Talon is a specialist Out-of-Home (OOH) agency with over 30% UK market share and operations in the USA, Canada, Europe, UAE, and Asia Pacific regions.  OOH is a collective term for advertisements found on public billboards, wallscapes, and posters seen while “on the go”. Traditionally, OOH agencies have been managing and running campaigns manually. Even for Talon, handling campaign planning to media buying, pricing, placement, and tracking was not an automated process. In addition, lack of industry standards created information silos making measurement and accountability complicated. 

Talon partnered with Sahaj Software for their expertise in the OOH and ad industry to build a robust campaign management tool, “Plato,” which surpasses off-the-shelf tools by adapting to various regions and integrating with the end-to-end ecosystem of the Talon group. Plato is now widely used as the de facto tool to research media inventory and plan campaigns that cater to the specific needs of customers in the UK, North America, and other international markets.

The Ask

Talon started its UK operations back in 2012 and, by 2017, became one of the top specialists in OOH campaign planning and execution. Traditional tools like spreadsheets and some of-the-shelf tools served them well in smaller markets, but as their business expanded, they needed more robust tools to manage large volumes of inventory and run campaigns in multiple regions across the globe. Most traditional campaign execution occurred either via manual interactions or ad hoc B2B platforms.

The major bottlenecks of the process were:

  • Lack of a standardized inventory of OOH media across multiple regions.

  • Different regions had localized nuances in the media buying process.

  • New partnerships with agencies and vendors demanded more integrated workflows.

  • The existing finance system could not adapt to new geographies, putting significant pressure on finance teams to manually validate and process finances.

Their earlier attempts to build a custom solution to these problems did not yield good results. The system was brittle and did not provide value throughout the complete campaign lifecycle. In 2018, Talon onboarded Sahaj Software to envision a platform that would allow them to scale and increase team efficiency by standardizing workflows and streamlining finances. In just four months, we delivered a working solution ready for production, to be used by their teams.

The Solution

We spent considerable time understanding the domain and business use-case. There was no existing solution for inspiration, but users had some ideas about how a tool could benefit them. A team was formed with Sahaj consultants and Talon business stakeholders that conducted multiple discovery workshops to understand the scope of the problem and designed the first version, which began delivering value by increasing campaign planning efficiency from day one.

The interactive approach helped us learn from usage, and continuous collaboration with users, and product owners guided us in defining new features as the platform was developed piece by piece in every iteration.

We built a multifaceted platform with each module targeting a specific aspect of campaign management, combining them into an extensible suite of application tools named Plato—an automated trading platform that aggregates all OOH inventory into a single, intuitive campaign planning and delivery system. It allows users to explore, plan, check availability, reserve, and trade static and digital inventory across multiple markets.