MediaPitch: Indigo Trigger Aims to Streamline Operations for Media Companies

Workflow inefficiency has emerged as a clear hurdle for media companies as product portfolios have become more diversified and content platforms have multiplied, complicating sales, ad, and production operations. These operations inefficiencies become a tax on publishers’ resources and revenue, and strip bandwidth from other value-creating efforts. Indigo Trigger aims to tackle the problems caused by too many systems getting in the way of efficient operations. Below, Indigo Trigger founder and CEO Christopher Prinos shares how his company’s services are solving the problem, and his vision for the future. Prinos has spent more than twenty years in marketing, business development, operations, and project management, evangelizing and implementing editorial, advertising, CRM, production, mobile, and tablet platforms to help media giants like Gannett., Tribune, News Corp., Hearst Newspapers, and The Washington Post streamline operations, reduce cost of sale, and increase revenues. What is your technology and how does it work? I founded Indigo Trigger to help media companies improve sales, ad operations, and ad production workflows by integrating disparate systems and streamlining processes. I’ve spent my entire career working with magazines and newspapers of all sizes all over the world and it’s rare that I find a group that isn’t looking to improve their processes. What problem are you solving or opportunity are you enabling? All of our projects focus on saving time, reducing cost, and increasing revenue. All traditional publishers are trying to do more with less. They’re also typically mired in seas of systems to help sell digital and print advertising. The cost of fulfillment is typically very high, and the problem has become much larger with new digital products emerging every day. Most of our customers have to use dozens of different systems to fill some very basic digital campaigns. We help companies make this process more efficient. We’re different from many strategic consultants in that we build ROI metrics into every project. Where most groups will focus on improving process or implementing new technologies, we set up benchmarks so our customers can actually measure how they’re doing post engagement. We use data to show success. We can tell you if the $5,000 ad campaign you sold cost $1,000 to fulfill or $6,000. Having actionable data is the most powerful tool a media company can have in today’s market. How did you come up with this idea? How does your new tech solution reflect changes and trends underway in the media world? Founding the company was a very organic process. I’ve been working on business process improvement projects all of my life. It just made sense to take my experience and build a team to be able to help media companies transform at scale. The concept of using strategic consultants is obviously not new, but as media companies look to cut costs in all parts of the business, we provide a low risk, “bite sized” way for companies to tackle unique projects they can’t typically on their own. We have a ton of experience with the entire media software ecosystem — from legacy order entry and finance systems, through ad tracking and production management, and on through to the dozens of ad servers, programmatic platforms and digital fulfillment solutions that are a core part of digital ad growth. How have you or do you plan to help media companies increase revenue or cut costs? Most of our projects help media companies consolidate multiple systems into one. We work a lot with different order management systems, CRM’s, and production systems — most of the time these systems are poorly integrated or don’t talk at all. This leads to re-keying the same information over and over into 4, 5, 10 different platforms. It’s extremely inefficient and our approach resonates with anyone leading large groups focused on sales, ad production and fulfillment. What’s next? Where do you see opportunities for growth? Our team has tripled in size since July 2018. As strategic consultants and system integrators, we do well by tackling more and more projects, so short term, our goal is to keep growing by delivering results. Beyond adding projects as consultants, we’re working on a software solution that will give media companies the ability to import sales, ad ops, production and fulfillment data and track true profitability for their ad campaigns. Today, we deliver this data through custom reports. The platform we’re working on will be a subscription-based service that anyone can use by plugging in some standard data feeds. Once that is ready, we’ll tap a freemium model to get customers engaged and then expand the offering based on feedback.

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MediaPitch: Indigo Trigger Aims to Streamline Operations for Media Companies

Toni McQuilken

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Toni McQuilken