Sinclair Turns to Tech To Maximize Ad Revenue
Broadcaster is rolling out unified ad platform and yield management tools
Sinclair Broadcast Group is rolling out new technology to squeeze more dollars out of its advertising inventory across the company.
“We’re not just a television company anymore. We’re a multiplatform company,” Rob Weisbord, Sinclair’s chief operating officer and president of broadcast, told Broadcasting+Cable.
That means the company isn’t just selling local broadcast commercials. There are 80 different ad products available, digital, streaming, national and local. In a soft advertising market, making sure all that inventory is easy for account executives to package and that it’s priced to maximize revenue is more important than ever.
On Sinclair’s fourth-quarter earnings call last month, the company told Wall Street that it would be launching the first phase of its unified ad platform in March. It also said it was implementing new yield management tools.
Weisbord said the unified ad platform will combine all of Sinclair’s advertising assets and allow its sellers to offer clients cross-platform ad campaigns.
Broadcasters have invested a lot of money in digital assets to be cross-platform, but cross-platform selling has proved difficult, he said.
The unified ad platform “will allow us to surface holistically all the options and what our recommendations are to increase reach and frequency,” Wesibord said. “What this does is it makes your ad sales guys more valuable because they have access to all this extra inventory and better analytics.”
It also “takes out some of the friction between buyer and seller and increases the velocity of presentations,” he said. More presentations equal more sales and more revenue.
Sinclair started working on its unified ad platform with ad tech company Operative about two years ago.