Pilat Media acknowledges the needs of the broadcaster operating in a forever changing market and is actively working with its clients to develop new features for its flagship product, IBMS (Integrated Broadcast Management System), to meet those challenges.
Over 30 broadcasters across the globe, including some of the industry’s best known names, have chosen Pilat Media’s IBMS system to streamline and efficiently manage their business processes.
NEW IBMS features include:
Active Workflow - Streamlined communications
An integral messaging and notification process which streamlines the communication between departments. This process enables users to monitor and automatically update in real-time, data and task changes in the system.
An operational blueprint can be configured to enhance internal and external communication. Users processing their workload will automatically trigger either a notification or message into the nominated recipients’ Inbox to inform them of the action taken. Workflow notification can also be set-up to escalate events automatically where appropriate. If required alerts for Notifications and Messages can be e-mailed to the chosen users.
Promotional Campaigns - Improved targeting
How to place and monitor promotional placement? Why didn’t the program rate well? Did we not promote it often enough? Was the creative targeted at the right audience? These are the questions that programming people ask themselves.
IBMS’ new advanced Promotion Planning tool enables broadcasters to achieve more targeted promotion placement and better exploitation of the inventory. The key business function of the tool provides a graphical user interface to plan promotion schedules via promotion campaigns. Broadcasters have the ability to set ratings targets for campaigns and to analyze the ratings whilst scheduling the promotions in addition to reporting on promotion placement and inventory usage. This enables productive analysis of statistics to set ratings targets for campaigns.
Auto-Generation of Campaigns - Automated proposals
Provides the ability to set advertising sales campaign targets and auto-generate proposals to achieve these targets. This is a fast and automated tool, fully integrated into sales and traffic. It allows proposals to be created by using accurate, available inventory and placement rules and be processed based on the desired workflow and approval procedure.
In addition, IBMS’ sophisticated business rules allow for spots or impressions to be ‘reclaimed’, if they have been over-delivered, thus freeing that inventory for new sales opportunities and revenue growth. In summary, these new features provide faster, automated tools to maximize yield and to increase your revenue.
Program Change Management - Flexible program changes
IBMS provides a flexible and configurable tool to handle the program change process that is often complicated. From program scheduling through promotions, media, engineering, sales and traffic, IBMS Program Change Management allows an organization the ability to define, not only the notification and messaging that needs to occur when a program change happens, but also manages the entire change itself.
By ensuring that all affected departments are notified – programming, media, promotions, on-air, sales, traffic – IBMS guarantees that all parties are informed and able to address any workflow needed. IBMS also manages the change itself, allowing an organization to handle all associated revenue, related to the change – commercials, sponsorships, secondary, tertiary or other potential revenue generating events – automatically! IBMS allows the broadcast operation to define, on a spot-by-spot or overall basis whether to do pre-emptions, moves, rolls or find alternative inventory – all within a managed workflow process.
IBMS solves the sticky program change problems and all associated manual intervention required and analyzes the potential impact on revenue and ratings, based on program changes made to the schedule.
Centralized Customer Management - Centralized systems
A ‘one advertiser/agency account’ philosophy, enabling broadcasters to easily perform corporate reporting and analysis for each client advertiser and/or agency across the globe.
IBMS’ centralized model provides broadcasters with many options when they decide how their business should come together. With flexibility in how they configure and share data between business units, IBMS allows broadcasters to determine how to centralize their customers, sales and invoicing along with content – acquisitions, rights and scheduling.
The IBMS technical architecture and parameter-driven business rules provide the flexibility needed to define the centralization model and the way broadcasters wish to analyze and access their data.
Strategic Scheduling - Scenario building
Provides the ability to create and evaluate alternative scheduling models based on program budgets. By allowing schedulers to plan and test scenarios before having any impact on other system users, this gives them the freedom to model schedules to achieve the appropriate financial balance.
The IBMS Planning Schedule has been enhanced to include the option for Schedule Versioning and cost analysis of the schedule. Schedule Versioning provides the ability to operate different versions of the Planning Schedule. The new functionality allows users to ‘check out’ sections of the schedule from the system, make changes and only then apply the changes back to the main Planning Schedule. This allows schedulers to plan and test scenarios without impacting on other IBMS users. They have the freedom to model schedules to evolve the appropriate financial balance, as users enter budget codes and costs against planning slots and program.
Inventory Management - Proactive business performance
Monitors the sales activities, pricing and business performance more proactively, to optimize the use of commercial inventory and maximize revenues.
Access to real-time inventory information enables broadcasters to create ‘avail types’ beyond the traditional commercial inventory needs, IBMS supports sponsorships, billboards, bugs, crawls, product placement – you name it – any primary, secondary, tertiary or other events that broadcasters want to track inventory on, put a rate against, invoice and analyze.
As a fully integrated solution, IBMS supports the ability for a single proposal or orders to cross multiple channels and multiple avail types – allowing users to sell what they want, when they want, and how they want.
The inventory management tools make it easier to analyze inventory at any time – with up-to-date information across the organization.
Revenue Management - Cost effective rates
Provides access to the right information, to determine better and more effective rates. Using integrated rate escalation capabilities and real-time avails enables broadcasters to decide the strategy for analyzing inventory sell out, availability and pressure on inventory. Allowing broadcasters to recommend rate increases as inventory is sold, or even proposed, based on the organizations’ business rules.
In addition, stagnant inventory can also become part of normal business workflow with IBMS active workflow capabilities – allowing a reduction in rates, when necessary, to move unsold inventory.
