A note from Laurie:
I do not know why our CEO shot this as a reaction video. Leaving that aside, it does a good job of setting the stage for how we got to where we are today, and in less than 3 minutes. And it definitely captures our excitement about this new capability.
Are you going to be at The Podcast Show in London? Give us a shout. And stop by the Brand stage at 2pm on Wednesday where Sean will be unveiling Revenue Optimizer.
What is Revenue Optimizer?
A complete, multi-platform Flight Management Solution that achieved an 8% lift in delivery and revenue in our development trials.
Operations teams control how much of their portfolio to give to Flightpath to manage. Every day, the system looks holistically at the entire portfolio under management, taking into account all trickle down effects, reviewing and correcting for actual performance, and running predication scenarios to identify the best solution to improve delivery and revenue. And then trafficking those solutions into your DAI platform(s).
Revenue Optimizer is for publishers with a high sell-through-rate on significant parts of their portfolio. Where trying to fix flights becomes an endless game of improving one flight only to negatively impact many others.
We are excited to talk more about our algorithms and how we are doing more than just selecting for highest CPM. But that will have to wait until after the unveiling in London.
How We Got Here
Four years ago, we launched the fastest and most reliable inventory availability system for publishers and networks in the podcasting space. Geo targeting, frequency caps, tag targeting, simulcast, baked in, and more. We continue to add features as DAI platforms evolve.
Knowing what you can actually sell up to a year in the future, with all the buyer’s criteria, is critical for sales teams. Getting availability back to buyers in minutes helps close more deals. Having our promises of availability be trustable drives increased re-buying.
Campaign Performance Prediction
Over 15 years in ad operations has taught us that nothing goes as planned. A buyer makes a mistake. The sales team fudges a number to hit their quota. The flight gets mis-trafficked due to a communication breakdown. The CEO makes a promise and Operations is scrambling. Regardless of the reasons, campaigns get into trouble and underdeliver.
So we built a comprehensive view of how campaigns are going to perform, up to a year in the future. Clients see the campaigns in trouble well before they’ve even started, allowing Operations to stop pacing-on-actuals and start fixing problems before they occur.
Flight-level Predictions
Predictions at the campaign level are great until you have to actually do something about them. The obvious next question: “Which flights are the problem? And why?”
So we built the first cross-platform flight traffic view for podcasting. Performance prediction at the flight level. Alerts, audit trail, competition breakdown, hot linking directly to the edit page for an order, and more.
This led to a deeper question: “This show does 15k a day in release, so why are we only delivering 5k a day on this flight?”
So we built the Flight Analysis view. It shows every loss point on a flight: what Geo targeting will take away; slippage – the downloads you can’t deliver an impression on; what you are losing to Frequency Cap, competition, etc. It’s likely the most useful breakdown for a flight when we want to understand where we are losing impressions.
But what it doesn’t answer is, “What change should I make to this flight to fix it?”
What is the best fix?
Every fix in this business has consequences. First, we’re limited in what options we can change without breaking our Insertion Order. We often can’t alter the targeting or frequency cap restrictions. And more and more, we can’t even adjust pacing. And changing priority quickly becomes an exercise is punting the problem down the line. Moving a flight up in priority causes a new set of alerts and underperformance concerns across multiple flights.
And the issue just compounds as the fires grow.
The first thing we built to help address this is Flight Simulator. It allows you to see the impacts into the future of any change to a flight. What will this change do for the flight in question and at what cost in your running and future booked flights.
This gives scenario tools to the operations teams. And it’s a powerful tool. But it still falls short of answering the question, “What is the best fix?” This is because the best fix is not related to a single order. The best fix requires a holistic analysis of future scenarios that involve ALL the orders under management.
Revenue Optimizer
We realized there was a larger question that needed an answer.
How do I optimize all my flights across all my orders, and identify revenue opportunities?
Every change ripples. Fixing one flight can knock three others off course. And spreadsheets become an exercise in overwhelm and stale data. It’s too much for one human to hold in their head.
This is the problem Revenue Optimizer solves.
Revenue Optimizer runs multiple scenarios into the future every day. It works out which changes, across which flights, will deliver the best performance and revenue, while accounting for every trickle down effect on every other order.
It is built to make two groups of people happy at the same time: the finance side, who care about revenue, and the sales team and buyers, who care about delivery and promises kept.
Join Us at The Podcast Show in London
Are you going to be in London for The Podcast Show? Let us know if you want to grab some time. And definitely swing by our presentation!
Sean will be unveiling Revenue Optimizer Wednesday, May 20th at 2pm on the Brand Stage, showing how it works and answering your questions.
