Radio advertising software: selling airtime with a small team
Radio advertising software sells a station's airtime the way a broadcaster's system sells television: the schedule and the breaks as inventory, the rate card with its rules, bookings against live availability, the spot log, the certificate of airing, the reconciliation and the invoice. The difference is scale. A radio station — or a group of them — sells the same kind of inventory with a fraction of the staff, so the software has to let one or two people run all of it. OpenMediaLogic is radio advertising software built that way, in the same system as TV and DOOH, deployable in any market and live today in three.
What radio needs from it
- Schedule as inventory — every hour, break and position on every station in the group, with availability visible to the seller and to the buyer
- Rate cards and rules — dayparts, seasonal coefficients, package prices, sponsorship and live-read formats, agency terms, all applied by the system rather than by whoever prepares the quote
- Booking and confirmation — a request becomes a booking in the schedule; a change is a change in one place
- Contracts and closing documents — generated from the booking; the certificate of airing from the actual log
- Reconciliation — planned against aired, with deviations flagged, before the invoice goes out rather than after the client disputes it
- Group-level view — a network selling several stations, or a sales house selling a pool of them, sees occupancy and revenue across all of them in one window
- Measurement — audience data from the market's radio currency attached to planning, so a buyer plans on reach and frequency instead of on the price list alone
Why radio inventory is not television inventory
Software written for television and pointed at a radio station fits badly, and it fits badly in three specific places.
Radio sells rotations, not positions. A television spot is booked into a named break in a named programme. A radio spot is usually booked into a window — a morning-drive rotator, say — and the system places it somewhere inside that window across the flight. What the buyer has bought is a distribution across a daypart, not a row in a schedule, and the software has to be able to hold that as a booking, honour separation rules between competing advertisers, and still produce a spot log precise enough to bill from.
Much of the inventory is not a spot. Live reads, presenter endorsements, and sponsorships attached to content — the traffic bulletin, the weather, the news at the top of the hour — are sold as radio inventory and priced as radio inventory, and none of them is thirty seconds of airtime in a break. A system that can only model spots either cannot sell them or sells them as a note in a comment field, which is where the revenue leaks.
The volume is the problem, not the complexity. A station running fifteen to twenty breaks an hour has several hundred sellable positions a day; a group of eight stations has thousands. Nothing about any single one is hard. Keeping all of them true in a spreadsheet, through a week of changes, is what takes the team that a small station does not have.
There is a fourth difference that changes how a campaign is managed rather than sold: in most markets radio trades on a panel or diary currency that publishes in waves rather than overnight. A television campaign can read its pacing against ratings while it runs. A radio campaign usually cannot, so delivery is tracked against the schedule — spots aired against spots booked — and any makegood is settled on the log rather than on audience.
How OpenMediaLogic does it
Radio sells the same airtime with a smaller team. In the platform the schedule, contracts and reconciliation are one system, so one or two people can run all of it — the radio page describes the workflow. Because TV, radio and DOOH share the system, an agency planning a campaign across all three sees the radio inventory beside the television inventory, and a media group that owns both sells both from one place. In Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan the platform is used by national and private radio stations alongside the TV channels; Beeline Kazakhstan's campaign workflow brought radio and DOOH into the same plan as its 11 TV channels — case study.
The vendor landscape
Radio traffic and billing has its own established vendors — Marketron and WideOrbit in North America above all — and the large radio groups run them. Those are station-side systems; the buyer still assembles the plan elsewhere. OpenMediaLogic is the marketplace between the two sides, which matters most in a market where the agencies and the stations do not yet share a system at all. The alternatives page sets out the difference vendor by vendor.
Deployment outside the current markets
The platform runs in any market: billing in local currency, data stored in the country, interface in 16 languages, and the audience currency the market trades on connected through the API. The UK, Australia and Philippines pages describe what that would involve for a station group or a sales house there. Onboarding takes 48 hours, reference data migration included.
Request a demo on your own schedule. Related: TV advertising software, media sales automation, what a broadcast certificate is.