Solutions : Price Director
Drive incremental revenue through rational, relevant rate cards
Rapt Price Director provides a business with a holistic pricing workbench, allowing an organization to understand market demand, set prices that make the most of their sales opportunity, and give the organization a rational, relevant rate card that serves as a critical tool during deal negotiation.
First, Price Director allows users to create and maintain a standard pricing framework. This framework serves as the underlying architecture of the rate card. It incorporates all requisite business rules and reflects the primary relationships across products and business segments, providing critical context for all prices that are to be set.
Second, Price Director's analytic engine develops an understanding of the relationship between price and demand. By analyzing sales history, seasonal trends, future availability, and external market factors, Price Director can anticipate what impact price moves today will have on future revenue. Further, with this deep understanding of the price/demand interplay, a user may then evaluate multiple pricing scenarios, understanding the true business impact of alternative rate card and discount decisions.
Finally, Price Director can be asked to prescribe optimized rate card pricing and discount floors in the face of those competing decision alternatives. Price Director, when running its optimization routine, looks at the rules the user has set, the potential market demand, value drivers within the product portfolio, and the cross-elasticity that exists across competing products. In prescribing the best pricing scenario, Price Director evaluates the millions of potential price combinations and delivers to a business the price plan that ensures maximum revenue and/or profitability from its advertising assets.
About our technology
Intelligent pricing is the cornerstone of yield optimization. With Rapt Price Director, a business sets prices that capture the value of their inventory and manages demand proactively to optimize inventory utilization. At the core of Rapt's pricing solution is a sophisticated price-demand engine that analyzes the impact of price changes on demand and optimizes prices to maximize yield over the entire product portfolio.
The engine has three core components: price-sensitive demand forecasting, product-inventory utilization, and optimization. The demand forecasting component applies time series forecasting, machine learning and stochastic econometric techniques to distinguish signal from noise and isolate trends in customer preferences amidst market, seasonal, and local pricing effects. Further, Price Director recognizes that price setting is not just about the rate set for a single product, but instead should be cognizant of the impact one product's price may have on the sales and revenue generation of other products within the portfolio. Internal cross-product cannibalization and sales 'spillover' are crucial components to understanding the impact of pricing on total portfolio revenue.
As important as the right mathematical approaches are, paramount to success is the real world experience and know-how to make them work within the constraints of media market realities and imperfect datasets. Through the application of Price Director to the operations of leading media companies, Rapt has developed and refined robust technology and techniques that are transforming the way businesses manage, price, and provision their advertising assets.
Effective sales management requires a blend of art and science. It is inevitable that sales managers take a much more scientific, sophisticated approach to pricing.
SVP NBC Universal Digital Media Sales
