TV ad sales software: what it does and how to choose it
TV advertising software — more precisely, TV ad sales software — is the system a broadcaster, a sales house or an agency uses to sell or buy television airtime without spreadsheets: the avails and rate cards, the media plan with its GRP and CPP, the booking against live availability, the traffic and scheduling of spots, the affidavit produced from actual airings, and the billing and post-buy that close the deal. OpenMediaLogic is TV ad sales software of this kind, with radio and DOOH in the same system, deployable in any market and live today in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.
Three kinds of TV advertising software
- Broadcast sales and traffic systems run inside the channel: the schedule, break structure, spot placement, logs and billing. WideOrbit, Operative and Imagine's Landmark are the established names, largely in North America and Western Europe.
- Agency planning and buying systems run inside the buyer: plans, budgets, orders and invoices across every medium the agency buys. Mediaocean is the largest; Bionic serves smaller agencies.
- Marketplaces connect the two, so a plan and a booking are one record on both sides. This is where OpenMediaLogic sits: the seller's inventory and the buyer's plan live in the same environment, and the certificate, post-buy and closing documents are produced from it.
What «traffic and billing» means
The phrase is the industry's own name for the sell side of this software. Traffic is everything between a signed order and a spot going to air — placing the booked spots, applying separation and clearance rules, getting the right creative version to the right transmission, and re-solving all of it whenever the schedule moves. Billing is the other end: turning what actually aired into an invoice the buyer will pay, by way of the affidavit and reconciliation. Traffic and billing has a page of its own, including what changes between television, radio and DOOH.
What to expect from the software
- Inventory and rate cards — every break, every position, every surcharge and discount rule in the system, not in a price list that is re-sent by email
- Planning — GRP, wGRP, CPP and reach calculated from the audience data the market trades on, with the plan checked against availability before it is sent
- Booking — an approved plan becomes booked spots in the channel's schedule at once; occupancy is visible to the seller before the period ends, not after
- Trafficking — creative versions, clearance status and rotation attached to the booking, so the log is built from the deal rather than typed from it
- Broadcast certificates — generated from actual airings, with deviations from the plan shown, rather than assembled by hand from logs
- Post-buy and billing — the delivered GRP against the planned, the invoice and the closing documents from the same record
- Roles and audit — each party sees its own prices, discounts and terms; the system keeps who changed what
- An API — the schedule and the deals reach playout, CRM, ERP and the audience-measurement provider without re-keying
How OpenMediaLogic does it
The platform closes the whole cycle in one interface: from the agency request and the media plan to placement in the grid, the airtime certificate and the financial reporting, with rating and revenue forecasts calculated in real time. The features page lists what is in the system; the broadcaster page and the agency page describe the two sides of it. It is sold as a subscription with onboarding in 48 hours, reference data migration included, and runs in the browser on any device.
Evidence from live markets
In Kazakhstan, where the platform launched in 2022, up to 95% of the country's TV inventory is sold through it. Beeline Kazakhstan, one of the country's largest advertisers, cut media costs by 32% in nine months after bringing 11 TV channels, radio and DOOH into a single workflow — case study. The National TV and Radio Company of Uzbekistan used the platform to open transparent, programmatic sales of state television airtime — case study.
Choosing between them
If the channel already runs a mature traffic system and the agencies already run Mediaocean, the question is what connects them; a marketplace layer is the answer, and it has to speak to both through an API. If the market — or the media group — still sells on spreadsheets and email, one system that covers both sides is faster to deploy and cheaper to run than two systems plus an integration project. The alternatives page compares the vendors by that criterion. For a market outside the three the platform is live in, the UK, Australia and Philippines pages describe what deployment would involve.
See it on your own inventory: request a demo. Related: radio advertising software, media sales automation, what GRP is.