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Case study

The challenge

A large US-based entertainment and media company was facing significant challenges with inefficient processes and lackluster profits from its advertising sales division. Teams were spending an overwhelming amount of manual effort pitching new proposals, scheduling programming and tracking the success of advertising campaigns. Account managers had to manually compile information from different internal and external systems for each proposal, checking that the data matched the proposal’s requirements. This method was prone to mistakes and had the potential to lead to the loss of millions in revenue. The company was experiencing missed sales opportunities, empty advertising slots and lower than expected advertising revenues. It turned to Cognizant for guidance with a focus on the sales, audience targeting, campaign planning and analytics processes.

Our approach

Cognizant identified three primary focus areas for improvement: advertising proposal creation and validation, media kit distribution and advertising campaign monitoring.

Our team automated the collection and uploading of sales orders to a SalesHub API which sped up the processing of sales data. As a result, media planners were able to significantly reduce the time they spent finalizing each advertising proposal, with a guarantee of 100% accuracy. Also, we automated the gathering and analysis of scheduling data from different networks, ensuring it met set rules. This intelligent automation removed the need for manual checks and allowed for instant content distribution to diverse markets based on audience preferences. Additionally, Cognizant integrated a variety of available raw data points from internal and external sources into the client’s sales system. This integration gave our client’s account executives instant access to critical ad performance data and allowed them to build reports that helped them improve the way they communicated with each other and their clients. 

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Cognizant uses intelligent automation to improve returns

The new solution resulted in substantial time and cost savings, increased efficiency and enhanced accuracy across various aspects of the company’s operations. Over the course of three years, we helped our client scale to take advantage of 70+ automated processes, saving time, money and effort across the media planning operation. Time to create comprehensive proposals decreased from two+ hours to two minutes, with zero errors. By moving to 24/7 transaction processing, the speed and scalability increased, allowing the team to process over 900,000 pre- and post-sales log transactions annually. Time spent validating the content inside each media kit was reduced by 50%, from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.

97%

reduction in proposal creation time

$3.1M

annual savings

75%

faster media planning

100%

accuracy of media placements