Cross-industry work-flow systems for TV & radio set the pace for print media
Andrew Troullides, chief media officer at IMD, was a panellist at MediaTel Group’s Why Aren’t We All Trading Electronically? event this week. Here he offers a sketch of the morning’s debate…
This Wednesday, a sold-out MediaTel Events seminar in the spectacular new media-land setting of Saint Giles tackled the subject: “Why aren’t we all trading electronically?”.
As an event sponsor and work-flow specialist, the IMD Group data business Optimad Media Systems had more than a vested interest in the answer.
Finding myself on an expert panel with other hopeful service providers MediaOcean – the re-named, newly merged MediaBank/DDS – Harris Systems and Media Equals, I was pleased to see sitting on my left the Godfather of work-flow systems, Douglas MacArthur. It is claimed that during his time running the Radio Advertising Bureau, he invented J-ET, appointed MediaTel to operate it and thereby radically transformed the viability of radio as a candidate medium for national brands forever… although possibly not in that order.
The fact that he also happens to occupy a desk literally a few metres away from the seminar’s venue proved one more thing we already knew: Douglas is usually in the right place at the right time.
This was a good omen for the audience and a very lively debate ensued.
Two of the world’s largest systems providers to agencies and media sales houses – Media Ocean and Harris – explained how they would both be transforming into leaner, fitter, more digital, more end-to-end-solutions organisations and would be ever more responsive to the changing dynamics of the media landscape… or rather they didn’t quite!
Media Equals, who revealed that they had been ready for a new paradigm for some time, challenged us to attempt to navigate the next few rocky years without recourse to an online media market place for traditional media (excluding TV… or maybe even including TV).
I chipped in occasionally but otherwise sat there getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu at these opening statements, and looking out in awe at the view across London from Specific Media’s 10th floor presentation theatre.
But then delegates suddenly agreed that it was about time that the huge resource efficiencies enabled by established third-party owned and operated industry systems like IMD’s CARIA, which is approaching its tenth birthday, could and should be applied to press and magazine media – maybe even out of home media, especially as these markets were becoming more and more digital anyway.
Jim Marshall, the chief client officer of Aegis, told us he had recently bought not just a CD but even a SUIT online! The very one he was wearing infact.
I’m even sure that Jonathan Gillespie, the GMG Radio boss, said he could get decent rates for some of his airtime some of the time… even when it was offered online.
And for a brief moment I thought that my subtle attempts to lull the audience’s focus away a bit from process management and a bit more towards active buying of the “click to buy”, “buy it now” variety were beginning to work.
But then media agency chiefs went and spoiled it all by concurring that the time wasn’t yet right for mainstream media to be negotiated let alone bought online, so they wouldn’t be.
What delegates DID agree is that it was about time that the huge efficiencies and error reductions made possible by systems like IMD’s CARIA (R) and radio’s J-ET, could and should be applied to print media.
News International’s Patricia Kill told us of the NPA’s operational review plans and urged everybody to step up to the plate (printing terminology pun not intended) to tackle the problem of the ever-increasing levels of “faff”, which threaten to paralyse organisations and destroy profitability. Media owners and agencies agreed that they would collaborate on this problem… I think.
How did it come to this? Fragmentation, it would appear, is the price we are all ultimately having to pay for media diversity and proliferation.
Smaller and smaller deals. More and more individual buys. More platforms. £100,000 split into wafer-thin strips. All of it needing to be strategically conceived, approved, placed, confirmed, scheduled, reconciled, invoiced, reported, vouched and archived.
No day book or biro or keyboard is safe. There will be respite. Watch this space.