10-5-2012
CEO Jeff Haley says Marketron and Emmis Interactive have had a strategic alliance for the last eighteen months, sharing a lot of customers, with products that are complementary to each other. The conversation to bring the two companies together started last spring. Haley says there were two big reasons to bring the two companies together. "The first is service. Both companies are highly customer oriented. The second is innovation. I think we are being innovative at Marketron with our new web-based platform and Emmis Interactive has a strong legacy of innovation."
Haley says part of his mission at Marketron is to grow it into much more than a back office and traffic billing software provider, expanding product offerings. Purchasing mSnap last year was a big step in that direction. "m Snap for our Marketron Mobile product clearly brings us into the listener engagement and loyalty space. The product that Emmis Interactive had, and has been developing, like Base Station, that is essentially a content management system for the digital presence of the radio station, in addition to that, they have added several products, several tools in part of that mix. One of them is GeoStation, which allows you to put a geographic overlay of your engaged listener base so that both a programmer and an advertiser can see where the listeners are for a radio station. We think those are very, very strong tools and add a lot to the mix of what we provide our customers now."
Haley explains more about what he hopes to accomplish with Marketron. "In the very first stage, taking the information that traditionally has existed in the back-office traffic function and helping to move that data through the organization seamlessly. That brings us to our web-based platform MediaScape that allows tremendous amounts of reporting tools that can be created instantly. We launched at the Radio Show, our Insite reporting tool. Insite uses the same data that has existed in our traffic systems for years, but brings it into the financial offices of a broadcaster in real-time, so they can do pacing reports, updates, average unit rates.... a tremendous amounts of ad-hoc reporting that they can create out of a web based tool that traditionally used to be created by hand on a weekly basis in an Excel program. Now, with our InSite tool, you can update that hour by hour and minute by minute, and it's in real-time. We are creating tremendous efficiencies in data-reporting structures in broadcasting. We think there are also tools like that, that can help with listener engagement and in a variety of other areas in the mobile space, and that's where our mSnap acquisition happened last year. We expect to grow and to broaden our services significantly for broadcasters."
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