Imagine Communications is making it easier and more profitable to trade television advertising, extending its award-winning GamePlan yield optimizer to offer the industry’s first turnkey, cloud-based service for linear TV advertising optimization.

Designed to extract maximum profitability of ad placement in linear channels, GamePlan Optimization-as-a-Service (OaaS) enables media companies to control costs and achieve all the revenue-driving benefits of optimization ― without adding specialized expertise or resources.

Imagine’s GamePlan optimizer can be integrated into an existing traffic system, enabling a hybrid operation that supports manual spot placement in premium inventory and automated placement of everything else.

While broadcasters and MVPDs are looking for innovative ways to maximize revenue in an increasingly competitive market, resource limitations and competing projects are often deterrents to implementing advertising optimization in house.

Imagine’s GamePlan OaaS simplifies the decision and the process by providing both the resources and expertise to set up and perform ongoing ad optimization. 

Graham Heap, senior director of product for Imagine Communications, says: ‘Given our customers’ clear, dual imperatives around their linear businesses, to control costs and maximize revenue, we think it’s absolutely the right time to take the value of GamePlan to the next level by providing this powerful optimization as a full white-glove service’.

‘GamePlan OaaS lets our customers focus on doing what they do best ― curate the content and sell advertising ― while Imagine experts focus on getting the best result from the optimization engine and continuous revenue maximization as business conditions change over time’.

GamePlan OaaS offers two levels of premium service. In the turnkey offering, Imagine not only hosts, maintains and provides 24/7 support for the service, but also supplies the data scientists to get the best out of it ― performing all the optimization runs required to fulfill a sales operation’s campaign execution needs.

A second level of premium service is also available for customers that prefer to manage GamePlan OaaS themselves with the help of coaching from an Imagine-dedicated optimization experts, who provide ongoing comprehensive consulting for the best setup, operation, reporting and key performance indicators (KPIs) to maximize yield. 

The latest evolution of GamePlan leverages the power of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, allowing media companies to perform more optimization runs in parallel — easily scaling ad operations and revenue.

It also adds several new business-enhancing features, including AutoPilot, a one-click function that provides computer-generated optimization scenarios — enabling users to set up more scenarios and reach optimal results more quickly.

This groundbreaking feature enables media companies to find the optimal balance between pure inventory efficiency and quality campaign effectiveness.

GamePlan also now includes the Best Result Selector (BRS), which allows different KPIs to be weighted according to specific business imperatives, such as campaign completion or value delivered, and then used to produce an easy-to-interpret score; and Right Sizer, which enables media companies to avoid giving anything away via automated trimming of over-delivering campaigns ― cancelling spots to bring that campaign back on target.

‘Imagine has been providing automated, audience-based optimization tools to the global ad sales market for more than two decades, but the power of the cloud has enabled us to set an entirely new standard’, says Heap.

‘Thanks to cloud processing, GamePlan can re-optimize the entire future booking plan every day to fine-tune campaigns as supply and demand naturally changes, enabling media companies to achieve revenue increases that were unattainable with previous ad tech solutions’.

In real-world deployments, GamePlan has helped media companies achieve up to 20% additional revenue from optimized inventory, while removing 80% of the workload involved in trading linear TV.

GamePlan Optimization-as-a-Service is available from September 2022.