AI-driven Media Ad Inventory Forecasting Improves ROI
The Challenge
Our media client grappled with numerous challenges in their advertisement delivery forecasting system, impeding their ability to make well-informed decisions regarding their ad inventory. Their traditional forecasting methods proved labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone, relying heavily on manual efforts and collaboration among Inventory and Finance teams to determine impression-based forecast capacity. This inefficiency hindered their agility in responding to market shifts and capitalizing on revenue-generating opportunities.
Furthermore, their existing forecasting process overlooked critical influencing factors, such as premiere dates on digital and linear platforms, fluctuations in ad breaks, dynamic ad insertion, seasonality, and more. Consequently, the forecasts generated lacked accuracy and failed to capture the intricacies of the dynamic media industry.
The existing solution also failed to account for the diversity of ad patterns across platforms & content types and the distinction between on-air and off-season behavior. The absence of a scalable framework to adapt to these diverse patterns resulted in missed opportunities and suboptimal inventory management.
The Solution
Infocepts team collaborated with our client to create an AI-enabled Digital Portfolio Forecasting solution, revolutionizing advertisement delivery predictions for optimized inventory planning and maximizing advertisement slot sales. The solution includes short-term forecasts spanning six months, providing daily updates to a centralized digital user platform. This empowers inventory teams to leverage forward-looking capacities, sell-through rates, and availability data, enabling informed decision-making regarding current and future inventory conditions. For in-depth analysis, the solution features a forecast dashboard for comprehensive data visibility and validation reports to facilitate user adoption. Our solution’s key highlights include:
- Adaptive Seasonality for accurate forecasts based on varying show characteristics
- Self-Service Influencing Factor tool for real-time adjustments such as ad break changes.
- NLP-Powered Show Mapping across datasets for premiere date tracking & adjusting for peak volumes
- Seamless Platform Integration with Teradata and Snowflake
- Robust Scalability leveraging AWS Cloud with Apache Spark, handling 7000+ models and a decade of historical data
- Efficient Data Handling with a single-store pipeline.
- Automated validation pipelines and reports explaining model performance and data quality
This comprehensive solution not only optimizes digital inventory planning but also streamlines the entire end-to-end process, enabling our client to stay ahead in the ever-evolving media advertising landscape.
The Outcome
With this solution, our client’s inventory teams gained a powerful tool for managing digital inventory efficiently, resulting in significant business value. This project seamlessly integrates with various client initiatives, including digital planning, sales, and finance, demonstrating its pivotal role in streamlining operations. Notably, it has delivered substantial tangible benefits:
- Enhanced Decision-Making: The solution enabled long-term annual planning, maximizing sell-through rates, reducing short-term overselling, and enhancing buffer capacity for improved ad delivery.
- Business-Driven Forecasting: By incorporating evolving business decisions into forecasts, such as premier dates, ad break adjustments, dynamic ad insertion, and seasonality, it ensured more intelligent and accurate predictions.
- Improved User Adoption: Increased accuracy, reduced variance, and minimized errors in automated forward-looking forecasts have bolstered user confidence and adoption rates across the portfolio.
- High Scalability: Designed to adapt to evolving inventory team needs, the solution can expand forecast granularity to include factors like DMA (geo), devices, genre, and format, ensuring it remains relevant as business requirements evolve.
- Self-Service Analytics: Business users now have the power to input the magnitude, type, and duration of impact using our automated Influence Factor self-service tool, providing greater autonomy.
- End-to-End Automation: The solution operates seamlessly without manual intervention, eliminating the risk of human errors that often occur during manual forecast updates.
In addition to these benefits, our solution saves more than 500 person-hours of labor, resulting in over $300k in savings per year.
Infocepts has been instrumental in transforming our ad inventory forecasting, bringing data-driven insights and efficiency to our business. Their dedication, expertise, and astute problem-solving have empowered us to make informed decisions. Their positive communication style and technical proficiency have been invaluable in enhancing our overall success and user experience.
Product Manager – Inventory
Global Media Company
About the Client
Our client is a mass media and entertainment conglomerate catering to a global audience. The company owns and operates a large portfolio of businesses that includes television networks, theme parks and internet-based businesses.
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