Adopting flexibility in direct sales may sound like a large undertaking, as it requires you to move away from a familiar sales environment. But this doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing approach. The easiest way is to sell flexible, goal-based campaign types in addition to traditional slot-based ones, such as frequency, takeover, or fixed share of voice. A campaign type determines how an ad is distributed across a set of screens.
Unlike slot-based campaigns that restrict your customers to a slot in a loop, a specific time period, or a location, flexible campaigns allow them to decide how often their ads should play based on their desired campaign goal. Similar to how digital advertising is bought, flexible campaigns are set based on a desired impression, play, budget, or share-of-voice goal.
By offering campaign goals similar to those of other media, you can facilitate the creation of omnichannel campaigns for your customers while also securing new budgets from digital advertisers. As more advertisers adopt and expect to book flexible campaigns in direct sales, having the right tools that can automatically optimize inventory to accommodate both fixed and flexible campaigns will become a key competitive advantage for you.
Flexible campaign types hit your campaign goals, every time
With a more flexible direct sales strategy, media owners and retailers will need to change how they market their inventory. Offering screen packages to customers looking to buy more flexibly will be crucial. This is because grouping your inventory in packages that meet your customers’ specific campaign criteria and goals enables you to offer more targeted advertising capabilities in your direct sales.
However, this doesn’t mean a loss of control over how you price and sell your inventory. Media owners should be able to decide whether they want to allocate all or part of their inventory to flexible campaign types. With Broadsign, they can choose how much flexibility to incorporate into their direct sales strategy with access to a wide range of fixed and flexible campaign types. Below are the types of flexible campaigns we support:
Play goal
A play goal lets you define how many times the ad should play. Broadsign ensures that the goal is met and distributed across all selected screens in the most optimal way possible for the campaign’s duration.
Impression goal
An impressions goal lets you decide how many people you would like to see your ad. This goal is met and distributed in a similar fashion to a play goal.
Budget goal
Depending on the budget provided to media owners by their customers, Broadsign will calculate the number of impressions they can guarantee and optimally deliver the ad across all desired screens throughout the campaign. This campaign type is particularly useful for customers who want their ad to be seen on as many screens in as many locations as possible, ensuring maximum visibility while respecting the defined budget.
Share of Voice
Customers can essentially buy a percentage of time on the screens. The desired share of voice can be met either by the end of the campaign, on a daily basis, or on a daily basis per screen.
A flexible network is better optimized for revenue
An advantage of booking and managing your customers’ flexible campaigns with Broadsign is access to our optimization engine. Purpose-built to help you navigate and balance the need to offer more flexible campaign types, our optimization engine strategically moves booked flexible campaigns to make room for new ones.
This is something that can’t be done with fixed campaigns. Without the ability to adjust fixed campaigns to accommodate new requests, unnecessary roadblocks are created for campaign planners in direct sales. Media owners are also more likely to find gaps in their inventory that are difficult to fill. Neither situation is ideal, as it ultimately results in lost revenue.
Most media owners are already rearranging their existing campaigns to make room for new ones. This is often done manually in spreadsheets, which is time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient, and cannot scale with your business. Why opt for a manual process when you can simply click a button and watch our optimization engine do the work for you? Providing you with the best way to allocate your inventory to maximize screen fill rates and revenue, every time. In fact, media owners using Broadsign’s flexible selling tools have been able to sell on average 10% more.
The shift towards more flexible campaigns is inevitable. As demand for flexible campaigns continues to grow, media owners that can offer them today will be better positioned to secure new budgets and gain a competitive start to the new norm of flexible buying in direct sales.
