Salesforce Media Cloud was introduced with the vision of enabling media companies to create personalized customer-centric solutions. It is a part of Salesforce Industries, which provides industry-specific solutions on the Salesforce platform. Essentially, it enables media companies to place customers at the center of their revenue-generating strategies.
With a customer-centric strategy, media companies use Media Cloud to unify revenue streams, from subscriptions and advertising to commerce transactions. You no longer need to fine-tune your Sales cloud to suit your media company’s needs either; you get all of that pre-built!
Media Cloud extends the Salesforce platform to tackle operational challenges that are commonly encountered by media companies. This means that media companies can expand their CRM capabilities using the media-specific data model and additional advanced applications to know their customers and deliver great experiences.
What’s in a Name?
After Salesforce acquired and integrated Vlocity into Salesforce, it changed the name of Vlocity to Salesforce Industries. So any Vlocity product is now called Salesforce Industries: for example, Vlocity CPQ is now called Salesforce Industry CPQ.
With Salesforce Industries, Salesforce has launched products to solve the specific needs of different industries. So far it has launched products across six different industries: Media and Entertainment, Communications, Insurance, Utilities, Government, and Health. Salesforce Media Cloud is a part of Salesforce Industries, which was earlier part of Vlocity, and Salesforce documentation contains references to both Vlocity as well as Industries. Despite the differing names, the product remains the same.
The Vlocity interaction platform, which is used to create experiences for users, is now called OmniStudio. To make it easier to remember: all the names have changed for all the tools that contained the word ‘Vlocity’. Vlocity DataRaptor is now known as OmniStudio DataRaptor for example.
Salesforce Media Cloud contains OmniStudio, which contains a set of tools used to create digital experiences for users. We will learn more about them later in the article.
The reason Salesforce keeps changing the names of its products frequently, is to better align with market needs and perceptions. This is something we need to deal with while working in this ecosystem, and it’s always a pertinent focus. The products however have little to no change in their functionalities.
Core Capabilities of the Salesforce Media Cloud
Salesforce Media Cloud comes with the following core capabilities:
- OmniChannel Service and Sales: Attract, engage, and support customers from anywhere. Unify teams and collaborate around a 360-degree view of your customers, and maximize customer lifetime value (CLV).
- Products, Bundles, and Promotions: Create and deploy customized media experiences and packages promptly. Reduce the time it takes to introduce new releases and provide intelligent recommendations to guide consumers towards suitable products and promotions.
- Contract Management: Seamlessly manage and streamline contracts to close deals faster and collect sooner.
- Order Fulfillment: Use media-specific processes and integrations to accelerate advertising and media campaign execution and fulfillment.
Media Cloud Solution Map
The Salesforce Media Cloud is built on the foundation of the Media Data Model: a multi-party customer model and relationship visualization tool, and OmniStudio digital engagement tools like flex cards, data raptors, integration procedures, etc.
Available Apps in Salesforce Media Cloud
Advertising Sales Management
The Advertising Sales Management (ASM) application helps media companies supercharge sales teams to sell smarter and faster and maximize cross-platform advertising sales with converged planning, execution, and measurement, powered by a single platform.
Subscriber Lifestyle Management
The Subscriber Lifecycle Management (SLM) application helps media companies rapidly launch subscription services for video and audio streaming, publishing, pay TV, gaming, B2B business information, and new digital media. SLM enables media companies to maintain agility while providing customized products, packages, and promotions.
Media Commerce Management
The Media Commerce Management (MCM) application will help media companies grow faster with media commerce built around their media service. It will help them drive revenue with personalized media commerce experiences, and stand out with relevant, AI-powered, and unified customer insights.
Licensing and Rights Management
The Licensing and Rights Management (LRM) application streamlines global licensing and contract negotiations with content syndication and distribution.
Salesforce Media Cloud Architecture
Let’s look at the Salesforce Media Cloud architecture as shown in the diagram above. At the base is the Salesforce platform. This means that it is native to Salesforce with the industry’s best security, performance, and manageability. You can customize it like you can with any Salesforce products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc., with clicks and not code.
The layer above is the developer experience layer which includes developer tools like the IDX build tool, installation assistant, and IDX workbench, allowing configurations to be source controlled, moved, and deployed quickly in multi-org, multi-configurator developer environments.
The next layer is the data and third party integration layer. Media Cloud integrates with MuleSoft out-of-the-box. It can also connect with other applications using integration procedures and DataRaptors. Using integration procedures and DataRaptors, developers can design APIs and transform data from one system to another and integrate third-party systems without writing any Apex code.
