The Seven Question Itch
by Richard Letaw
In the classic film The Seven Year Itch, Tom Ewell plays a publishing executive vexed by fantasies involving women other than his wife. These reveries culminate in an iconic scene in which Marilyn Monroe—who spends the duration of the film innocently in search of working A/C—has her skirt blown up while standing over a subway grate. The title of the film comes, of course, from the pop psych concept that happiness in a marriage devolves after the first seven years.
In evaluating the marriage you have to your processes and tech stack, it’s important to take an honest look and ask what’s working, and what isn’t. We put some questions together to help you reach an answer: seven if you don’t currently have an OMS, and seven if you do.
"I do not currently have an OMS"
Some common pain points:
Are your teams entering the same data across multiple systems and spreadsheets in order to plan campaigns, schedule orders, and collect data for billing?
Do you have issues with undersell/oversell of your display media offerings?
Are your sales reps creating ad products which are hard or impossible for traffickers to deliver?
Are scheduling conflicts with your sponsorship products a constant headache?
Do deviations from rate cards by sellers compromise margins?
Do you lack consolidated reporting across all of your advertising business?
Are you having trouble closing out your books at the end of the month due to disparate fulfillment sources (1P/3P delivery)?
"I currently have an OMS"
Some competitive differentiators against other platforms in our class:
Is a lack of a two-way order sync between your Salesforce and OMS environments compromising data integrity?
Does your current OMS lack the integration points that you require with your ad server?
Are you unable to receive real-time inventory availability information against key value settings on DFP line items?
Are your users unsatisfied with a clunky and difficult-to-use UI?
Is your current OMS not able to support the scale of your business in terms of complexity, volume, deal flow, user counts, or otherwise?
Will the product vision and roadmap for your OMS solve real-world problems for you and your industry peers?
Do you consider your OMS a true Revenue Management platform where you can manage the end-to-end process for both direct and indirect sales?
The ever-shifting landscape of digital media requires the ability to scale and evolve. If the solutions you have in place to manage your revenue streams don’t allow you to do these two things, you may find yourself up the creek without a paddle, just like Ricky Sherman.
Give us a call if you’ve got “The Seven Question Itch”!
Contact Richard Letaw by calling (747)249-1273 or by emailing rletaw@fattail.com.