Pedestrian Group is Australia’s leading youth-centered publisher formed in 2019 from the merger of Nine and Fairfax Media. As a digital powerhouse, Pedestrian Group reaches more than 4.9 million monthly readers across their six publications including PEDESTRIAN.TV, Business Insider, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, and POPSUGAR.
Following the merger, new CEO Matt Rowley recognized Pedestrian Group’s new requirements “to make ad operations and business reporting more efficient and to better control and manage both products and pricing”. He appointed Deanna Galluccio, Commercial Operations Manager, to project lead. Deanna’s goal was to find the right order management solution that would streamline the group’s advertising processes and ensure increased collaboration and efficiency across sales and operations.
Pedestrian Group Streamlines Their Advertising Management
The business had “scaled so quickly” and was “still using a combination of ad-hoc business tools such as Excel and disjointed CMS tools”. It was clear that a cloud-first solution was needed to consolidate their advertising operations.
For sales, version control of ad schedules was a problem. Errors and confusion were rife, with multiple versions of the same excel spreadsheets being stored and circulated, and a lack of consistency in ad product availability. There was poor oversight of the products and prices that were being offered, and no team responsible for approving bookings.
The Ad Ops team was having difficulty deciphering booking requirements, the Finance team found themselves dealing with incorrect invoicing details and payment delays and Reporting teams had no inventory or yield analysis taking place. Streamlining these processes became crucial. At a top-level, bookings and revenue could be seen but there was nothing in place for product or line reporting. Reporting deadlines would often be missed due to the inefficient processes that made gathering data took hours rather than minutes. As Deanna explained, “it was obvious we were in desperate need of an all-in-one solution to replace our mix of legacy systems”.
Like any modern publishing company, Pedestrian Group was supremely conscious of cost, and about the time and investment required. Change management can be difficult. And for Pedestrian, “it meant getting the team off Excel spreadsheets and disconnected legacy systems which were really comfortable for them to use.”
Not only did Deanna have to factor this into consideration she also had a tight timeline to turn this around.
For a solution that was customizable to their specific requirements, Pedestrian Group chose ADvendio. Its ability to unify advertising operations with automated processes and improved data flows made it the right choice for the entire organization.
A Collaborative Effort Results in a Successful Implementation
ADvendio connected Pedestrian Group’s processes with features such as a Salesforce-powered CRM, customized order management, inventory management, ad server connections and integrations, booking calendar, billing runs, availability checks, and ad server checks along with invoicing, reporting, and analytics tools.
Decipher Digital, an ADvendio implementation and consulting partner that specialize in driving performance for media publishers in the APAC region were responsible for the implementation.
According to Pedestrian’s Deanna Galluccio, with their “experience in media and setting up ADvendio for other local publishers, I knew I could trust them”. This was particularly important to Pedestrian Group, who were completely new to automated systems.
Decipher Digital provided a very tailored and personalized experience for Pedestrian, based on their specific configuration requirements, and developed a detailed project plan to keep everybody working to schedule so that ADvendio could be set up with a deadline in sight.
Training and informative, leave-behind documentation was provided to the team, leaving Pedestrian Group virtually self-sufficient, and because Decipher Digital is based in Australia, Pedestrian Group were able to receive local hands-on support rather than waiting for somebody in a different time-zone to respond to their needs.
Craig Newns-Smith, Founder and Director of Decipher Digital is delighted with the results and appreciates Pedestrian Groups’ complete collaboration throughout the entire implementation. He added: “Collaboration is a key ingredient for success for any project and the team at Pedestrian Group were fantastic to work with as they remained highly engaged throughout the entire implementation and beyond. By gaining a thorough insight into their existing systems and processes, we were able to decipher their main issues and challenges and deliver a comprehensive solution that enabled all the various users at Pedestrian Group to realize immediate value from ADvendio — from finance to sales, to operations and management”.
ADvendio Provides Increased Efficiency & Collaboration Across Departments
Delighted with the results Deanna Galluccio, Commercial Operations Manager discussed the impact of ADvendio across Pedestrian Group’s Sales, Operations, and Finance teams. “ADvendio was the first time that a true order management and CRM system came together in our business to seamlessly communicate with one another. We were hoping for a minimum viable product that we could be happy with — with room to grow as we went along. But ADvendio has turned out to be so much more than that. It’s really worked out perfectly for us!”
In ADvendio, the entire sales and delivery workflow process is built into the system — products, pricing, availability, discount, and ad specs — and these are always up to date. Campaign line items are maintained in one location rather than on inaccurate, insecure excel spreadsheets. One of the biggest benefits is efficiency and accuracy of reporting, with revenue and pipe reports available on dashboards within two clicks of log-in.
With regards to inventory pricing, built-in workflow rules make sure that debtors are approved on time, products are valid and guaranteed to be priced correctly. The direct connection to the AdServer is considered a massive benefit as it has all line items as pre-defined templates, saving hours of manual entry, particularly for larger campaigns.
For the Finance team at Pedestrian Group, invoices are now pushed straight into Xero, using “Breadwinner” integration software, so the invoicing workflow is more efficient. According to Deanna, “So many of our teams have seen the benefit of ADvendio — leadership teams because of its reporting and business analytic capabilities, our sales team because of the inbuilt Salesforce CRM, our ad operations team because of its direct push to Ad Server and management of products, and our Finance team with debtor and revenue information they can trust. The business benefits are endless!”.
She also added “Advendio has been phenomenal! Reports are really quick to generate, and the data gets visualized in a way we’ve never had before. We can dig into revenue by-product, or line, and compare year on year. We are now properly managing inventory & yield. It’s fantastic!”
Matt Rowley, CEO Pedestrian Group is pleased with the results and adds: “Having an order and pipe management tool in the form of ADvendio has been transformative in our business.” He is delighted with the results of the implementation as “Decipher Digital was core in getting us up and running in a way that suits the nuances of our business. Their expertise, care, and flexibility is first-rate!”
ADvendio has completely revolutionized Pedestrian Group’s business and they truly believe that “ you could potentially save on headcount by investing in ADvendio for guaranteed efficiencies in your workflow.”
Pedestrian Group is currently trialing the new Programmatic module of ADvendio and excited that it will give them more insight into the different channels of programmatic revenue which is the next step for them.
Originally published at www.advendio.com on September 11, 2020
