Media sales automation for TV, radio and DOOH owners

Media sales automation replaces the manual chain a media owner runs to sell airtime or screens — rate card by email, approval by phone, booking in a spreadsheet, certificate assembled from logs, reconciliation over weeks — with one system in which the request, the plan, the booking, the airing, the certificate and the invoice are one record. OpenMediaLogic is media sales automation for TV channels, radio stations, DOOH operators and the sales houses that represent them, deployable in any market and live today in three, where 200+ media brands use it.

What gets automated

• Inventory — the schedule, breaks and positions (or the screen network) as inventory the system knows, with occupancy visible before the period ends rather than after
• Rate cards and rules — prices, coefficients, surcharges, discounts and agency terms applied by the system; each party sees only what is theirs
• Requests and plans — the agency's request arrives against live availability and prices; the plan is checked as it is built
• Booking — an approved plan becomes booked spots; a change is a change in one place
• Trafficking — creative versions, clearance and rotation attached to the booking
• Broadcast certificates — produced from actual airings, deviations shown, without anyone assembling them from logs
• Reconciliation and closing documents — planned against aired, invoice and closing documents generated from the same record
• Commissions and commitments — for a sales house, commission calculation and commitment tracking across the channel pool
• Analytics — occupancy, revenue and forecast by channel, agency and brand, updated in real time
• Regulatory reporting — where a regulator requires it, produced from the system's records

Where a manual sell side loses money

Automation is usually sold as saved administration, and that is the smaller half of it. The larger half is yield, and it leaks in five places that have nothing to do with how hard anyone is working.

• Inventory discounted blind. A seller who cannot see how full a period already is negotiates every deal as though the period were empty. Discount is the only lever that always works, so it is the one that gets used — and it gets used on slots that would have sold at rate.
• Inventory left unsold because nobody answered in time. An avails request that takes two days to answer loses to the seller who answered the same afternoon. In a market where every answer is assembled by hand, the deciding factor is often availability of staff rather than availability of inventory.
• Spots that aired and were never invoiced. Where the schedule, the log and the invoice are three documents, some airings fall between them. Nobody notices, because the missing revenue looks exactly like revenue that was never booked.
• Makegoods given away larger than they were owed. Without the plan, the airings and the shortfall in one record, the argument is settled on goodwill and on whoever kept better notes. That asymmetry costs the seller every time — see makegood.
• Agency terms reconciled once a year. Volume commitments and rebates calculated at year end from a spreadsheet are a bill the seller cannot forecast and often cannot check.

Which is why the order of work matters more than the choice of vendor. Automate the record before the pricing. A yield rule applied on top of an occupancy picture nobody trusts just discounts faster; once the picture is true, the rule has something to price against. It is also why occupancy alone is the wrong target: a station can reach a full schedule by cutting rates, and the number that says whether that was worth doing is occupancy against price realised, per daypart, not occupancy on its own.

How OpenMediaLogic does it

The broadcaster page and the sales house page describe the two seller roles; radio and DOOH have pages of their own. The platform is a marketplace, so the agencies work in the same record — which is what makes the automation hold: a booking that still has to be re-keyed on the other side is not automated. The National TV and Radio Company of Uzbekistan, the country's largest broadcaster, used it to open a transparent ad market with one rulebook and legible pricing: +47% occupancy and 120+ new advertisers in a year — case study. In Kazakhstan up to 95% of the country's TV inventory is sold through the platform.

Where it differs from a traffic system

Broadcast sales, traffic and billing systems — WideOrbit, Operative, Imagine's Landmark, Marketron for radio — run the station's side to a high standard and are the established choice in North America and Western Europe. They are station-side: the buyer's plan is still built elsewhere and arrives as an order. OpenMediaLogic covers the station side and holds the buyer's side too, which is why it deploys in 48 hours as a subscription rather than as an implementation project, and why in a market where the station already runs one of those systems it connects through the API rather than replacing it. The alternatives page compares them on that basis.

Deployment outside the current markets

Local currency billing, in-country data storage, the market's audience currency and clearance workflow connected through the API, interface in 16 languages. The UK, Australia and Philippines pages describe what that would involve for a broadcaster or a sales house there.

Request a demo on your own schedule. Related: TV advertising software, media buying platform, what occupancy is.