Media Prima Berhad came to Accenture when it decided it needed to improve its advertising-based sales management.
Media Prima Berhad is the largest integrated media group in Malaysia, with interests in TV, radio and print media as well as content creation, events management and outdoor advertising. Its products reach some 22 million Malaysians each day, including 11.2 million television viewers, 6.8 million newspaper readers and 3.5 million radio listeners.
The media industry continues to experience intense competition for TV advertising sales, Media Prima Berhad’s primary source of revenue and growth driver. Not only are advertising buyers cutting back on discretionary spending amidst the economic downturn, but interactive technology—such as personal and digital video recorders—means new ways to sell and position advertising value.
However, customer interaction and sales management processes at Media Prima Berhad were not sufficiently advanced to support its existing advertising sales volume. Lacking access to a sales management system, the company’s sales teams spent a huge amount of time researching existing accounts to gather data needed for sales analysis.
Basic account data, such as client profiles and proposals, was captured manually and without relevant historical information. It could take more than a week, for example, to determine an account’s past spending patterns, program placements or spending levels as input into a new sales proposal.
The company recognized that it needed to improve its advertising-based sales management to bolster its future growth and journey to become a high-performance business. At the same time, Media Prima Berhad sought to reduce costs, retain customers and stay ahead of its competitors.
Media Prima Berhad set an ambitious goal for the new advertiser sales management solution: generate revenue uplift of 1 to 2 percent. To gain access to broader insight and skills, the company sought outside help and turned to Accenture. Media Prima Berhad believed Accenture’s extensive media industry experience, proven systems integration delivery approach, deep project management skills and alliance relationships would serve as a business advantage. The situations led to gaps in the comprehensiveness of account coverage, resulting in operational inefficiencies, lost opportunities to maximize revenue and an impaired ability to deliver the highest-quality customer service.
In January 2008, Accenture teamed with Microsoft and Avanade—a joint venture company of Accenture and Microsoft, to help Media Prima Berhad develop the advertiser sales management solution.
Responsible for the end-to-end management of the project, Accenture developed a compelling business architecture blueprint and brought that vision to life through a rigorous development process characterized by, among several key aspects, useability and strong end-user and executive sponsorship and participation. A highly effective and integrated team of Accenture and Avanade specialists worked to design and build both the advertiser relationship management and business intelligence capabilities using Microsoft .NET, Microsoft CRM version 4 and Microsoft SQL Server.
The Avanade Connected Architectures development framework and key Microsoft CRM development accelerators from Avanade allowed the project to be delivered in a predictable and productive manner with a focus on business value supported by technology architecture excellence.
According to Encik Abdul Rahman Ahmad, group CEO at Media Prima Berhad: “The Microsoft-based solution developed by Accenture and Avanade offered us a simple, elegant, intuitive and, more importantly, very user-friendly system. We have virtually real-time generation of sales management reports—a necessity that was not available to us prior to the new system. Now, it is easier to benchmark team performance.”
The new advertiser sales management solution is helping Media Prima Berhad improve its advertising revenue reporting and drive growth in ad sales.
Executive management is able to have a stronger pulse on the business through enhanced visibility to business metrics, being now empowered by the solution’s business intelligence dashboards to generate analytical reports (such as sales revenue, airtime utilization and financial) instantaneously on the most recent data.
Thanks to internal and external system integration, the time to generate management reports has been reduced from days to just minutes. Shareen Ooi, group head of sales for Media Prima Berhad, stated it this way: “I can now generate in 40 minutes what used to take me more than four days to put together.”
For each sales person, a sales management dashboard can now be generated that shows current information on sales activities, such as targets, revenue by target, pipelines and alerts—vital insight to improve executive decision making and drive value.
With help from Accenture, Media Prima Berhad has distinctive capabilities that are delivering better advertiser sales practices with greater efficiencies to help meet the challenges of a tightening global market. Future solution capabilities will enable the media company to analyse business intelligence reports as part of more robust strategic planning, forecasting and budgeting activities.
Altogether, Media Prima Berhad is better positioned to capture the next wave of advertising revenue and achieve high performance—even as changing consumer viewing habits and new interactive technology reshapes traditional advertising and the global media business.
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