The Challenge

Cable television was experiencing a huge growth in viewership and increased potential for advertising revenue. However, existing systems weren’t keeping up. Primarily designed for local cable, they were not well suited to the national advertising campaigns. They didn’t support the new business models of advertising package sales. They didn’t track performance levels required for providing contractual guarantees of performance. They didn’t maximize the use of inventory. And manual re-entering of data left room for errors.

Opportunity existed for a single integrated system that would provide features and functions tailored to the specific needs of the cable television networks:

• An integrated system that would provide up to date information at all times
• Support for the sales models that were unique to cable television network sales
• Analytics that allowed robust analysis of sales packages, profitability, and inventory utilization
• Tools to allow for the maximization of the value of the available inventory.

MSA approached the cable television industry with a proposition to create a tailored solution.

The Solution

MSA developed Gabriel^®, an integrated sales and traffic solution specifically designed to the needs of the cable television networks. Offering many unique capabilities, development partnerships and product adoption quickly ensued. Gabriel provides:

• A fully integrated system that allows up to date information flow through the system at all points in the process, speeding both access to the data and up to date information anywhere within the system.
• Full support of the continually evolving models of advertising models utilized by cable television networks.
• An integrated, real time scheduler that allows efficient modeling of advertising placement, thus allowing real time visibility to the avails within the constraint bound inventory, resulting in networks being able to focus on revenue maximization rather than the operational challenges of slotting advertising inventory.
• Robust analytics throughout the platform, providing access to key performance metrics, required operational data, and decision-making tools for the network to maximize revenue and ensure operational efficiency.

The Results

Gabriel has become a standard in the industry, and continues to keep up with the changes in network sales, providing ever-evolving functions and features to support the growth of cable television networks, along with ever-evolving analytics to provide both end-to-end and best practice solutions to customers.

The Challenge

Thirty years ago, one family of cable networks came to MSA with a problem. There was significant potential within cable television advertising, but first there was a need to create trust in the product for advertisers and agencies. Being a leader in advertising data analysis, MSA stepped up to the challenge.

The Solution

The Media division at MSA responded by developing the Post Buy report, which was quickly adopted as the industry standard. Referred to and well known in the industry as “The MSA”, it provides third party processing to analyze the contractual performance of advertising placement — a key link in allowing the cable networks to provide the guarantees of performance that are required to execute predictable advertising campaigns.

The Results

Thirty years later, MSA continues to provide the Post Buy service to the industry, with provision to over 100 cable networks, as well as satellite and unwired networks. As delivery models of advertising change with advances in technology and changing patterns of media consumption, MSA continues to integrate the new sources into the existing reports, providing the stability and creation of standards required by the industry to support new advertising delivery models and industry growth.