Media planning has become even more data-intensive than ever before. Advertisers are purchasing media inventories on websites, applications, connected television, out-of-home media, and other media formats. Therefore, the task of searching for media inventory is not easy. Media planners must know where and how they can place their ads, what audience they can reach via such placement, and if the inventory source meets their campaign requirements. Here comes the role of the inventory discovery tools. Not all such tools provide enough transparency and usability. The DESSY’s Inventory Discovery Tool is meant to change it.
What Is an Inventory Discovery Tool?
Inventory discovery tool is designed to assist media planners to discover and assess the available inventory prior to running their campaigns.
Depending on the particular tool used, planners will have access to various pieces of information on available inventory like: inventory type, publisher, ad formats, device, geography, demographic information, etc. The main objective here is to allow media planners to make more informed decisions regarding their inventory choice before investing money in a specific campaign.
How Is DESSY’s Inventory Discovery Tool Unique?
1. More Structured Inventory Research With the help of DESSY’s Inventory Discovery Tool, one gets access to the structured inventory data, enabling media planners to filter out possible opportunities using certain criteria. In this way, it is not necessary to manually go through all the spreadsheets, websites, and sources while researching inventory.
2. Improved Visibility Before Campaign Activation One of the problems that media planners might face is a lack of visibility with regard to the available inventory before finalizing the campaign plan. The inventory discovery tool allows one to have insight into the potential placements and inventory properties before activation of the campaign. For instance, if a planner is building up a mobile campaign, the media planner would like to know something about the mobile inventory, its formats, the list of the publishers and other properties.
3. Facilitates Comparison of Opportunities for Media Planners Having discovered one suitable source of inventory is good but finding out which among several inventory sources would fit better is what media planning is all about. DESSY’s data would help in this by enabling planners to examine several opportunities for inventory using inventory attributes related to those opportunities. This is done without having to consider every opportunity individually since all necessary data will be available. It will come in handy if a campaign has different requirements such as particular devices, ads, geographies or media environments.
4. Saves Manual Labor Inventory research is known to require much labour on the part of media planners. A planner has to go through different websites, collect data, put it into spreadsheets and then make comparisons. That is time-consuming and may lead to inconsistencies. Incorporation of inventory discovery process into the tool allows for saving some time.
5. Enables Informed Decisions About Media The good discovery tool should be able to answer the following questions:
- What inventory exists?
- Where will the campaign run?
- What type of ads is supported?
- What devices/environments are available?
- What inventory options fit campaign’s needs?
- How can those opportunities be compared?
It is in such a context that the Inventory Discovery Tool by DESSY was designed, to bring those questions into the planning process so that users could make their decisions based on available inventory information.
Importance of Inventory Discovery for Modern Media Planning
Since digital marketing has become more fragmented, media planners have increased options when choosing an inventory. Although multiple choices could be an advantage, such a situation complicates the planning process. With the help of inventory discovery tools, media planners get an opportunity to facilitate the inventory exploration process.
The goal of DESSY’s Inventory Discovery Tool is to make inventory exploration process more manageable for media planners discovering, exploring, comparing, and understanding inventory prior to campaign execution.
Conclusion
Inventory discovery has become an integral component of modern media planning. Whereas many tools can provide information on inventory, the actual value of the tool is its applicability in the context of planning.
DESSY’s Inventory Discovery Tool is developed based on the needs of media planners helping them with structured inventory exploration, increased visibility, comparison, and minimized manual research efforts. In other words, for media planners, inventory research will be not only a search through different information sources but also discovery of opportunities for a campaign and their efficient evaluation.