BrightMEDIA has enabled Northern & Shell to remain responsive and competitive within a diverse and rapidly changing market
Alan Tabrar, Advertising Systems Manager
The world of ad sales is going to change exponentially over the next few years. You need to make sure you have the right system in place to cope. I know I have!
Robert Avery, Head of Enterprise & Group Sales Support
Northern & Shell Media Group is a British publisher with a portfolio of newspapers and magazines, including the Daily Express, Daily Star and OK! magazine.
The Express was looking for a new ad sales solution that could support cross media sales and business growth, and that was optimised for the developments in digital media.
The Challenge
- Support cross-media sales and business growth in a challenging and ever-changing industry
- Legacy ad sales system was on-premise and required a specific application installation on each desktop, making it expensive to maintain
- Reduce operational costs and increase efficiency and visibility across the advertising sales teams
- Open new sales channels and enable customer self-service
The Solution
- Implemented BrightMEDIA, customising it to The Express to add multiple cross-media orders in one booking, apply discounts, track spend and barter agreements, tracking yield achieved against standard pricing
- Replicated previous reports for senior leadership in BrightMEDIA and built flexible reporting engine for real-time ad-hoc reporting
- Implemented logical taxonomy for advertisers, brands and agencies, to give clearer visibility of current customers, and aid accurate billing for identification of new business and up-sell opportunities
- Set up two-way integration to the finance system, providing real-time credit checking and account updates
The Results for Northern & Shell
- The first UK national publisher to have a media-specific, cloud-based ad booking system delivered via the Salesforce platform
- A seamless booking experience for cross-media ad sales
- Increased digital ad sales by 15%
- Time taken to book multi-channel orders reduced by over 50% compared to the old system
- Revenue now split across platforms (print and digital), resulting in more accurate financial reporting
- Users can create their own personalised, custom reports, leading to lower IT administration overheads and further time savings
- Reduced time spent on creating new publications from one day down to one hour
- An ad sales platform that supports future commercial growth and is adaptable to industry changes