Theorem study: friction between pre-sales and executed media ads

There is a resistance that digital marketing firm Theorem has pinpointed between the systems media advertisement teams use in pre-sales and when it is punted off to the deal makers.

New research from the company has found that friction remains the primary barrier to efficient pre-sales operations across the streaming, audio, video and publishing industries. The study put it in a simple phrase: "pre-sales processes are slowing down advertising revenue."

The survey, which drew responses from more than 500 America-based industry professionals, predominantly in sales, client success, and revenue and media operations, found that 92% of organisations consider their tools efficient, yet 77% still report manual errors.

The company's Founder and CEO, Jay Kulkarni, said the issue carries broader weight because advertising is becoming an increasingly dominant revenue model for publishers and content owners. He said technology that reduces cost and operational complexity has a direct bearing on a publisher's ability to compete for advertising budgets that are themselves becoming more contested.

"Even these sophisticated systems don't talk well to each other. That's what the number talks about: by themselves, they are working efficiently, but the act of communicating between them is where the friction is," said Kulkarni.

The data points to manual tasks as an impediment to an uptick in efficiency. Theorem reported 90% of surveyed professionals spend more than five hours per week on manual pre-sales tasks, with 44% spending over ten hours.

The survey also found that 86% of organisations saw more closed deals after adopting pre-sales automation.

Kulkarni said the pre-sales process spans two separate ecosystems: a sales-side system, typically built on tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce, and a media operations side built on ad-serving technologies. Once a deal is agreed and an insertion order is triggered, he said it is handed to that media operations side, an entirely separate ecosystem built around programmatic platforms.

"Pre-sales is what a salesperson has to do to put the sales pitch together. By its very nature, it needs research, back and forth, data, historical campaigns, and a profile of advertisers that would benefit from the content and the audience they have, so by it's very nature, it is packed with friction," Kulkarni said.

Each system performs adequately on its own, Kulkarni said, but the process of connecting them, combined with sales and operations teams sitting in separate divisions, is where manual errors persist despite tools that are otherwise considered efficient.

He said pre-sales carries a disproportionate share of that friction compared with the sales process itself, because it requires staff to access multiple manual systems before a pitch can even be presented to a brand or agency. 

"Large organisations are all attempting to automate because access to technology is dropping, so they all have their own technology stacks," he said. "But this is a very specific workflow. They may have automation and AI initiatives at an [organisational] level, but this is a very niche, specialised and valuable workflow."

Successfully automating pre-sales requires three things, according to the business leader: technical skills, an understanding of the workflow technologies at an industry level, and the ability to customise a system for an individual organisation, without producing a tool that then requires a dedicated team simply to maintain it.

Kulkarni added that automation and efficiency gains are now table stakes, and that the greater opportunity lies in helping publishers launch video-enabled sponsorship deals, which carry higher margins than programmatic advertising and allow for more bespoke, high-touch sales conversations with brands and agencies.

Theorem has built a platform, called Upward, that is designed to streamline the pre-sales workflow and, separately, to let publishers create and launch video-enabled sponsorship opportunities. Kulkarni said the platform's minimum viable product is being built for a soft launch in October.