Solutions for Media (S4M) has won a new contract from RTL Nederland to manage its advertising campaigns with S4M’s airtime sales system, S4AdSales.
With its four TV broadcasting stations RTL 4, RTL 5, RTL 7 and RTL 8, fast-growing digital activities and the Dutch leading radio station, Radio 538, RTL Nederland is a significant player on the Dutch media market. Operating seven days a week and 24 hours a day RTL Nederland provides Dutch consumers with a variety of national and international content. Advertising has to be managed for several stations and forms of advertising. Thus, the broadcaster was searching for a cutting-edge media sales system that provides for complex automated booking and optimisation procedures.
Paul Siero, chief commercial officer at RTL Nederland, explained: “We opted for S4AdSales because it allows us to manage and place commercial airtime with great flexibility and transparency. This enables us to further improve client services and of course, help us in further enhancing the efficiency of our stations.”
The so-called “spot optimiser” constitutes the core of the application. It enables automated planning: RTL Nederland usually doesn’t sell certain programmes to its advertisers, but gross rating points (GRP). The corresponding GRP packages are individually defined. According to the desired number of contacts within the chosen target audience, the spot optimiser automatically determines how many spots have to be placed, at what time and in which programmes. S4AdSales then proposes a possible scenario and also provides a respective simulation run. After this, users can amend and test the scenario several times. Of course, the underlying legal guidelines and customer’s specific rules can be defined individually.
The big advantage of this procedure is that the simulations allow to exert influence on bookings and consequently on revenue, whereas “over delivery” of manual GRP bookings can be reduced while keeping or improving customer placement preferences.
