TV, radio and DOOH advertising automation for Germany

OpenMediaLogic can be deployed for German broadcasters, sales houses (Vermarkter), radio groups, out-of-home operators and agencies. It is not live in Germany today: the platform runs in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, where 200+ media brands use it. This page describes what a German deployment would involve, in the German market's own terms — starting with the deadline every German media company is already working towards. German version.

E-invoicing: the deadline that makes this concrete

Since 1 January 2025 every business in Germany has had to be able to receive a structured electronic invoice under EN 16931 — in practice XRechnung or ZUGFeRD from version 2.0.1, excluding the MINIMUM and BASIC-WL profiles. Paper and PDF are still allowed with the recipient's consent until the end of 2026. The obligation to issue then arrives: from 1 January 2027 for companies whose 2026 turnover exceeded €800,000, and from 1 January 2028 for the rest. A broadcaster's advertising business feels this directly: one campaign produces an order, a placement, a broadcast certificate, a reconciliation and an invoice, and when the invoice has to leave the house as a structured document, the question of which record it is generated from stops being a back-office detail. The platform issues every closing document of a deal from the same record the booking was made in, and a German deployment connects that output to the XRechnung or ZUGFeRD workflow through the API.

How Germany trades, and what the platform connects to

• Television audience is measured for the industry by AGF Videoforschung, the broadcasters' joint body, on a panel of about 5,400 households and 11,000 people, operated by GfK Fernsehforschung; streaming is reported alongside it as convergent reach, with a wider convergent ranking added in 2026 and the larger system upgrade scheduled for 2028. Television is planned and traded on ratings within the commercial target group, on GRP and on TKP (cost per thousand contacts), with rate cards, seasonal indices and discount scales rather than on cost per point alone. The planning module takes the market's currency through the API and calculates GRP, TKP, reach and frequency on it.
• Vermarkter — the sales houses — are how German television is actually sold, and the structure moved in 2025 and 2026: MFE-MediaForEurope took a controlling stake in ProSiebenSat.1, whose airtime is sold by Seven.One Media, and RTL Deutschland closed its acquisition of Sky Deutschland in June 2026, with Ad Alliance selling for the enlarged group. The concentration commission has noted that those two houses together account for roughly three quarters of gross television advertising revenue; ARD MEDIA and ZDF Werbefernsehen sell for the public broadcasters, and smaller houses for thematic and regional channels. The sales-house role in the platform — every channel of the pool in one window, agency agreements and annual volumes tracked across the year, one rate card and one discount structure — is that same shape. The large houses run mature systems, and a deployment there is a marketplace layer connected to them through the API.
• Radio reach is published by agma in the ma Audio, released twice a year and still measured by telephone interview on a sample of tens of thousands per wave; it is the currency the whole radio trade prices on. Airtime is sold both nationally, through the sales houses that bundle stations into bookable combinations — RMS alone represents over 250 private stations — and locally by the stations themselves. That long tail is where a shared system pays for itself: the radio module runs the schedule, the rate card, the booking, the broadcast certificates and the reconciliation for a station of any size, and a combination is modelled as a pool of stations sold together.
• Out-of-home — Ströer, JCDecaux and the regional operators sell classic and digital faces directly; the medium's currency is ma Out of Home, published by agma, whose unit is the Plakatseher pro Stelle, the contact value of a single face in a target group. The platform runs the direct business — packages, bookings, proof of play, certificates — beside the TV and radio book, and leaves the programmatic DOOH channel to the SSPs.
• Regulation — the Medienstaatsvertrag sets the advertising rules: under § 70 spot advertising may not exceed 20% of airtime in each of three windows of the day rather than in each clock hour. The fourteen Landesmedienanstalten, acting jointly through the ZAK, license private broadcasters and supervise compliance, including the separation of advertising from programming; the Deutscher Werberat runs content self-regulation, up to a public reprimand. Time limits are enforced in the scheduling module when a spot is placed, and a spot without clearance cannot be scheduled.

Commercial and legal terms of a German deployment

• Billing in EUR with German VAT, through a German contracting entity
• E-invoicing as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD, generated from the booking record and handed over through the API, on the timetable above
• Hosting and data residency in Germany, under the GDPR and the BDSG, supervised by the competent state data protection authority; role-based access, encryption in transit and at rest, audit log — see security and GDPR and data processing
• Interface in German — one of the platform's 16 languages, already in use on this site — with English available to every user
• Integration through the REST API: audience data, playout and automation, agency planning and finance systems, accounting and e-invoicing
• Onboarding in 48 hours for the platform itself, reference data migration included

Where the platform fits in Germany

Germany is one of the few markets with a domestic software industry of its own for this work: MERIDIAN, uki.dispo, Delfin.Media, cataneo and arvato Systems have been running Werbezeitendisposition for German broadcasters and Vermarkter for decades. Those are station-side systems — one house's own disposition, traffic and billing. OpenMediaLogic is the layer above them: the seller's live availability and prices, the agency booking against them online, the confirmation, the broadcast certificate and the invoice out of one record, with an existing disposition system connected through the REST API. The alternatives page describes the same relationship with Mediaocean, WideOrbit and Operative, and traffic and billing describes the station-side category itself. The stronger fit is the part of the market that never bought one of those systems: regional and thematic television, the long tail of private local radio, out-of-home operators' direct business, and the independent agencies — the part that still books by e-mail and Excel and has to turn every booking into a structured invoice from 2027. In the platform's three live markets that is where the results came from: up to 95% of a country's TV inventory on one platform; −32% media costs for a national advertiser (Beeline); +47% occupancy for a national broadcaster (NTRC Uzbekistan).

Next step

A demo on your own inventory or plan takes 30 minutes, in German or English: request one. Category pages: TV advertising software, radio, DOOH, media sales, traffic and billing; the company profile. Neighbouring markets: France, Poland, Romania, Estonia, Turkey.