The digital experience layer helps to create a rich user experience for users and employees at scale. It contains media action cards, media call center consoles, OmniScript, and a mobile-first user experience. We will talk more about the digital experience layer later in the article.
The top layer contains the media industry-specific data model. The media industry data model helps to get started with the media cloud easily with media cloud objects, fields, flows, etc.
Media Cloud Data Model
Salesforce has extended the core data model to meet the needs of media companies. This means that any media company adopting Media Cloud needs to create fewer custom objects, and can do more with the standard ones.
In the picture above, the white boxes represent standard Salesforce data model entities and the blue boxes represent extensions to the Salesforce data model built for Media Cloud.
The changes to the core data model can be broken down into two categories:
- People and Accounts
- Products and Assets
People and Accounts
In media companies, defining the customer is important. A customer can be a person who will consume media or entertainment content. or it could be the publisher who is paying for advertisements to the consumer. Media Cloud handles this by using different record types for the account objects for different customers:
- Customer Account: This describes a customer, account, organization, or partner involved with your business. This could be a consumer (representing a person who consumes a media asset) or a business account (representing a complex business structure), and they usually are the parent of multiple billing or service accounts.
- Billing Account: This record type defines a billing and payment profile for a customer account. Billing accounts capture information such as the billing address, chosen payment method, billing cycle, and optionally the current billed amount.
- Service Account: This record type defines a service location for a customer account, or, in other words, a service account is the attachment of a customer (account) to a place (premises). Service accounts capture information such as the service location address.
- Person(Contact) Object: This object represents the individual person at a customer account or business.
Products and Assets
Objects like the standard object and the asset object are also important, and when it comes to Media Cloud, they’re a little more enhanced:
Product Object: This is the standard product object that describes products or services sold to a customer, but in Media Cloud, the product object has been significantly enhanced to allow you to build product hierarchies or bundles and to add attributes to describe product characteristics.
Child Products Object: Child products are custom objects that describe the component products included in a product bundle. When you define a child product, you can also define its cardinality, which controls the maximum, minimum, and default quantities of that product allowed in the cart
Asset Object: In Media Cloud, the standard asset object has been extended to support subscriptions. Assets allow you to govern multiple subscriptions or services under a single contract.
B2B Ad Sales Model
Let us now take a look at a B2B Ad sales data model as an example of how Salesforce Media Cloud makes it easier for media companies to launch their offerings quickly on the Media Cloud.
A brief description of the objects in the above diagram is as follows:
- Account: Into the existing account, we’ve added an extension that introduces three new record types: Advertiser, Agency, and Brand.
- Opportunity: Into the existing opportunity, we’ve added an extension that introduces a record type for Media Campaign and a new field to capture the Budget Amount.
- Order: Into the existing order object, we’ve introduced a record type for an Insertion Order, which is the document that organizes all of the technical information contained in the media plan.
- Order Item: The Order Ad Placement is an extension to the Order Item. The combination of an Order item and Order Ad Placement defines an Order Ad Placement.
- Quote: The Media Plan Placement extends the Quote Line Item. The combination of a Quote Line item and Media Plan Placement defines a media plan and sets the price for the Media Plan Quote.
- Ad Space Specification: The Ad Space Specification object defines a specific place or a group of places where an Ad Creative may be served, such as a single ad space or a grouped ad space.
- Ad Space Group Member: The Ad Space Group Member defines the association of an Ad Space specification record with an Ad Space Group record. It provides information as to which Ad Spaces are part of a given Ad Space Group.
- Ad Server Account: The Ad Server Account captures the mapping of an Account with an Ad Server. When we create an ad advertiser Account, the Account needs to be mapped to one or more Ad Servers.
- Ad Server User: The Ad Server User captures the mapping of a User with an Ad Server. The User (Media Planner or AdOps) needs to have an account in the Ad Server. Each record in the Ad Server object stores information for the Ad Servers that are connected to the Advertising Sales Management application. It is used to identify which ad server the Placement should go to.
- Ad Space Creative SizeType: The Ad Space Creative SizeType is the junction object to capture the possible SizeTypes that can be assigned to an Ad Space and includes the different size types that are allowed to be part of an Ad Space.
- Ad Creative SizeType: The Ad Creative SizeType defines the size of the Ad Creative. Specifications include Media Type, Height, Width, Run Time, and Unit of Measure.
OmniStudio Digital Interaction Platform
Salesforce Media Cloud is configurable with the various tools available at our disposal. We can create user experiences, guided flows, and integrations with third-party tools with clicks and not code. Here are some of the important tools available in OmniStudio, which are available in the Salesforce Media Cloud:
Flex Cards
FlexCards extend core Salesforce with a highly configurable set of UI components that solve complex UI challenges. They display information and actions for a specific context at a glance.
