Aquira Back to Basics: Zetta Live Log & Reconciliation

Did you know that Zetta can share a live log with not only GSelector, but Aquira too? As part of our Aquira Back to Basics series, we’ve already covered how to add a client, add a contract, and schedule spotlines, so this week Dawn Newberry, RCS Traffic Sales Engineer, joined us to discuss how Zetta’s Live Log works and what information is shared between products. In addition, we also reviewed Aquira’s reconciliation process and offered some tips regarding how to maximize your Aquira experience.

In order to integrate your Zetta and Aquira environment, you’ll need the Aquira Sync tool, a free RCS middleware that allows your Aquira to communicate with Zetta. There are a couple noteworthy settings, specifically how often your Zetta system will look to receive changes from Aquira. Programmers naturally want to define a quicker turnaround, like every 30 seconds to a minute, but if you find there’s performance issues due to a lot of network traffic – think of a 10 station cluster running within one Zetta system that includes various automated tasks like satellite feeds – some users may adjust that number to once an hour. It all depends on how you interpret your Aquira. If you’re constantly working on your logs and sending same day changes, then yes, you would want a smaller request window. If you export station logs once a week, then there’s no need for Zetta to look for log changes every minute of every hour.

The Aquira Sync tool not only will share live logs, but when a Traffic Manager creates a new contract, featuring media and perhaps a script, Aquira can also send updates to the asset cart and/or create a new asset in Zetta, with any desired metadata, including the live read text for the on-air talent to read live and mark as read in Zetta’s Notes module for reconciliation. Let’s say that it’s 11am and you received a new state lottery order. Create the contract in Aquira, define the spotlines and you’re ready to re-export the log. In Aquira, mark the day’s log as Edit (essentially reopening the day to edit the log) and then hit Save and Continue to trigger the change in the backend for the Aquira Sync Tool to see the change and update Zetta accordingly. It’s that easy! For reconciliation, we continue to respect Zetta’s flat file assignment for a proper reconciliation workflow, however, we have some exciting Aquira news coming down the pipeline as we’re currently working on including reconciliation as part of the Aquira Sync Tool. For more information when Aquira Live Log reconciliation will be released, keep it locked to our socials or sign up for our Aquira newsletter through your RCS profile notification settings within www.rcsworks.com.

Speaking of reconciliation, after publishing the log, we reviewed some additional reconciliation steps, like the Exceptions subtab. Found under the Reconciliations navigation tab, this is where users can see what played, what didn’t play and why. Then, a Traffic Manager can easily fix any missed spots. A common traffic workflow is to move or make good on spots that didn’t air. This way, you’re not losing the revenue and essentially adding that spotline back into the scheduler as a future spotline. Remember, this is all tied to revenue, so we like to operate under best practices. Reconcile your logs as part of your first daily task. That way, if you front loaded your week’s worth of logs and then skipped a bunch of spotlines, you’re not missing any revenue by simply rescheduling the spotlines either later in the day or the following day. The goal is to avoid scenarios like a scheduled week’s worth of logs, only reconciling on Mondays and Fridays. If there was a spot that was supposed to run for 50 times Monday through Friday at $50 a spot, but on Friday you caught that if never aired (for whatever reason) or it was bumped off the log for another spot, your station just lost $2,500 worth of revenue that you can’t make good because Friday’s log is already published or worse – the inventory is maxed out.

These are just some of the tips we are discussing during the Aquira Back to Basics series. We have a couple more sessions coming up, so keep an eye out on our socials for time and dates or review past videos on our RCS Live Archive.The RCS Live Archive features over 150+ how to videos available on our website under the Blog and RCS Live section. If there’s a certain topic, view one of the videos and use the Seach field on the right to find videos based on specific keywords. We also feature the RCS Academy, which offers online, self-paced training that highlights Zetta, Zetta for Engineers, GSelector and Aquira. If you find these “Back to Basics series” helpful, reach out and let us know if there’s another RCS product you want us to review. Or if you need more assistance, RCS Support is only a phone call or email away.