• by Ross Fadner , April 9, 2004

A renewed demand for ad space in an increasingly vigorous online marketplace has left some publishers experiencing chronic inventory management problems.

Most ad servers offer some type of inventory management solution and many publishers have their own in-house system, but the rise in demand for online advertising has put added pressure on sales operations to know the status of their inventory in real-time. Solbright Inc. today introduced AdInventory Manager, the fourth component in its Adsuite product which manages orders, requests for proposals, creative placements, billing, and business reporting.

AdInventory Manager ties in with Adsuite tool AdSales by allowing the transfer of proposals to contract management, review, and approval. Through the new service, this is done in real-time, so other sales and operations personnel know the exact inventory status at any given time.

In addition to real-time inventory management, AdInventory will enable publishers to forecast inventory as far out as one year by factoring in previously booked contracts, time of season, and recurring events and non-recurring events, as well as inventory history. Weather.com, the Web site of The Weather Channel, has been beta-testing the product since August 2003, and is AdInventory's first customer.

Terry Blevins, vice president of finance and ad operations, weather.com, says that real-time inventory management is "important right now because online advertising is growing so quickly" and inventory data needs to be updated and readily available to everyone in sales operations. Before, she says: "[Weather.com was] limited in the amount of data that it could actually track at any given time." Blevins says that real-time information eliminates the problem of oversold inventory.

Tim Messier, director of business analytics and support systems, weather.com, notes that while most publishers have some sort of system similar to AdInventory, often "they are very informal, or ad hoc."

Messier says that ad-serving systems also give publishers measurement and management tools, but they tend to be tech-oriented and difficult for sales operations personnel to understand. He says that AdInventory Manager is "publisher-oriented."

Thomas Pace, president and CEO of Solbright, says the product is designed for sales departments of any size, although it is particularly useful for large companies with complex sales operations. Pace hints that Solbright is exploring the possibility of a partnership with Tacoda Systems, which specializes in behavioral targeting. "Inventory management will enable behavioral targeting systems to be better integrated into the daily work flow of online sales," Pace says.

Pace declined to disclose the terms of a potential deal or the time frame for an announcement from Solbright or Tacoda. Solbright's other partners for AdSuite partners include: The New York Times Co.'s New York Times Digital, The Washington Post Co.'s washingtonpost.com, Viacom's MTV.com, and Gannett Co.'s USAToday.com.