Integrated sales, rights and scheduling system boosts productivity and improves reporting
Imagine Communications, empowering the media and entertainment industry through transformative innovation, has installed its Landmark™ Sales, Rights & Scheduling system at Turner Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong. The transformation in Turner’s business operations puts all of Turner’s planning and campaign management in a single solution, helping to eliminate bottlenecks and the need to transfer data from one system to another.
The implementation of Landmark creates transparency across the whole planning, scheduling and sales process, including advertising spot placement on both linear and nonlinear platforms. The result is that Turner can interact with its audience more effectively, providing the right content at the right time and with the most appropriate advertising, thus helping to increase revenue opportunities and enhance viewer engagement.
Turner’s preferred workflow begins with schedule planning, defining program formats, commercial breaks and other information to be input at the start. By consolidating all processes in a single system, all users — whatever their role — can see the plans as they develop and can work proactively and cohesively. Landmark eliminates sequential workflows, allowing teams to work in parallel. The presentation department, for example, no longer needs to wait until seven days out before working on the schedule in detail. Now they can start as early as five weeks before a program is set to air and develop internal marketing plans alongside commercial placements.
For the commercial sales team, Landmark clearly identifies available advertising inventory, and enables it to be sold much closer to transmission time, helping to maximize revenue opportunities and ensuring that the requirements of advertisers can be best met. Turner uses a combination of the Landmark Sales AutoBook™ engine to automatically manage impression-based campaigns, as well as line-based booking to meet the changing requirements of the buying community. Appropriate advertising can also increase audience engagement, which has a positive impact on ratings. The integrated solution provides detailed management reporting and analytics, helping the business gauge the success of campaigns and directs future scheduling.
“Today’s media environment is hugely challenging,” said Sarah Foss, vice president, product management, Advertising Management Systems, Imagine Communications. “Broadcasters have to continue to engage audiences, maximize advertising revenues, and monetize new outputs across traditional linear, video on demand, streaming and other platforms.
“Landmark is an established and proven solution that is continually evolving to meet today’s challenges, allowing staff to work effectively and management to have clear insights into the business’s success. Turner in Hong Kong also benefits from our investments in support in the Asia-Pacific region, helping to ensure that the software platform will continue to meet their real challenges.”
The Landmark installation at Turner was completed at the end of April 2016.
For more information about Landmark and Imagine Communications’ other solutions, please visit www.imaginecommunications.com.
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About Imagine Communications
Imagine Communications empowers the media and entertainment industry through transformative innovation. Broadcasters, networks, video service providers and enterprises around the world rely on our optimized, future-proof, multiscreen video and revenue enablement solutions every day to support their mission-critical operations. Today, nearly half of the world’s video channels traverse our products, and our software solutions drive close to a third of global ad revenue. Through continuous innovation we are delivering the most advanced IP, cloud-enabled, software-defined network and workflow solutions in the industry. Visit www.imaginecommunications.com for more information, and follow us on Twitter @imagine_comms.
About Turner Asia Pacific
Turner Asia Pacific creates and distributes award-winning brands throughout the region, running 63 channels in 14 languages in 37 countries. These include CNN International, CNNj, CNN, HLN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Boomerang, POGO, Toonami, World Heritage Channel, Warner TV, Oh!K, TCM Turner Classic Movies, truTV, MondoTV, TABI Channel, and HBO and WB in South Asia. Turner manages the business of Pay- and Free-TV-channels, as well as Internet-based services, and oversees commercial partnerships with various third-party media ventures; it teams with Warner Bros. and HBO to leverage Time Warner’s global reach. Turner Broadcasting System Asia Pacific, Inc. (“Turner Asia Pacific”) is a Time Warner company.