Replacing legacy systems that were built to power linear television advertising sales isn’t the answer to cope with today’s increasingly complicated selling landscape. It’s complementing those systems with an enterprise offering that frees up manpower, according to Furious Corp. Chief Product Officer JT White.
“The biggest thing that I hear from sellers right now is that it just takes so much time for them to sell,” White says in this interview with Beet.TV. “I think the biggest problem they have right now is just trying to get out into the streets.”
So why not just junk the old systems and start fresh? “We talk about that a lot and I think the answer is no. I don’t think that’s the answer at all. As a product person, again what I think about is the gaps. What can we do to sort of make these systems work together a little bit better and just fill some of those.”
In other words, it’s about progress as opposed to disruption. “I don’t want to disrupt anything. I just want to make things easier for people. And I think we have the ability to do that right now,” White says.
Such progress requires patience and collaboration but it will ultimately do eliminate things that handicap sales and deliver a way to achieve yield optimization across an organization. “That’s not a small feat and it requires a lot of people and those people are doing a lot of manual work.”
White would rather “shoot the gaps, find small wins that you can make a huge difference in and just free your talent and empower the people to go do what they do best.”
The solution at Furious, which helps TV broadcasters and premium publishers manage pricing and planning of cross-platform video inventory, is called PROPHET, which aggregates and normalizes data across disparate data sets. “And so it’s about taking a really, really easy approach of ‘let’s not over-complicate things.’ What Profit does is it talks to all those systems and it puts you in the position where you get to drive.”
Just because he isn’t advocating disruption doesn’t mean that White suggests that TV sellers can just let things slide, given major sales opportunities that include the 2020 presidential election cycle. “I think if you’re not acting right now you’re doing a huge disservice not only to your sellers and your sales org but also to your bottom line. It’s not going to be simpler six months from now. It’s certainly not going to be simpler two years from now, when addressable really kind of hits its stride, audience buying becomes kind of the norm.”
