ACBJ and FatTail: Partnering to Deliver Value and Client Success

AdTech and media consultant Rob Beeler, CEO of Beeler.tech recently sat down with FatTail CEO Doug Huntington and American City Business Journal’s (ACBJ) Senior Vice President Ryan Whittington to learn more about the partnership that led to the development of AdBookPORTAL, FatTail’s newest technology offering. They also discussed how AdBookPORTAL is helping ACBJ strengthen their customer relationships and how the solution will address some of publishers’ persistent challenges as well as meet new demands of today’s business buyers. 

Here are four key takeaways from their conversation: 

1. Digital engagement will be an important differentiator going forward

“Always-on” solutions that create more efficient workflow across the supply chain will set companies apart in a variety of industries, including publishing. McKinsey’s recent report affirms ‘digital is the wave of the future’ for B2B sales and service and that both buyers and sellers want fewer face-to-face interactions, particularly now that remote work is here to stay. The report goes on to suggest that industries will have to address this shift in buyer preference to stay relevant to their customers. Technology solutions that enable digital engagement will have a competitive advantage over those that do not.

2. Self-management and self-service solutions will free up teams to do higher value work

An ongoing and persistent pain point publishers face is the inefficiency of post-sale campaign execution. Publishers need a solution to automate the core components of this process: payment, transparency of campaign information, creatives, and reporting. Their primary objectives are to improve operating margins, free up internal resources to focus on higher value and more personally fulfilling activities, and provide differentiated service to customers.

These objectives are in line with FatTail’s long term vision of extending the value of our Order Management Solution to streamline intercompany workflow and promote direct relationships between publishers and advertisers.

AdBookPORTAL supports the two primary use cases that publishers have as it relates to customer success: self-management for internal teams and self-service for advertising clients. 

3. Higher value work yields greater client and employee retention. 

Today’s business buyers want “service at the click of a button.” This means features like easy-to-use interfaces, instantaneous access to information, built-in workflow reminders, self-service product and price discovery, simple payment processing, guaranteed fulfillment, and automated re-ordering. By implementing many of these capabilities, publishers and their customers can realize the benefits of more efficient workflow, greater campaign transparency, and streamlined communication.

Hiring and retaining well-qualified employees is becoming increasingly challenging. By automating manually intensive, highly redundant tasks, sales and support teams are able to focus more of their energy on developing and implementing higher value ideas and strategies, which not only benefit clients and the business as a whole, but are also much more personally satisfying. 

4. The ultimate winner in digital engagement and automation is professional journalism 

By streamlining processes and creating more efficient workflows, a digital solution like AdBookPORTAL ends up boosting productivity, driving down transaction costs, saving time and resources, improving accuracy, and increasing control, all of which allows more of each advertising dollar to be invested in what is truly matters: helping professional journalism thrive. 

Listen to the full conversation and learn more details about the development and launch of AdBookPORTAL.