Prodigy, the cloud-based production data platform with AI technology for global marketers, has won trademark rights to its SaaMS™ (Software as a Managed Service) platform, an advertising industry innovation that eliminates data entry for marketer and ad agency users.
SaaMS™ was born out of a whiteboard exercise when the founders of Prodigy were brainstorming on how to best solve the problem of capturing the production project spending and profile details of marketer advertising campaigns. As co-founders of the production consultancy PostAds Group established in 2007, the company was hired by global marketers and movie studios as subject matter experts to improve production workflow and efficiencies manually reviewing campaign creative briefs, cost estimates and supplier bids. While this served a useful purpose on a project-by-project basis, marketers increasingly sought to centralize and aggregate data across all projects for strategic insights into their operations. Herein lies the challenge: wrangling all of the project data that lived in email Inboxes, PDF's and Excel documents in order to make larger sense of it and having the ability to access spending data in real-time for regular reporting.
The PostAds Group team knew from prior experience that attempts to automate the process via off-the-shelf 3rd-party SaaS (Software as a Service) failed to meet the demands of the fast-moving production workflow process. Marketers rely on their ad agencies to source content production and post-production suppliers - and the incumbent process was one of email communications between production departments and suppliers. Asking agencies and suppliers to suddenly change their email workflow process and begin manually entering data into a SaaS not only required a major change management initiative, it ultimately failed due to "too many cooks in the kitchen". The agency-supplier ecosystem simply had too many stakeholders burdened with software data entry duties to make it an effective solution, resulting in too many data gaps to be a reliable "single source of truth".
Thus the Prodigy founders came up with the concept of handling 100% of the data entry on behalf of clients using a combination of AI and Production Data Coordinators (PDC's) to ingest production projects into the platform; yet at the same time, offering marketers a visually pleasing software interface to view their projects and data on dashboards with data visualizations. "All of your production data, none of the data entry" became the tagline of Prodigy's product rollout and the rest is history. Launched in 2020 during the pandemic, Prodigy now manages over $1B+ in production data representing over 100+ brands and 50+ ad agencies in 60+ markets across the globe.
"It's a nice achievement for Prodigy and SaaMS™ to forever be associated together as a first-ever technology product and service."
SaaMS™ was the acronym the founders used to differentiate Prodigy's solution to those of the competing SaaS - and to their surprise, discovered that the term "SaaMS" was also an original in the global marketplace. "There are so many MarTech acronyms out there: SaaS, DaaS (Data as a Service), DAM (Digital Asset Management), DMP (Data Management Platform) and iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) to name a few," said John Lipuma, Co-founder and CEO of Prodigy. "It's kind of a big deal to have the trademark rights to SaaMS™ because we've proven the concept that it can outperform traditional SaaS for niche businesses such as Marketing Production. It's a nice achievement for Prodigy and SaaMS™ to forever be associated together as a unique technology product and service."
"Those whiteboard sessions where we made the decision to free our clients of data entry duties was fateful when we look back on it, adds Mark Dunn, Co-founder and COO of Prodigy. "SaaMS™ may very well be the difference between Prodigy succeeding as a product or becoming another one of the failed SaaS solutions that came and went."
AI technology plays a major role in offering a SaaMS™ model. Automating data entry is just as important for Prodigy's internal teams as it was for external users. The platform has ingested 5,000+ production projects encompassing 7,000+ bid documents from 1,000+ suppliers without requiring a single human keystroke of data entry. Via machine learning the platform has read over 3,000 document types from projects being produced in over 60 global locations in multiple languages and currencies. The ability to handle any project or document type though the use of technology allows the platform to scale effortlessly regardless of the volume of incoming work.
"The platform has ingested 4,000+ production projects encompassing 7,000+ bid documents from 800+ suppliers without requiring a single human keystroke of data entry."
Prodigy recently headlined at the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) MarTech Committee meeting, providing a demo of the platform to members and discussing the unique nature of Prodigy's SaaMS™ offering. Noting that Marketers invest over $400B annually in MarTech solutions primarily in the "three pillars" of Performance, Programmatic & Creative Automation tools, Prodigy is the first in creating the "fourth pillar" category for Production Effectiveness. As all marketers are in the business of creating content on a daily basis, using technology to effectively manage production operations is increasingly viewed as a mission critical priority for global marketers.
To learn more and schedule a demo of Prodigy contact us at [email protected]