Electronic trading – benefits of thinking from an industry perspective

MediaTel’s ‘Electronic Trading Debate’ held on Thursday 11 October considered the benefit of thinking from an industry perspective to garner adoption of new systems and working initiatives.

Jeff Eales, director of systems and development at BSkyB said “when we started CARIA there were fundamental principles we had to agree on; we didn’t all agree to start with.”

From inception not all television sales houses were involved in funding CARIA. “Smaller broadcasters were getting all the benefits without paying,” said Eales and continued “we had to do it for greater efficiencies”.

All CARIA costs are currently paid for by the broadcaster. “However, it is reasonable for agencies to pay to maintain links or feeds that are bespoke applications” said Eales.

Learning from this, does it need a major national newspaper group to lead everyone else in the national press market?

Steve Bottomley, business services director at NI responded, “Other groups are enthusiastic and want to make a step change”. Bottomley felt that the focus should be on transaction management and that national newspapers needed to get a critical mass of agencies involved.

During the Olympic games outdoor media owners were obliged to offer their inventory to official sponsors first. MediaEquals was appointed to handle the official auction by LOCOG. A transactional and auction system was set up and over £40 million pounds was transacted without a single invoice query.