OmniScript
OmniScript is designed to guide a human through a set of business processes. OmniScript enables the creation of user-friendly interactive workflows that conceal intricate functionality in the background.
DataRaptor
DataRaptor is a tool for sending and receiving complex hierarchical data into Salesforce. DataRaptor can:
- Get and transform data from Salesforce (DataRaptor Extract)
- Transform and save data to Salesforce (DataRaptor Load)
- Transform any data (DataRaptor Transform)
Integration Procedures
Integration Procedures are server-side processes that are declarative and capable of executing multiple actions within a single server call. They provide a means to retrieve, store, and manipulate data without the need for user interaction. Integration Procedures are particularly useful when there is a requirement for the efficient processing of intricate data from various sources.
Calculation Procedure
Calculation Procedures allow complex math to be configured procedurally on the Salesforce platform. You can run a detailed set of mathematical processing steps to do the kinds of calculations required in industries where more than a simple mathematical function is required.
When there are a number of factors, values, and calculations, a calculation procedure can call one or more calculation matrices (which are lookup tables).
Salesforce Media Cloud Modules
Industries Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ)
Industries CPQ gives sales teams advanced order-capture and guided-selling capabilities to offer best-suited media plans and placements to advertisers and agencies spanning different media types across different channels. Using attribute-based pricing, Industries CPQ provides complex, differentiated pricing based on attributes, like ad space, media property, and time of day.
Enterprise Product Catalog
EPC enables product managers to quickly create, launch, and update new products and service offerings from the reusable product, service, and physical asset components. The single product catalog is used to automate catalog-driven workflows, including sign-up, order capture, complex order breakdown (decomposition), orchestration, and fulfillment.
This allows publishers to configure their subscription packages, show/movie titles (for licensing), and ad products. Media companies can manage these products over their lifecycle.
Industries Order Management
It helps to manage the fulfillment of orders. Orchestrations break down orders into their component parts (decomposition) and then orchestrate fulfillment in external systems. One example of this for Media Cloud is the fulfillment of digital media campaigns in Google Ad Manager.
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)
CLM supports the complete contract lifecycle. Contract administrators can author and assemble insertion order documents, which are contract documents dynamically generated to meet the needs of sales users, resulting in lower costs and effort to do business. Sales Reps know the contract document is valid and structurally complete, reducing review and approval cycles. Pre-integration with the DocuSign electronic signature solution enables stakeholders to sign electronically.
The Benefits of Using Media Cloud
Here are some of the benefits of using Salesforce Media Cloud:
Build on the Salesforce Platform
Salesforce Media Cloud is built on the Salesforce platform so it comes with the industry’s best security, automation, and configuration features Salesforce is known for. It has been configured to suit the needs of media companies to rapidly design, launch, and monetize media experiences from anywhere.
Fast Time-to-Value
Media Cloud provides the fastest path to success with purpose built-apps, integrations, and data models customized for the media industry. From the ground up, Salesforce Media Cloud was designed to deliver fast time to value to speed deployment and drive the monetization vision.
It enables media companies to fast-track digital transformation. Companies can accelerate time to value with industry-specific processes, data models, integrations, and UX templates.
Rapidly Grow Media Revenue
Companies can maximize advertising revenue through industry-specific processes, automated pricing, and discounts. From opportunity to order management, the entire media sales process can be handled by a single platform which reduces errors and friction and increases sales velocity.
Flexible and Scalable Tailored Experiences
Built on Salesforce’s low-code platform, media companies can deliver and configure hundreds of processes and experiences they need. They can design and deliver omnichannel B2C and B2B media experiences across platforms.
Media cloud components can be leveraged in any combination to meet the company’s needs. Media companies can purchase the applications that are pre-built to leverage the underlying components or choose to implement the components and build an experience unique to their needs with Media Cloud’s low-code tools.
Essentially, media companies can deepen customer relationships by decreasing the time-to-order to new products and offering through a unified catalog.
Summary
Salesforce Media Cloud is gaining popularity among media companies as a rapid solution for building and launching CRM solutions on the cloud. Instead of spending excessive time customizing the Sales Cloud to fit their requirements, media companies can now access a tailored solution designed specifically for their needs. By offering pre-built applications, specialized architecture, tools, and data models tailored to the media industry, Salesforce Media Cloud empowers media companies to swiftly adopt the Salesforce platform and deliver exceptional customer experiences.