The intent of this guide is to streamline the general workflow process for publisher direct-sold deals with an eye toward best practice. Our goal is to provide the industry with a commonly accepted process and shared language to discuss and improve existing processes.

For the scope of these discussions, the term publisher is meant to include all types of publishers including retail organizations that operate in the media space.

This document is expected to evolve over time to keep pace with changes in workflow and best practices. Since no two publishers will have identical processes, we won’t be able to develop a definitive blueprint for these steps, but operational processes should be more similar than different. These common processes will help us to
work together to improve efficiency to the benefit of all of our organizations.

This version 2.0 of the workflow includes a few areas of enhancement:

The Product Development stage has been expanded upon based on feedback from our community.
Identifying the primary role responsible for each stage. During Base Camp: Newport Beach, we discussed and identified each role for each stage.
Some thoughts about holds or reservations.
Other small updates and enhancements.

Note that the knowledge base version of the document is located here and will be updated more frequently than the downloadable version.