The ad tech sector has been making a lot of promises about bringing digital media’s perks – real-time measurement, data targeting, scale – to linear TV. But many broadcasters and media agencies have balked at the idea of flipping the TV ecosystem up-side down. There’s a reason it works the way it does, they say, and we shouldn’t be so quick to throw everything out.
The sentiment has given rise to a different vision of the future of media. Instead of creating a whole new buying process for the digital age, why not just add automation to the process as it currently exists?
Technology supporting what’s come to be called “automated guaranteed direct” or just “automated guaranteed” in both digital and traditional media has been quietly building steam over the past several years. In automated guaranteed, buyers work with avails, insertion orders and contracts the same way they’ve done for decades, but use an online system that makes the process user-friendly and real-time.
Last year, AppNexus launched an experiment in guaranteed direct automation called Twixt, and Canadian startup Juice Mobile released its own take on RFP automation for mobile, called Nectar. Just yesterday, supply-side technology provider Rubicon announced it had spent $30 million to acquire two automated guaranteed startups so it could start building out its own product.
But long before Rubicon took interest, New York-based tech company Mediaocean was one of the biggest players in the space. Over the last three years, it’s been building automated guaranteed direct platforms for a range of digital and traditional media channels. This month it finished beta testing the final piece of the product, and now has a solution that it says automates the traditional TV contracts process end-to-end.
A big part of automating traditional TV buying, said Mediaocean president Wally Oakes, is automating changes to campaign contracts. “We provide a facility now called eContracts, which allows the broadcaster, as they’re changing things on their side, to electronically send what is going to run to the agency, and they can do an automated comparison.”
Last week the company added a new solution that deals with post-contracts as well. In a TV buy, like in any media buy, what’s ordered isn’t always what’s delivered — some ads might get preempted, or programs jostled around. At the completion of a contract, the broadcaster sends what’s called a post-contract to the media agency, describing what was actually delivered and how it compares to what was ordered (often using Numeris ratings to compare actual reach/frequency to what was promised).
Most of that paperwork had to be done on a spreasheet and delivered by e-mail. Mediaocean now provides an interface for broadcasters and agencies to build, change and submit contracts instantaneously.
Post-contracts are the final piece of a larger project that Mediaocean has undertaken to automate every step of the TV buying process in Canada. The company’s automated solutions for avails, booking, contracts and post-contracts make up a package that streamlines and digitizes the four major steps in TV transactions – no spreadsheet or e-mail required.
CBC test launch meets with success
CBC is the first broadcaster to integrate the most recent post-contract solution into its media sales. Over the past several months, it has been testing the system with several of Mediaocean’s agency clients, including OMD, PHD, Touché!PHD, Havas Media and IPG Mediabrands.
“Each agency designated a couple of people and a couple of contracts, and they’d send it over – and it worked so well, and the buyers were so enthused, they were calling their CBC reps saying ‘Send me more [post-contracts],'” said Oakes. “CBC had to call us and say, ‘Can you rein the agencies in? We weren’t ready for that volume yet.’ We were thrilled, because it meant there was real value there.”
The CBC has since made automated post-contracts available to any buyer, and the solution is now available for other broadcasters to implement.
The suite of products was created by Mediaocean’s Canadian arm specifically for the Canadian market. TV buying in Canada is very different than buying in the U.S., and the same solutions would not work there, Oakes said.
“Canada’s TV buying workflow is probably the most automated of all the major media in North America. We’re more automated than the U.S.,” he said. “If you compare buying network TV in Canada to what goes on in buying network in the U.S., there’s still a ton of manual processes.”
