IBC Exhibitor Opinion: The Evolution of the Advertising Marketplace

Press Release: 9 September 2005

Geoff Hutton, Chief Functional Architect

The challenges posed by a rapidly evolving media world are constant and ongoing. One of these challenges is the evolution of advertising.

Opinions differ about whether TV sales revenues are increasing or declining. Some sources show TV advertising spend in the US is continuing to rise by around 8% per year, whilst others claim a significant drop in TV advertising revenues in other markets. Whatever proves to be the actual outcome one thing that cannot be denied is that the marketplace is changing as alternative forms of advertising emerge and new media continues to increase its share of overall media spend.

The alternative forms of advertising within the 'traditional' TV space include techniques such as product placement, sponsorship and interactive advertising.

Outside television, delivery mechanisms such as internet and mobile phones are steadily increasing their share of the advertising revenue budget. For example, 83% of the top 100 advertisers in the UK use Internet advertising as part of their marketing communications mix.

Advertising revenue budgets are still large. Worldwide expenditure on advertising in 2004 was predicted to be $343 billion, an increase of 4.7 % on the previous year.

Alongside this, the face of broadcasting is changing. As TV stations are consolidated into bigger and bigger station groups, additional campaign strategies such as network or even global advertising become a possibility.

Many broadcasters are acquiring or merging with other media organisations, allowing them to offer cross-media campaigns.

At Pilat Media we recognise the needs of the modern broadcaster and are working with our clients to develop new features for our flagship product, Integrated Broadcast Management System (IBMS) to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing media environment.

An example of this is the ability to use IBMS to manage the creation and billing of cross-media campaigns. Facilities being introduced into IBMS allow a broadcaster to manage cross-media proposals (including internet and mobile phone campaigns), book the TV aspects of those proposals automatically and then bill the whole campaign.

Acting as a central point for customer management, IBMS can support an unlimited number of customers, assigning and managing these across multi-discipline sales teams. This centralised customer management function not only handles all the billing of the cross-media campaigns but also provides the means for accurate and comprehensive revenue analysis and reporting across those campaigns. This gives sales management improved abilities to forecast and track performance and better tools to negotiate future campaigns.

In terms of advertising delivery, the system offers advanced facilities for managing network, regional and even global advertising. Additionally, IBMS can support any form of TV or radio advertising, from traditional spot buys, guaranteed ratings campaigns, through to sponsorship.

With the onset of new advertising platforms, solution providers like Pilat Media need to be working with existing and potential customers to analyse and design solutions in response to these market demands. Pilat Media's philosophy has always been to develop solutions in conjunction with the market to enable future growth.