J-ET’s quiet revolution
Nearly £5bn in radio revenue and 170m spots have been traded through J-ET. Here, Raymond Snoddy charts the history of one of adland’s best collaborative success stories
The article in The Times was a modest piece about a modest development in the media in the days when there were media pages in the national newspapers and such developments were able to generate medium-sized articles.
“Media minnow nets on-screen sales deal” ran the headline while a sub-head explained that “an electronic system to sell radio advertising aims to offer more efficient trading.”
A much younger me – nearly two decades younger – went on to explain how “the minnow,” Mediatel, had beaten much larger rivals, including Reuters, to win a contract to create an electronic system to sell radio advertising.
Media planners could brief salespeople electronically, complete the deal on-screen and provide confirmation that advertisers have got the advertising slots they have paid for.
How terribly mundane it seems now. Except that it wasn’t.
The date was May 1998 when electronic trading systems were hardly well understood in the media or anywhere else.
The contract that was awarded to Mediatel was remarkable in many ways.
It was set up as a joint industry initiative or JICRIT (Joint Industry Committee for Radio IT Futures) jointly owned by the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), and it was designed to collaborate to solve some easily identifiable problems. To this day it remains unusual in this respect.
As Justin Sampson – then of RAB and now chief executive of BARB – put it at the time, radio had been criticised for taking up 15 per cent of a media buyer’s time in return for 5 per cent of their budget.
The problem was crystallised for Sampson’s boss, RAB founder Douglas McArthur, one day in the office of Nick Manning, of Manning Gottlieb OMD.
Manning, now at Ebiquity, disappeared and came back with a large pile of A4 faxes, the paperwork needed to spend £60,000 for a radio campaign for his client Chessington World of Adventures.
The piles got even larger if you wanted to make late changes in what was a more fragmented radio universe.
The admin was killing radio’s future prospects.
The truth was, as Sampson is happy to acknowledge, that radio was hardly at eye-level when you walked into the media store but probably in a warehouse somewhere out the back.
Using the latest online technology to handle sales would be a way of putting radio more on the front-foot and give the industry a relative advantage in the battle to win a higher percentage of the advertising cake.
But why did “the minnow” Mediatel get the job?
Mediatel was fast out of the traps in realising the significance of the internet for the analysing and dissemination of information.
Current chief executive Derek Jones points to an invitation to a presentation at the Institute of Directors on 4 December 1995 when Mediatel demonstrated its new database services accessible to subscribers via the internet, plus services openly available online.
The IPA’s research director, Lynne Robinson, the Guardian’s Commercial Director, Nick Hewat, and the CEO of BARB, Justin Sampson, share their memories of the launch of J-ET.
An indication of how new some of this was came in a line on the invitation which read; “A short formal presentation will be followed by an opportunity to ‘surf the net’.”
Jones concedes he wasn’t exactly at the cutting edge of the latest internet technology himself, but his technical director at the time, Tom Walder, was.
And although being too far ahead of the technology curve can sometimes be risky in business terms, the company’s gradual migration from Prestel and Teletext to the internet paid dividends in going for the JICRIT contract.
They could demonstrate how the system could be future-proofed by going online and putting the piles of faxes out of business.
After nearly two years of occasionally “frank exchanges” and raised voices J-ET was born and this week celebrates its 18th anniversary with a big party.
Why mark the 18th birthday?
“We just thought it was time,” Jones explains.
It was the first industry trading system long before the term “programmatic” had been invented and was developed to include single source post-campaign accountability.
There are about 600 buyers and sellers on the system and J-ET’s client list includes all the major radio groups in London, Manchester and Scotland together with leading media agencies in each region.
Nearly £5 billion in radio revenue has been traded through J-ET and 170 million spots bought with 17 million spots going through the system last year alone – a rise of 14 per cent.
It may still be the only jointly owned industry trading system in the world, even now as further automation is being added, including J-ET Exchange which gives sales points the opportunity to respond in real time to agency briefs and automate the booking process with a single click.
Lynne Robinson, IPA research director, notes how J-ET has been consistently updated including mobile versions, a finance link to agency invoicing.
Robinson notes that other media have tried to emulate JICRIT and failed but she still regularly recommends that anyone thinking of similar industry online projects should speak to the organisation.
“So why do you hear so little about J-ET in the news? The short answer to that is because it works – it runs quietly, efficiently and very cost effectively in the background – a testament to the JICRIT and Mediatel teams,” says Robinson.
McArthur asks where radio would have been without J-ET and answers that it certainly wouldn’t be using faxes today but that the J-ET system came along at just the right time for radio.
John McGeough, Commercial Operations Director at Global Radio, and Cathy Lowe, Head of Radio at PHD UK, discuss the future of J-ET.
Across the second half of the 1990s, the former RAB executive explains marketing was educating advertisers on radio’s effectiveness and that message was getting through.
J-ET added on the essential extra ingredient – making radio easier to buy and fully accountable.
“Without J-ET commercial radio would have a substantially smaller share of advertising today,” insists McArthur, now chairman of UK Online Measurement (UKOM).
Certainly in the current environment many believe digital online publishers would benefit from such a system and the level of transparent accountability it has achieved.
In the original Times article Derek Jones was quoted as saying if the creation of JICRIT goes to plan Mediatel will run the system for the radio industry on a continuing basis.
Eighteen years and it is still running, and Jones, as he takes part in discussions to adapt the system yet again to cope with radio streaming deals, should already be planning the J-ET 21st anniversary party in three years.