An ad order management system is the software that a media company uses to take, schedule and bill the large ad deals that its sales team agrees with advertisers in person, instead of through automatic auctions. It is also called an order management system, or OMS, for advertising. TV broadcasters, newspaper groups and streaming services all use one.
Much online advertising is sold by auction, in milliseconds. But the most valuable ad space is still sold by people. A TV channel's sales team negotiates the sponsorship of a cricket tournament with a brand's agency over several weeks. A newspaper sells a front-page ad for the Diwali weekend. These deals have agreed prices, dates and positions, and they can be worth crores of rupees. The OMS keeps the record of each deal, from the first proposal to the last invoice.
Here is a typical case. A broadcaster's sales team sells a soft-drink brand 120 ten-second spots during the IPL, spread over 40 matches. The deal also includes 2 crore video impressions on the broadcaster's streaming app. An impression is one showing of an ad to one viewer. The brand's agency sends a release order, its formal order, from its media planning and buying software. The OMS records the order and checks that enough ad time is still unsold in those 40 matches. It reserves the spots. Before each match, it sends the list of spots to the television network's scheduling system, which places each ad in a break. After the match, the OMS compares the log of what actually aired with the order. Say rain cuts one match short, and three spots never air. The OMS records the three spots as owed, and the sales team offers them in a later match. At the end of the month, the OMS produces the invoice.
The streaming part of the deal is a guaranteed deal. The broadcaster promises to deliver 2 crore showings at a fixed price, and the OMS tracks how many have been delivered so far.
The OMS also manages the space that the sales team did not sell. Unsold slots can be passed to a supply-side platform (SSP), which sells them by auction. So one media company may sell the same kind of space in both ways. The OMS makes sure that the same slot is not sold twice.
News groups use the same kind of system. A digital news publisher uses it for sponsored sections and for deals that fill its whole home page for a day. The automatic side of the market is explained on the page on real-time bidding (RTB).