Salesforce Industries' Media Cloud adds ad management

Salesforce Industries released an ad sales management tool for its Media Cloud, giving media companies a way to better track campaigns' performance across a mix of digital and offline publishing. The company also added chat and customer review functionality to its AppExchange partner store. All the features are live today.

Salesforce Media Cloud, one of 12 Salesforce Industries' vertical-specific customizations, released Advertising Sales Management, which connects Salesforce's CRM to customized tools that enable media companies to manage insertions and then track ad sales and performance across physical and digital media. The feature bundle can run analytics and optimize ad budget spend, which gives ad buyers the ability to reallocate ad buys to the highest-performing channels during an ad campaign.

These digital ad management tools come at an interesting time for beleaguered publishers whose revenue has been in decline for years, said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank. Those running ad platforms must also follow compliance regulations to keep on the right side of digital privacy law enforcement, along with the end of third-party ad-tracking cookies and Apple iOS App Tracking Transparency changes.

The loss of cookies has put a great deal of pressure on the revenue side of the publishing industry.

Salesforce's ad sales tool debuts in a market that already includes some mature competitors, such as FatTail, WideOrbit, Advendio and Mediaocean, most of which already integrate with the Salesforce CRM. But Frank said there might be an opening for Salesforce in a crowded market.

"The loss of cookies has put a great deal of pressure on the revenue side of the publishing industry -- there's a great deal of openness to new solutions that might help fight the scourge of falling advertising value," Frank said. "But it's an industry that just doesn't have a great deal of free cash flow to spend."

Salesforce also enters a changing digital ad market where e-commerce sellers are opening ad inventories. Retailers and online sellers now embedded ads into the checkout process, said Christopher Dean, vice president and general manager of Salesforce Media Cloud.

"Beyond media and entertainment, we see retail media as another big area where there's a lot of interest in a solution like this to help manage the sale of their advertising," Dean said. "A lot of places were locked down in the pandemic. They're all dusting off their e-commerce processes and technologies, trying to monetize them in different ways."

Salesforce Media Cloud Advertising Sales Management pricing varies based on the number of seats that an enterprise licenses, as well as order throughput.

Salesforce also added two new features to its AppExchange partner marketplace.

The first, AppExchange Chat, embeds live chat for Salesforce users shopping for third-party apps. It is live on about 30 Salesforce AppExchange 6,000-plus apps. AppExchange Chat enables app developers to talk directly with prospective buyers within their AppExchange listings.

Also live is AppExchange Trusted Reviews, an Amazon-like catalog of user reviews with a five-star rating system. Reviewers are tagged Salesforce MVP when the company gives them the title; Trailhead Ranger when a user completes certain badges; and Top Reviewer when contributions "encourage conversation and help others make informed decisions," according to Salesforce.