Electronic TV Trading: Competition Hotting Up
Competition is hotting up to be the supplier of the standard electronic trading system for the UK TV airtime market, it would appear from yesterday’s ADMAP conference – “Electronic Trading: Bombshell or Bonanza ?”
Currently R&B’s NOMAD with 65% of UK airtime booked across its system, is the only player to boast live, paying users, but now it is to face competition from TSMS’ Agency Link – tested in Abbott Mead Vickers, and soon to be rolled out to another nine sites – and DDS’ ECHO – tested in Germany, and adapted for use here by the autumn.
Adrian Ford, Managing Director of R&B neatly summed up the barriers and conflicts which hinder the development of an industry standard for electronic trading, in the TV market or across other media – above all the fears such a system generates in a competitive buying market and the need to change business practices and invest money for longer term savings in overheads. He anticipated no “big bang”, just gradual development, and did not believe any industry committee could solve the problem because of the numerous vested interests involved.
An upgraded version of NOMAD will be under test, in a prototype form, by the end of June, and it would seem definite that the competition will see major benefits, in terms of improved facilities and features, for those companies wishing to use any of the systems.
For TSMS, Managing Director Tim Wootton suggested that Agency Link, PC-based and “Internet compatible”, “had the potential to become the industry standard”, but he accepted that it required Laser or Carlton to come on board if this was to be the case. Currently neither have shown signs of doing so, and Sky is R&B’s biggest customer.
Wootton believed that an industry standard would lead to greater transparency in dealing practices, and would mean a shift away from (low percentage) commission, and therefore better rewarded media buying points. He also felt it would improve trust between buyer and seller.
Wootton’s call to the IPA to agree an agency standard seemed a little illogical given the comparatively small number of TV buying points involved – if TSMS can draw another major partner the standard would be achieved much more quickly.
Sandy Macdiarmid, DDS’ Executive Director of Media Services, ignored the broader issues during his presentation, but agreed with all other speakers that electronic trading was inevitable. His time was devoted mainly to a pitch for ECHO, which DDS had developed successfully in Germany and (known as DARE) in the USA, and was bringing to the UK in the autumn.
A windows program, ECHO will provide a direct update of schedules transmitted via e-mail into DDS. It would carry an additional cost for DDS subscribers, but it meant that the initial keying of schedules was carried out at the sales houses, not at the agencies (Agency Link). ECHO hopes to develop to include electronic invoicing.
DDS’ ECHO will not run with the old dumb terminals initially required to access the DDS service, but upgrading these to PC screens remained the responsibility of the agency, Macdiarmid confirmed – Adlink it would seem had borne the cost of some upgrades to get its own system installed at certain sites.