The Traffic Directors‘ Guild of America (TDGA) has asked radio and television traffic personnel nationwide to submit questions and issues for providers in the space to respond on behalf of RBR-TVBR. This series includes a question from TDGA CEO Larry Keene, along with a couple sent anonymously from his annual survey. RBR-TVBR looked at demands of traffic personnel vs. management; the systems‘ political capabilities and contextual advertising placement.
What demands are you getting from prospects at the station management levels? How do they line up with questions your support teams are getting from the traffic pros at the stations?
RCS/Aquira: Station Management are looking for increased efficiency and better ways to optimize inventory and manage clients. They want to know what sales tools are available, and what enterprise reporting capabilities the software can provide. We are getting many requests for the ability to interface with other business systems.
Aquira Online is our web-based proposal booking system which offers dashboard reporting (i.e. KPI) as well as the ability to integrate with Microsoft Office Outlook to capture call information used in reporting and to share the company contacts with reps. Other features include an online proposal approval process, instant credit/avails/rate warnings, and up to the minute avails, commission and revenue reporting.
Aquira offers workflow management of a) clients from lead, through prospect and approved client status, and b) orders from a proposal state through an approval process on rates, avails, credit warnings etc. before it becomes an approved contract, and c) the workflow from scheduled spots to creating copy (scripts) and instructing the associated media (audio). Real time enterprise reporting capabilities with an inbuilt report builder allows users to design their own reports with user-definable attributes. There are many data export options including an E-Billing export, and the ability to export financial data to a third party finance system.
Station Management requests very closely align with the questions being asked when Traffic phone for support. In many instances when Traffic phone to ask for assistance in gathering new information or creating a new report they are acting on a request from Station Management. In addition to these type of requests, the Traffic staff are also looking for support on using Aquira’s flexible rate cards to their full potential, utilizing the up-to-date avails pivot grid and traditional reporting, accomplishing quick and accurate contract entry using our default codes and attributes, and copy and repeat functions, and also looking for ideas on how on Aquira can help to improve their log management.
What about your systems‘ political capabilities? I.e. finding the lowest unit charge for each of the stations‘ classes of time and types of buys?
RCS/Aquira: The Aquira reporting system provides a powerful in-built report builder that will allow you to design your own traditional or grid reports so that you can obtain the data that is important for your political reporting requirements. Various reporting categories provide wide-ranging lists of columns, groups, and filters so that you can sort this data in just the right way. Sophisticated Rate Cards configured with a minimum and maximum Rate Card Variance will prohibit your Sales Team from underselling the quoted political rates.
Can your system offer contextual advertising placement or assistance, where advertisers can to target industries or on-air content they would like to be associated with–spot following spot, spot following songs or content?
Aquira’s format clocks allow specific breaks to be setup next to known program elements, and spots are targeted to this content (e.g. weather, business report, etc.). This allows the ability to manage the avails for this high-valued inventory.