Q&A with Matt Rohrs on the Opportunity for Media Companies to have their Own Self Service Solution in 2025

Matthew Rohrs, Sales Director based in NYC, is focused on traditional publishing and retail media clients. He started his media career on the agency side of the business as a media buyer. He jumped from media buying to a role at VisibleWorld, which focused on linear addressable technology. VisibleWorld was acquired by Comcast and eventually rolled into FreeWheel, which focused on digital video ad-serving (and much more). He came to ADvendio by way of Operative, and he is now our Sales Director. Due to his experience as a media buyer, Matthew was the perfect person to chat with on the opportunity for media companies to have their own self-service solution in 2025.

Q1: Matt, Can you tell our readers what a self-service solution is?

Happily! Self-service is a really exciting product that is seeing a lot of traction in the market right now. Self-service is a space that allows clients to plan, buy, and pay for their own media campaigns. A lot of media companies utilize a self-service portal to service their small-to-medium-sized business clients in a way that is more sustainable and mirrors their previous experiences in buying search and social media campaigns.

Q2: How can media companies use a self-service solution?

It’s important that you look into the overall flexibility and usability of a potential self-service partner. Ideally, self-service would plug into a media-company’s existing workflow and tech-stack. That means that the self-service solution needs to work with your CRM, OMS, Ad-Server, ERP, DMP, etc.

A self-service advertising platform should serve as a compliment to your existing tools, not a tangential path. Connectivity is king!

As an example, ADvendio’s Self-Service solution plugs in seamlessly with the ADvendio OMS, the SalesForce CRM, and then we’ve built out connections to ad-servers like GAM and FW. This means that all of the data housed within self-service flows into the other systems. If a client wanted to, they could even allow their self-service users to push their campaigns directly into the ad-servers!

When everything is set up correctly, the self-service portal can serve as an extension of a publisher’s sales team.

Q3: What are the benefits of a self-service solution for media companies?

Self-service allows a media company to “do more with less.” For many of them, SMBs had been more-or-less ceded to social media and search. To use traditional sales techniques on these smaller clients wouldn’t be profitable or scaleable, so self-service allows the publishers to “meet them where they are.”

For many publishers, this revenue is net-new to them, so the return on investment is immense.

With the right partner, self-service can plug into their existing workflows, go live quickly, and start generating returns almost immediately.

Of course, self-service requires new types of support (ie, an un-marketed self-service portal is an unknown self-service portal), but the demands are fairly minimal.

Q4: How can a self-service solution help media companies improve efficiency?

With a Self-Service solution like ADvendio’s, clients follow the necessary steps to get their campaigns live. The clients upload their creatives, they pay their bills, they pull their own reports. This is all work that would have had to have been done by someone whose time might be better spent going after larger budgets.

That may sound dismissive, but these clients don’t expect a high-touch experience. They’ve been buying search and social media, an extremely low-touch experience. These clients are comfortable in this environment, so why not build it for them?

Q5: What is the opportunity for media companies? Can they gain a competitive advantage?

When I was a junior media buyer, one of my weekly tasks was to put together a highlighted calendar showing where our clients’ spots would be airing. The client always loved to tune-in and watch their ad play out on their own TV.

TV has been a great place for massive scale and exposure, and a TV commercial can be a very impactful experience. The main problem has always been that TV is geared towards large advertisers. You need relationships, an agency, lots of expensive commercials, etc.

Self-service democratizes all that! We’re exploring integrations with AI companies that can generate a TV ad from a client’s existing collateral, thus eliminating one of the biggest barriers to entry for an SMB.

A high-quality television-ready commercial can now be created with the click of a button!

With the way things are now, the owner of Joe’s Pizza can hop onto a publisher’s website, create an ad from scratch, and experience that same thrill of seeing their brand play out on premium television!

Self-service allows a publisher to claw back market share from the giants of search and social in a way that hasn’t been possible before now.

Are you looking for a self-service solution to manage your advertising inventory? Talk to our team today.

Originally posted on ADvendio.com on the 9th of December 2024.