Pacing on Actuals: A Recipe for Stalled Revenue Growth
Why and how to avoid pacing on actuals in your business
I’ve had the privilege of meeting Ad Operations people from one end of our industry to the other. And I can say with conviction that podcasting has the best Ad Ops people I’ve ever met. I would go so far as to say they put all other forms of media to shame, because they have to.
I don’t want to take away from other teams. Every media channel has its pain points, but I think it’s safe to say that in podcasting, Operations has had one (or both) of their hands tied behind their backs. They have been forced to cobble together makeshift solution after makeshift solution in a vain attempt to stop make goods, manage producers, and scramble to maximize delivery and sell-through.
All due to a lack of reliable yield, operations, and forecasting tools in the podcasting industry. Leaving teams with no choice but to turn to an old and flawed friend: pacing on actuals.
Pacing on actuals is a disaster. It always has been and it always will be.
Some have even attempted to break it down into pacing by day, with the idea of identifying the Ideal Spend to Date, with little improvement.
Pacing on actuals is where someone builds an equation, usually in Excel, that takes the impressions delivered to date (actuals) and tries to determine how likely this flight is to deliver what was promised to the buyer.
With pacing on actuals, every order starts in the green. Maybe it’s underperforming slightly in our equation, but we know there is an episode release coming up later in the week. So we pray it will be be fine. And we color it green, letting our team focus on the other problem flights.
At the midway point of the flight, we have to acknowledge we might have a problem. So we flag it as “yellow” and we do what we can: perhaps we increase its priority or extend the run. But we’ve missed the episode release peak, so there is not much we can really do at this point.
In the final days of the flight, there’s nothing left but to flag the flight as “red” and bring it to the top of one of our weekly flight review spreadsheets. It’s too late to do anything, so we draw straws on who has to tell sales they have to ask the buyer (again) to extend the flight, knowing full well that if the buyer agrees, this will throw many of our other campaigns into question.
All of which leads to lacklustre campaign performance, increased make goods, and negative experiences for the buyer.
There is a better way: predicted performance.
Reliable, order-level predictions that free your team from trying to guess at future performance and instead focus on solving problems before flights even start.
Flightpath predicts every order with ummatched reliability and provides future campaign performance, financial projections, order performance alerts, and sellable inventory at the push of a button.
Give your sales and support teams the tools to drive revenue growth and fix problems before they happen.
Stop scrambling and start scaling your business.
Learn more at: flightpath.fm