Invision: Electronic Communication Between TV Buyers and Sellers: Why Are We 'Stuck' on Contract and Invoice Transmissions? - Ashley Barretto - MediaBizBloggers

In an era of unprecedented technological advancements there is wide acknowledgment that there are inefficiencies in the television buysell process Why then hasn39t technology or common sense eliminated these inefficienciesWe had something of a start back in the 90s with a push by industry committees vendors and business partners that resulted in standards being developed for electronic communication of contracts and invoices between trading partners But we seem to have stalled since thenReceiving invoices electronically helped agencies facilitate the aggregation of invoices from the various media outlets running portions of an overall national campaign thereby streamlining the reconciliation process of quotboughtquot versus quotairedquot and enabling speedy invoice payment promises promisesReceiving contracts electronically ensured that agencies had the same version of the negotiated deal ie the reserved inventory from the seller39s system How that inventory is subsequently utilized and verified is a different storyElectronic contracts and invoices oneway communication back to the agency eliminate significant manual processes But they do not provide the complete electronic audit trail necessary to ensure that what was ordered was accurately communicated and actually aired in terms of the brand unit length date time and copy For this to happen the various systems in the process ie agency systems sales management systems and traffic systems must have a standardized way of identifying an individual piece of business from its inception through its lifeA unit or a reserved slot of inventory originates when a seller responds to a buyer RFP and the two trading partners settle on a deal The unit is created in the seller39s system and is communicated back to the agency The unit subsequently goes through a number of changes split into multiple units combined with another unit allocated to a specific brand assigned a specific piece of copy slotted to run in a specific break position on a particular day All this happens through manual instructions between the various parties resulting in overhead all around with inefficiencies and inaccuraciesAn improved process could look something like this1 The agency sends the network an RFP2 The network builds a deal in their ad sales system and sends the contract EDI to the agency3 The EDI transaction carries unit serial numbers which become the serial numbers of record4 The agency stores the unit serial numbers in their system5 The agency does the allocation in their system which happens across the width of the media platforms they are running the campaign on but instead of sending allocation instructions they send specific unit level allocations amp8211 across all media platforms using the network39s serial numbers6 The network sends all unit level data to their traffic system for airing7 Units air at the network and the network sends invoices to the agency with units identified by their serial number8 All communicationreconciliation is done at the unit levelAs media outlets proliferate across a growing number of platforms electronic communication and verification will become even more critical Cross media buys and cross media liability management add to the complexity and needThere is a lot of good work underway with the 4A39s ebiz for media initiative that expands the communication between trading partners to a robust set of twoway transactions and the 4A39s and ANA39s ADID asset coding system However unless agency systems sales systems and traffic systems can have twoway communication at an inventory unit level the electronic workflow will not be complete and inefficiencies will persistAshley Barretto is Senior Vice President Client Services for INVISION IncRead all Ashley39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Invision MediaBizBloggers

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Invision: Electronic Communication Between TV Buyers and Sellers: Why Are We 'Stuck' on Contract and Invoice Transmissions? - Ashley Barretto - MediaBizBloggers

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Invision: Electronic Communication Between TV Buyers and Sellers: Why Are We 'Stuck' on Contract and Invoice Transmissions? - Ashley Barretto - MediaBizBloggers

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