if you are running separate systems across your various media properties.

“The stuff that’s merely a little bit complicated, we solve pretty well. The stuff that’s esoterically complicated, that’s hard. That’s where analytics come in. Realistically, people don’t want a fancier fishing pole. The want a filet presented on the plate with lemon and butter.”

Decentrix

Denver-based Decentrix doesn’t offer a CRM product. It focuses on data warehousing and analytics with Analytix Data Warehouse Business Intelligence group of products.

“We gather business account data from all sort of sources,” says Michael Ledwich, VP-consulting services. “From traffic and billing, accounts receivable, proposal systems. It all sits alongside bookings. We can see integrated data from all bookings across media properties, compare it to last year, put it up on the [Decentrix] portal.”

Ledwich notes that with more Web and digital subchannel revenues mixed in with local TV advertising, and some media companies owning broadcast TV, radio and print platforms, “CRM is the one place where all of their properties come together in single proposal single tracking system.”