Publishers, Ask More from Your Order Management System
The order management system has a branding problem. The phrase’s matter-of-factness suggests that all publishers should expect from an OMS is that it enables basic business functions. Those might include monitoring ad inventory availability, creating campaigns, reporting, invoicing, and billing reconciliation.
But the contemporary OMS has moved far beyond these standard tactics and operations. The OMS has evolved into a critical connection point for all automation. A modern OMS should unlock advanced capabilities such as dynamic rate management, financial controls, and reconciliation without expensive API integrations between third-party systems.
The upshot is that the OMS should not just help ad operations teams scale. It should fuel cost savings, maximize revenue, and spur innovation that boosts overall business success and growth.
Here’s how publishers should be using their OMS to meet those three business-critical goals — and what they should demand from the technology.
How to lean on your OMS to save costs
Two ways an OMS’s advanced features can save publisher costs are through media convergence, and the elimination of unnecessary API integrations.
When publishers shifted to digital, many adopted different technologies to manage their online advertising business in addition to those tied to print or broadcast. Now, most publishers realize this silo is unduly burdensome, but some are daunted by the logistical and financial headache involved in unifying systems. An advanced OMS should be able to centralize measurement and operations across multiple types of media, saving unnecessary costs and valuable employee time.
Another area where the OMS can save costs is third-party system integrations. Publishers’ tech stacks can include dozens of ad delivery platforms, but they shouldn’t need to integrate all of them to enable inventory forecasting and tracking. Rather than chasing integrations, publishers can use a third-party-agnostic OMS to handle data from any third-party system and achieve delivery reconciliation for forecasting and reporting.
These are just two of many features an OMS can offer to derisk, declutter, and automate ad operations, letting technology handle logistics so that publishers regain human time and capital they can reallocate to revenue-generating activities.
Maximizing revenue through superior yield management
In addition to allowing publishers get creative to save costs, the OMS can maximize revenue through capabilities such as dynamic yield management. At its core, yield is about revenue maximization. A cutting-edge OMS allows publishers to set and deviate from inventory selling rules to ensure maximum utilization without exposing the publisher to value erosion through the spot market.
For example, an OMS can provide advanced controls that allow publishers to set granular rules around how a media buyer can deviate from rate cards. This ensures approvals happen automatically on the back end when necessary, but the publisher still commands fine data points to assess how their inventory is priced versus how it is sold, guarding against the risk of inventory devaluation.
Is the publisher discounting too much? Do they allow for exceptions at the correct frequency and in the right scenarios to avoid waste? An OMS can answer these questions, driving not just day-to-day operations, but business-critical decision-making as well.
The OMS should also allow publishers to set custom rules to ensure buyers don’t book more than a certain percentage of available inventory. This frees up the time of campaign managers, who no longer need to worry that buyers will purchase unavailable media and can therefore dedicate their time to strategies that support customer retention and acquisition.
Finally, an OMS should act as a control center for all forms of direct deals, unlocking not just yield management but the power to source and manage the best deals possible, whether through manual or programmatic transactions. To enable this, OMSs should be able to connect directly to the buy side to unlock interconnected workflows and automated deal execution with any buying system, including DSPs. This way, the OMS is an engine of not just greater efficiency but higher-value deals.
How a modern OMS can free your team to focus on innovation
If ad operations teams can trust their OMS to cut costs, maximize revenue, and help daily operations run smoothly, they can focus their talent on collaborating with the sales and product teams to improve strategy and devise products that will open up fresh revenue opportunities while making their jobs and those of their customers easier.
Ad ops teams face two common communication problems with sales and product teams: Sales often makes promises that do not comply with operational constraints; the product team pursues visions that do not align with daily priorities.
By working more directly with the sales team, ops can build more strategic campaigns for key clients and get closer to prospective customer desires, allowing them to reconfigure operations to drive conversions. On the product front, they can collaborate with product managers to focus attention on issues that most directly need solving and ensure the product roadmap is focused on not only the next big idea but also practical improvements that immediately enhance the customer experience.
In both cases, this opportunity for human collaboration means that an advanced OMS eliminates needless costs and frustrations, while freeing up publisher talent to do what only humans can do: devise new products, technologies, and capabilities to delight customers, boost retention, and drive fresh revenue.
That’s the standard for today’s OMS. Publishers, are you asking enough of yours?