· by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese,
7 hours ago
There's something ironic about a plan being
announced this morning by a consortium of local TV broadcasters to develop a
standard interface to accelerate electronic trading with advertisers and
agencies. The irony is that electronic media trading began with local
broadcasters and it is now coming full circle.
Remember “electronic data interchange”? No? How
about “eBiz"? Not that either? Well, those were the ad industry’s earliest
attempts to trade media electronically -- beginning with avail requests and
then on through invoices, verification and payments and posting.
Of course, some of these processes have already
gone digital, especially the back-end parts powered by the likes of Mediaocean.
For those who don't recall, it was in the late
'90s, up through the dot-com crash of 2000, when much of the attention in
electronic trading was on traditional media, especially broadcast -- not digital.
Following the dot-com crash, many of those
traditional media trading initiatives floundered or went dormant, but digital
marched along, especially Google’s structuring of the paid search marketplace
via AdWords, and ultimately the emergence of a biddable digital display
advertising marketplace.
A couple of decades later, broadcasters are back
at it. The consortium announced this morning the TIP Initiative. (TIP is
an acronym that stands for TV Interface Practices.)
The group, including Nexstar Media, Sinclair
Broadcast, TEGNA and Tribune Media, says the renewed effort recognizes
that “local TV industry has struggled with the manual nature of the advertising
buying and selling process for many years.”
Given the speed with which the industry has
embraced electronic trading its first couple of decades, I’d say the struggle
will continue for many more years, except I happen to know about some other
concurrent efforts.
Also, there's the fact that if local broadcast
media cannot adopt to electronic trading, it will become increasingly
irrelevant. More on that another time.
In the meantime, TIP’s organizers say they are
building their protocol around the following principles:
·
Local television is the
most powerful brand-building medium, connecting marketers with consumers and
advertisers. Both brands and broadcasters will benefit from the best
automation.
·
While demand is high for
local television ad inventory, transactional friction has created challenges
for buyers.
·
System-to-system
electronic processes can streamline the buying of local spot media; however,
creating interoperability takes coordination across multiple broadcast
companies.
·
Standards-based
interfaces are the best way of encouraging the needed system-to-system
interchange of transactional information.
·
Standard API interfaces
set the stage for advanced local TV and ATSC 3.0, and will greatly enhance the
efficiency of buying local media by U.S. advertising agencies.
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