The Marketron CEO, fresh from signing new deals with Jelli, Imagine Communications, Efficio Solutions–and launching Mediascape Streaming, spoke with RBR-TVBR from NAB 2014 to discuss business and what’s next from the company—including the deal with DoubleClick and looking forward to what’s next with media transactions and programmatic buying.
“It’s been a very busy first quarter for us and we’re excited to share a lot of those things with our customers here—and they’re excited to hear more about what we’re doing.”
Haley noted that there are two ways to go about building software solutions for running a broadcast business: “You could do an all-in-one, completely proprietary solution, either building it yourself and have it highly customized and have it perfect for yourself the day it is done. You’ve spend all of that capital and then the pace and change of technology will make that perfect system that you’ve completed, say 4/1/14, completely obsolete by 4/1/15. And further, because you’ve done it all that way, you’ve had to train everybody who touches those systems, you’ve now locked yourself into an outdated, outmoded piece of technology that you’ve spent millions of dollars on and won’t be easy to extract yourself out of.
The second approach is to find a vendor who builds a closed in, purely proprietary system. And that’s not bad, because at least that capital is a shared infrastructure and at least, since you’re not in the technology business and you’re relying on a vendor to build it. But where we really think the problem that still exists there is that it’s a closed system. You can only use “Flavor X” for every single function that you can imagine, and not everybody is great at everything, and that means some real compromises.
We think the third way, the path we’ve started down in 2010, is to build an open platform, where the software exists as a service. It’s all web-based, as opposed to implementing at the client. It still has the benefits of a shared infrastructure and the benefits of not having major capital expenditures. But it has the added benefit of at its maturity, being a platform where you as a customer can add any single integration you want. You will be able to integrate with any third party system, including CRM. You tell us what you want to be able to use, what you want to build and we’ll plug it in. On the sales side, we don’t think that’s a piece of the business we want to be in, but we do think it needs to be implemented into traffic, into accounts, into financial reporting. Al of those things have to be one system—from the sales rep to the CFO and everything that happens in between. Many broadcasters call this process “from quote to cash.” That whole ecosystem exists right now with multiple different functions and boxes. We think it can exist upon a common platform which we call ‘Mediascape,’ and do so in a way that makes it highly customizable, very easy to implement and use and very easy to service, because it’s web-based.
And that’s what all of these announcements really mean: Our platform Mediascape has gotten to a point of maturity where we’re able to integrate with third parties—whether it’s CRM with Efficio, streaming with the full integration we’ve done with that product launch, cross-media into television with Imagine Communications (formerly Harris), or the programmatic approach that we have with Jelli. These all represent opportunities for broadcasters to streamline their business.”
What’s next? What sea change would you like to see happen next that you’d like to spearhead or be a part of?
“I think there are a couple of things. On a tactical basis, as you can imagine, having launched with a 65% share of radio stations as our clients in the US and having launched four pretty robust partner integrations, there’s a line outside our conference room here of other vendors who would like that same integration. So we’ve actually got two sets of meetings going simultaneously—client meetings in one conference room and a vendor relationship meeting in another one. I literally go up and down the elevator all day between these meetings. So tactically, what are the next pieces that customers want us to build out on this platform? Whether they be multiple versions of cross-media or whatever. We’ll have an integration soon with DoubleClick so banner display ads on station websites as well as streaming display ads will be in-line on a common invoice with the over-the-air advertising, the mobile advertising and all of the other pieces.
I think down the line what I’d like to see happen in a much more strategic basis is for the industry to start to think about some of the developments that are happening in the media transaction space. And understand how by adopting some of these things we can both drive new business but also drive pricing power and make it easier to buy radio. I think we’ve made great strides in the industry in talking about radio as a national platform and a national medium that has great reach. But we still have a lot of unsold inventory out there and we have a lot of people on the buying side looking to buy media in a much more seamless, faster transaction.
That’s where I think our development with Jelli on the programmatic space will be an interesting way to transact and drive business. There are actually marketers out there that are building out budget lines for programmatic—almost as a distinct line item that’s agnostic with regards to what the media is. They just want to get into the programmatic space because it’s shining a new, seamless, quick and easy transaction. So they’re buying programmatic the way they would buy direct response. It doesn’t matter what media it is. So it’s telling us as an industry that there is effectively money on the table for radio. If we build it, they will come. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I think it is where the world is going and we, as a company, want to stay ahead of that for our clients. Radio, as a medium, doesn’t always embrace change, but this is a great opportunity to embrace that change and to be a leader in that area of change, as opposed to just reacting to it.”
Any other deals or integrations coming soon?
“I think we’re probably pretty quiet through the rest of April, but I think you’ll see some things in May on both the customer front and in the development front.”
