Discovery Taps Imagine to Take Ad Management to the Cloud

THAMES DITTON, England, September 30, 2020 ― Imagine Communications, which helps broadcasters, content owners, MVPDs and vMVPDs make and monetize TV, today announced that Discovery Sweden and Finland have transitioned to the latest cloud-based release of Landmark™ Sales operated by Imagine’s Managed Service. Discovery will benefit from reduced infrastructure costs, increased performance and improved management of linear airtime sales across a diverse advertising ecosystem. Imagine’s turnkey, cloud-based advertising management solution enables Discovery’s ad operations team to focus on core business priorities and maximize sales without the burden of managing underlying technical complexity.

“Consolidating ad sales and fulfillment across multiple platforms will unlock new revenue opportunities, and moving this functionality to the Imagine Managed Service will ensure we can remain focused on our business, not running IT infrastructure,” said Ross Goodall, SVP Business Systems & Operations for Discovery Inc. “Discovery needed a seamless, centralized solution, and Imagine delivered with a proven product suite that met our needs and fit our broader business and technology strategy.”

The solution deployed by Discovery in Sweden and Finland features Imagine’s Landmark Sales product for broadcast and multimedia ad sales. Landmark Sales is differentiated in its support for TV and VOD spots to be sold on a pure, digital-like audience basis, which can be optimized continuously to maximize yields using Imagine’s AutoBook™ engine.  The agreement is an extension of Imagine’s ongoing relationship with Discovery and will help drive new opportunities for the network and its advertisers, including as they plan to address advertising demands for the Summer Games to be held in Tokyo next year.

“Imagine’s collaboration with Discovery is an important step in our strategy of enabling our core products to run in the cloud as a turnkey managed service,” said Mark Senecal, GM of Managed Services, for Imagine Communications. “By moving our products into the cloud, we can deliver significant business and operational benefits while allowing our customers to focus on business and transformation strategies as they evolve into digital media companies. Recent months have demonstrated that a cloud-based approach to critical technologies delivers more flexibility and faster time to market and is the foundation of a strong business continuity strategy. We look forward to our continued work with Discovery and content providers globally as demand for our cloud solutions proliferates.”

The Imagine Landmark Sales platform helps media companies create and deliver efficient ad sales campaigns across platforms by leveraging a range of price strategies and using multiple sales methodologies. Imagine’s customers can use Landmark to maximize revenue and control operational costs across linear, on-demand, linear addressable and web or display platforms through efficient use of inventory, comprehensive business data insights and a suite of automated tools. The platform has an aggressive roadmap that will deliver ongoing improvements to address the need for a single currency across multiple viewing platforms and can be extended easily with Imagine’s award-winning cloud-based optimization engine, xG GamePlan™, to further turbocharge yields.

Imagine’s Managed Service helps customers unlock the potential of applications such as Landmark Sales and xG GamePlan without having to deploy the infrastructure to support them. This offering provides a fully packaged service where Imagine hosts, secures, maintains and provides 24/7 support for customer applications in Imagine environments, enabling media companies to count on consistent costs and reduce risk and total cost of ownership as compared to an on-premises deployment.