BOSTON – When Ashley Swartz discusses the nuts and bolts of digital media, it’s reflective of her background in manufacturing systems. Hence her view that connecting disparate data and systems is “not sexy” and that media company content management systems “are dirty and messy.”
They’re also the main reasons why she started Furious Corp., an enterprise management platform for television broadcasters and premium publishers to manage pricing and planning of cross-platform video inventory. In an interview with Beet.TV, CEO & Founder Swartz says systems providers “have done a really poor job” of helping media companies solve their business problems.
“We’ve sort of been using transactional ad tech to run our businesses, and then with Excel. That’s what connects the enterprise,” says Swartz.
She saw the need for better business optimization tool connecting such elements as campaigns and impression- and avail-level optimization with the portfolio management side. It’s all designed to help foster decisions like which TV inventory to sell, at what price and which inventory a seller might have to give up.
“If you’re going to sell addressable then you’re blowing up your linear guarantee and measurements,” she explains. “You’ve got to make the decision of what inventory you’re going to cannibalize. It’s really the harder business decisions that involve a lot of math and require visibility across the entirety of your business to make the right decision.”
Having connected 44 systems for clients, Swartz believes the biggest challenge is connecting disparate data and systems. “That’s not sexy work. There’s no API libraries for most of the traditional television systems,” she says.
Likewise, “CMS’s are dirty and messy, but a content management system is one of the most valuable places you can get insight on audiences within the first party of a media company,” Swartz adds.
Finally, it’s being able to display data in a meaningful way for different users in a media company. “We have very flexible front end and dashboard that we can reconfigure for different business units and functions as well as for different stakeholders within the business,” says Swartz.
We interviewed her last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.
