Where would radio be without J-ET?

UKOM’s Douglas McArthur explains why the ad trading system J-ET, which celebrates its eighteenth birthday this week, arrived at exactly the right time for commercial radio

When I founded the RAB in 1992, my thinking was that radio needed to promote the medium’s strength through education rather than salesmanship. It didn’t do too badly with the share of advertising growing from 2% to 7% over a decade.

However, marketing doesn’t just mean promotion. Achieving growth also needs the creation of infrastructure to make your product easy to plan and buy. J-ET was a very important part of that growth as it massively reduced paperwork and admin – making buying lots of radio spots very easy.

As the originator, funder and driver of the JICRIT, the RAB and my then MD Justin Sampson deservedly received a lot of credit. RAB took the idea and ran with it, but I have to admit that the catalyst for the idea of a transaction and verification system didn’t start from me – but from a then agency chief.

In the early days of the RAB I made it my task to get out and listen to advertisers and agency chiefs. One of these meetings was with Nick Manning – now Ebiquity – but then of the media agency Manning Gottlieb OMD. I think this was in 1993 or early 1994. Radio was growing well, and we had a chat about radio and the issues holding back further growth. Nick said the real problem was admin, then suddenly jumped up and left the meeting room.

He came back and rather theatrically dumped a three inch pile of A4 faxes on the table. He said that this was the paperwork required to spend £60,000 on radio for their client – Chessington World of Adventures. As I had experience of the station end of the radio transaction, I knew that buying and selling detail was done by back and forward faxes, with regular re-keying to enter – hence errors!

Despite that experience I was pretty amazed that all that paperwork had to be checked by Nick’s buying team.

Then, as a finale, he dumped a second similarly sized pile on to the tables and said that this second pile was the replacement faxes when an error was found in one Bank Holiday dates. All parties had to revise, reissue and check another pile of faxes.

Nick’s serious point was that agencies couldn’t make a profit on planning radio because of all the time consuming admin faxes. He argued that this would definitely hold back radio’s growth potential. Radio needed a better communication system than piles of faxes to each of the then seven sales points.

Nick’s pile of faxes was the kernel of the idea that Justin and Mediatel developed into an online trading and verification system – J-ET.

I have to confess that J-ET was my first experience at commissioning a significant IT project. I had acquaintances who had this experience and they all said that I should be prepared for the development budget to double and the target completion date to slip. I wish that had been the case – “double” was well surpassed.

The actual company that runs J-ET is called JICRIT Ltd – which we set up with the rather dull title of “Joint Industry Committee for Radio IT”.

The joint part is important. Although the development was mostly paid for by commercial radio via the RAB, such a system couldn’t have been set up without the participation of the IPA both as an investing shareholder and as an active participant in the development of the system.

I remember then heads of radio such as Jim Freemen and Jonathan Gillespie putting in many hours to get the specification and delivery to meet an agency buyer’s needs.

So where would Radio be without J-ET?

I don’t think that we’d still be using faxes today, but the J-ET system came at exactly the right time for radio. Across the second half of the 90s marketing was educating the advertiser on radio’s effectiveness and their favourability to radio effectiveness was growing. Across the same period J-ET made radio easy to buy.

Without J-ET, commercial radio would have a substantially smaller share of advertising today.

Douglas McArthur was CEO of Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) between 1992-2006, and is now chairman of UK Online Measurement Ltd (UKOM)