The expansion of the media landscape is a gift and a curse for ad sellers. The more that channels and ad formats multiply, the more that supporting point solutions proliferate.

Total up all the solutions you use to manage your ad inventory and the number might make you dizzy. CRMs, proposal management platforms, retail solutions, ad servers, DSPs, social media interfaces, financial tools — ad sellers wrangle any or all of these every day.

Whether you’re a traditional publisher trying to gain a data overview through spreadsheets, or a retailer building your inventory management infrastructure from scratch to capitalize on the retail media boom — trying to manage all of these point solutions is time-consuming, error-prone, and woefully inefficient for media optimizations.

But there is a better way.

Ad inventory management software — and so much more

The ideal solution is a complete operating system that unifies and automates your ad-selling operation — from campaign planning, execution, and optimization, through to reporting, billing, and invoicing. It makes ad inventory management easy.

Publishers and retailers can aggregate all their workflows, processes, and data. And ad ops teams can push out sales plans to ad servers and execute on ads without having to manually re-enter information. 

Meanwhile performance data is pulled in real time from downstream systems, so you know how campaigns are running and whether performance is matching expectations. Accurate invoicing becomes more straightforward too.

Centralizing point solutions and collating insights improves decision-making and productivity, helping you build a more profitable, efficient, and successful ad-selling operation.

An ad-selling OS (with ad inventory management software built in) 

An operating system for ad sales can support the whole sales lifecycle — from proposal through to invoicing. Let’s break down the must-have capabilities.

Integrations

• Tight integration with your CRM: Data should flow to and from your CRM to enable more accurate targeting, so look for an OS that’s native to your platform and that supports all your customizations.
• Advanced integrations with your other systems: Bi-directional APIs support the planning, pricing, activation, and billing of omnichannel campaigns. If the level of integration is less extensive, your solution might facilitate your CRM or media planning, but not let you activate your media plan in your other systems and pull performance data from them.

Ad sales and finance

• Visibility into inventory forecasting: Aggregated software can help you confidently plan against available inventory by pulling forecasting directly from your downstream trafficking systems. Features such as inventory calendars, bulk editing, and one-click trafficking can further streamline your inventory management workflow.
• Pipeline and revenue forecasting: Good decision-making hinges on accurate revenue data. Tooling that can forecast across campaigns, line items, different ad servers, and flight times provides sales teams and financial leaders with the intelligence to run the business successfully.
• Seamless billing: Automated billing is essential for the era of omnichannel media. An ad-selling OS with  ad inventory management features can help you create line-item templates for each product, as well as define pricing, frequency, and billing criteria. Support for product packages and bundling makes finance even easier.
• Consolidated data retrieval: With data synchronized from all integrated platforms, an ad-selling OS can eliminate manual retrieval for fast, accurate revenue recognition.

Ad ops

• Real-time performance monitoring:  Proactive campaign monitoring lets you catch issues before they impact results, or adjust spend and upsell if positive trends emerge.
• Ad sales portal: An ad sales portal can allow brands and agencies to create, schedule, and pay across all your supported ad products and channels. This grows your ad sales by exposing self-service inventory to buyers that can’t be reached through a direct sales channel. And, crucially, all revenue is connected within a single interface.
• Visibility and accountability: Aggregating your point solutions shouldn’t compromise control, accountability, or accessibility. So your ad-sellling OS needs to provide robust roles and permissions, combined with governance configurations and change-history logs.
• Compliance and security: Software that’s SOC1- and SOC2-certified gives you total confidence in financial data control, security, and privacy.

AI development

Artificial intelligence is another vital consideration when it comes to ad inventory management, as it continues to unlock ways of improving advertising effectiveness, efficiency, and profitability. Eliminating repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks is just the start. An AI-powered ad-selling OS can go several steps further by empowering teams with an intelligence layer that drives inventory planning and optimization. Here are the AI capabilities to look for.

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• Ad-hoc reporting: One of the simplest benefits of AI in ad inventory management is providing instant answers to your common reporting needs — and CFOs’ and stakeholders’ queries — such as comparing quarterly revenue.
• Campaign planning: An AI copilot can help you draft a campaign using your information on budget and targeting, then draw on historical campaigns from the brand’s account (or adjacent accounts). It can reconfigure these recommendations according to additional requests like changing the channel mix. AI in ad inventory management can therefore be hugely time-saving as you only need to edit plans rather than create them from scratch.
• Campaign optimization: AI can not only track and project campaign performance, but also suggest ways of quickly addressing any issues — whether that’s adding another line item or shifting budget to a better-performing ad set.
• Automated implementations: As well as identifying issues and recommending actions, AI-enabled inventory management can even implement any approved optimizations for you.
• Invoice reconciliation: Instead of manually reconciling ad vendors’ invoices to calculate actual spend from performance, AI can rapidly ingest and read the documents, pull the data, then match it against what was delivered. With discrepancies in the delivery data flagged, you can then make more effective decisions such as adjusting next month’s spend, or capitalizing on overperformance by advising the brand to increase budget.
• Revenue forecasting: Some ad inventory management software might only offer basic pipeline forecasting, such as straight-line forecasting, rather than factoring in what's actually been booked for a more accurate prediction. Machine learning can leverage all your data around pipeline booked revenue, delivered revenue, and what’s actually been billed, then use an algorithm to forecast revenue. This allows you to adjust pricing or  increase hiring to take advantage of tailwinds.

Combining these capabilities in an ad-selling OS simplifies the complexity of omnichannel media operations — empowering your business to thrive.

A better way to orchestrate inventory management 

Some of the world’s biggest media players rely on AdSalesOS by Placements.io — the leading  operating system for ad sales. It can connect and orchestrate all the omnichannel dots, unifying ad-selling operations.

A single, slick, powerful interface brings together all the granular point solutions you use, without overhauling them. Thanks to the bespoke developments and integrations enabled by  open APIs — unique to Placements.io — AdSalesOS links your entire quote-to-cash chain so you can grow at scale.

With this consolidation, you can then apply end-to-end intelligence to campaign planning, monitoring, and optimization — taking your ad-selling efficiency to the next level, while making better strategic decisions with holistic insights.

Selling ads shouldn’t feel like rocket science. To find out more, drop us a line.

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