New Online Trading System To Bring Efficiencies To The Buying Process

Derek Jones, MediaTel Group managing director, announces the launch of a new online trading system and the benefits it will offer the industry.

Maybe it is a timely coincidence that we should announce the start of a trial programme for DELTA, our new booking and trading system for online, at the same time as the whole ad trading area has featured extensively in the trade press.

DELTA’s aim is to bring efficiencies to the process and these will ultimately mean real cost and time savings for agencies and sales points. It can do this because it is focused on online advertising; because it has identified clear areas of inefficiency in the current process such as faxing of orders, duplication of effort, no campaign audit trail; and because it will integrate with users’ back-end systems and with ad servers in the next few months.

We know it won’t be easy but we have a wonderful list of trial partners – AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Guardian News & Media, Bauer Advertising, OPera and Profero – and it is key that both agencies and sales points are fully involved. Any agency-focused system will find it very hard to become a true two way service over time. We know this having built J-ET for radio. J-ET is very successful now but its early years were painful – and that was with IPA and RAB support all the way.

The trade press is currently focusing on advertising opportunity systems. The latest versions are more sophisticated than predecessors (including our own MediaTrader) but they don’t create time or cost savings because they handle bits of media, not full media campaigns, and often lack any other system integration.

J-ET is an integrated system that processes 90% of national radio advertising and CARIA does the same for TV. DELTA aims to follow the J-ET/CARIA model and bring significant progress – in the form of real cost savings – to the online advertising business process.