If you are a publisher in online media or print or OTT, you must be having an inventory calendar created inside Excel sheets or you might be potentially using a Google calendar or Outlook calendar to track when what inventory is sold and what is available. In some cases, you might have also built a custom solution to manage your advertising inventory.
These ad-hoc solutions built by internal teams or solutions managed in excel sheets are difficult to scale, error-prone, hard to maintain, and potentially confuses if used and managed by multiple users within a team.
Inventory calendar is typically managed by the yield team or the operations team who provides updates to the sales team on inventory requests, manages the reservations, and continuously updates the inventory availability. This typically involves large overhead on the operations team who are already under extreme time pressure to launch, manage, and optimize campaigns. Adding additional work of managing inventory calendar removes them from the focussed work on ensuring delivery of the campaigns. Managing a large product catalog’s inventory calendar gets complicated if you use more than one ad server.
In addition to all the complexity in managing the inventory calendar, these custom-built solutions also slow down the RFP response times potentially impacting those sales closures since the sales team does not have updated inventory available on request. The sales team typically has to put in a request via a form or an email and wait for the operations team to get back. If the inventory calendar is open and available to all within the organization, multiple people simultaneously accessing the inventory calendar and managing the inventory availability will result in either over bookings or under bookings thereby impacting the company’s revenue.
As accounts are managed in a CRM system, it becomes extremely difficult to manage inventory without having integration between the inventory booking system and the CRM. However, due to the custom nature of the inventory management application or the use of sheets, this limits the integration capabilities.
At Symmetriq, we provide an integrated inventory booking calendar that allows you to not only visualize who booked what inventory and for whom at what price but also allows you to set up controls on inventory booking to avoid any under bookings or over bookings of the same inventory. With self-service reports and custom dashboards in the Symmetriq platform, you can also monitor and manage what is the potential revenue impact due to over-bookings and can also set up alerts when a particular inventory is being overbooked.
About Symmetriq
Symmetriq is an Omni Channel Revenue Management platform allowing you to unify inventory, manage quote to cash, and maximize revenue across OTT, Digital, Linear, and Print in a Single Cloud-Based SaaS Advertising Revenue Management platform. Symmetriq was born out of the need to provide tools, technologies, and platforms to enable media companies to manage and run a profitable advertising business. Our omni channel revenue management platform is built natively on the cloud with the latest web technologies with the scale being the primary driver without compromising on security and compliance which has become paramount in the current privacy-first world.
We help leading publishers across the globe manage their complex advertising business in a single platform enabling them to run a profitable media business. For any queries, please reach out to info@symmetriq.io.
