• by Melynda Fuller , June 28, 2019

The Local Media Consortium (LMC) has a new offering for the 80 media companies and 3,300 outlets that are members: access to Centro’s Basis platform.

Centro and the LMC have partnered for years, but access to Basis was something many of the organization's members were eager to access.

“Our members consistently identify billing and reconciliation processes as being serious pain points for their teams because these types of systems are typically separate from campaign execution tools,” Christian A. Hendricks, president of the LMC, stated.

Through the Basis platform media organizations are able to automate, streamline and unify functions like managing campaigns for search, social and programmatic in one system. Users can also take advantage of its integrated DSP when ordering campaign optimizations across all channels while managing all interactions with multiple vendors.

John Hyland, vice president of Centro, noted that today’s local media organizations are collecting ad revenue from a constantly diversifying pool of partners and vendors, which meant tapping new hires who can execute, sell and develop new processes. This, in turn, puts an increased strain on a publisher’s financial team. 

“Basis provides a place to build an agency business in a streamlined way,” Hyland told Publishers Daily. “It allows a media planner within an organization to be able to look at all their programmatic, search, social and vendor direct buys under one umbrella from the planning stage to the billing stage.”

Hyland said many of the media companies he works with have developed an agency model over the past five or six years to some degree.

“But they haven’t really had the opportunity to invest in ad technology to fully build that agency on top of it, start developing best practices, start to communicate better across teams, start to collect data across different clients and brands as they run more and more campaigns for them,” he said.

Basis allows them to be up and running more quickly, with some organizations launching a new campaign just a week after signing up and adopting the software.

Jim Grayson, vice president, business development, OnMilwaukee, stated: “Running our entire digital agency on one platform is a game changer. We now communicate, plan, execute and report from one interface across all media channels. The result is a higher level of productivity, leading to more activity and smarter digital programs that excite our clients.”