MIAMI – Media companies have lots of untapped data wealth but cannot realize it because their CMS systems don’t like to share, is one of Ashley J. Swartz’s theses and a contributing factor to her formation of Furious Corp. “We just decided to tackle the unsexy, hard problem of connecting all these disparate systems and datasets, and to really provide the tools to make much more informed decision using data,” Swartz explains during a panel discussion at the recent Beet.tv Retreat 2016.
Furious Corp.’s Prophet is an enterprise management platform for television broadcasters and premium publishers to manage pricing and planning of cross-platform video inventory. Among other things, it’s a tool for forecasting, “which everybody neglects but is an essential precursor to a better planning, pricing, allocation and optimization business process,” Swartz says.
“The other big part of our thesis is there is so much wealth to be unlocked at media companies,” Swartz continues. “If media companies aren’t empowered with insights and information and they don’t understand their own audiences, how are they going to package and deliver that audience to an advertiser?”
At many large media companies, there is one CMS per television network and a separate one for digital, making it difficult to build cross-platform plans, Swartz says in response to a question from Matt Prohaska of Prohaska Consulting.
“What better place are you going to mine insights than looking at your digital audience behavior and viewing behavior and adjacent behavior to build a better television schedule?” says Swartz.
While this should be a quick win, according to Swartz, “because the CMS’s are disparate and don’t talk to one another, that media company is disadvantaged going to the negotiation table.”
As a result, “value is going to be had by a middle person putting their hand in the pot. We believe there’s an opportunity to recapture more of the value upstream by empowering them.”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
