New innovations for Telmar's Transmit software

"Our aim has been to introduce additional functionality to Transmit which will enable users to use the data more effectively," says Martin Urry, local Telmar technical director.

Adds Mike Nussey, acting GM, "All these enhancements will contribute towards greater productivity and increased efficiency for all our clients who are regular users of our Transmit software."

According to Urry, Telmar's offerings and product enhancements are all aimed at anticipating what broadcasters will be offering when they finalise their sales policies in the near future.

"We're trying to give our clients all the necessary tools they may require to deal with the new TV trading environment. Our product mix is continually evolving as we develop new features and further enhancements to existing products in order to allow media planners more sophisticated tools to cope with a rapidly changing television trading landscape."

Adjust during campaign

Telmar has considered that, with overnight data being made available, there is the potential to monitor campaigns during flighting and to make adjustments during the course of the actual campaign. Xcelerator has therefore been introduced as an extension of Transmit and will assist the user to place spots matching features that will be available within the broadcasters' administrative software.

Xcelerator was introduced to Telmar clients a little over two months ago and since then has had enhancements made to it in order to make it even more client friendly. "Clients requested that the runs be made possible by month and by campaign, as well as weekly," explains Urry. "This functionality is now available."

In response to client requests that results should be graphically displayed, Telmar now offers a full graphing facility in Xcelerator.

Success estimator

Actuals is another new feature that allows the user to evaluate the performance of the campaign at any time while it is being flighted. In essence, the programme estimates how successful a campaign is likely to be based on the actual data that has already been made available, together with the audience projections for the balance of the campaign.

Another feature, called Alerts, allows the user to specify which TV campaigns to monitor, within particular criteria and boundaries and on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The system then generates an automated exception report if a particular campaign falls outside of a pre-defined criteria list.

"It's essentially a feature which runs in the background and alerts the planner when things go awry," informs Urry.

Extensions have also been made to the Transmit data downloading facility, which is now fully automated.