Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud, a new industry-specific application for managing cross-channel advertising sales. With Advertising Sales Management, cross-channel planning and execution, automated client reporting and campaign optimization converge in a single platform to help drive revenue for publishers.

Publishers such as online and print newspapers, social media platforms, streaming networks, television and radio stations, and retailers generate revenue by selling advertising campaigns to brands. As the number of channels for advertising increases, so does the complexity of managing available advertising inventory and tracking campaign results.

Managing these functions across an average of 23 systems can be cumbersome and error-prone due to frequent switching and distributed capabilities. What publishers need now is one streamlined platform that integrates workflows where they can track campaign performance and view available advertising sales inventory from across a number of different channels.

Introducing Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud

With Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud, publishers can maximize advertising revenue by bringing together media planning across channels and analyzing campaign performance from multiple first- and third-party sources. This includes:

• Growing Advertising Sales with a Unified Platform: Normally, when publishers run a campaign using different media channels, such as digital, audio or television ads, they have to log into different systems to book and run the ads. With Advertising Sales Management, they have a single platform to plan and monitor campaigns across different formats and platforms, without needing to jump across different systems — ultimately reducing time spent logging into different systems.

• Streamlining Ad Operations and Sales with Automation: Publishers with legacy systems are burdened with manual processes and data entry, such as inputting data from insertion orders into different linear and digital systems. This can often be error prone, resulting in costly makegoods, such as advertising credits and ad re-runs. With Advertising Sales Management, data can flow across advertising systems consistently while automated approvals along the workflow can be configured to provide visibility at each phase of the campaign.

• Optimizing Campaign Performance with a Single View of Truth: Embedded analytics and dashboards provide timely, actionable insights, all in a single view, to help optimize campaign performance. Publishers can easily fix pacing and campaign performance problems in real time, while their sales teams can analyze historical performance to uncover upsell opportunities, like recommending new and niche channels for incremental reach. For example, while a campaign is running, publishers can monitor if one channel running ads is underperforming and can re-allocate remaining resources from that underperforming campaign to another channel that is performing more strongly, maximizing their return on investment.

"We understand the complexity that comes with managing advertising sales in today’s increasingly digital world, especially with publishers managing data across so many different advertising channels and formats," said Christopher Dean, VP and GM, Media Cloud. "With Advertising Sales Management, Media Cloud’s new industry-specific application built natively on top of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, we’re giving publishers one simple platform to help their teams manage everything in one place."

"Sales operations automation is a key area of need in today’s market," said Karsten Weide, Program Vice President, Media & Entertainment, IDC. "Media companies need the right technology in place to simplify the complexity from RFP ingestion to post-campaign reporting."

Advertising Sales Management helps grow revenue through customer engagement

Publishers like Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI) will begin implementing Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud. SPNI reaches 700M viewers with 26 channels across 167 countries. As part of its digital expansion initiative, SPNI will use Advertising Sales Management to modernize its systems, unify data sets from multiple channels, and sell smarter.

Extending Advertising Sales Management through the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem

Several Salesforce partners are now equipped to implement Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud for publishers globally. Global strategic partners like Accenture, Deloitte and PwC, in addition to partners like dentsu, Shift CRM — a Silverline Company, and V2 Strategic Advisors can leverage their deep industry expertise to accelerate customer deployment and adoption of Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud.

Availability

Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud is generally available.

More Information

Learn more about new Advertising Sales Management for Media Cloud HERE.

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