Call for media
data standards

Mike Lotito's project: Uniform buy-sell language

By Kevin Downey

    Michael Lotito is CEO of MediaPort, the online media buying service formed by the agency holding companies, Interpublic Group of Companies, Omnicom and WPP. He has put together a white paper calling for a data standard that will create a uniform system of electronic communication between media buyers and sellers. The idea is to reduce some of the inefficiencies and redundancies that bog down the back-end operations at media companies and agencies. By eliminating some of those steps, the standard is ultimately intended to save the industry money. Lotito spoke with Media Life last week about setting a data standard and the steps that MediaPort and others are taking to get an industrywide agreement on what the standard will be.



Why is a data standard needed?

    It would make everybody’s life easier.
    Here’s what a standard does: It helps computers communicate with each other.
    When we want to send data from one system to another, unless we agree on a standard way of positioning that data, then the system can’t download it automatically because it puts it in the wrong place.
    When an agency wants to send out a request for avails to a station or a request for a proposal to a magazine, it’s got to be put into a digital format that everyone can read so that the television stations or magazines can accept it.
   Then when they put a proposal together, they want to put it back into a format that everyone can understand and send it out electronically.
    Today, because there isn’t a standard, it’s all done by fax and phone. A lot of agencies literally have phone lines that you call to see if they have any money working in your market.
    What we’d like to do is make all of that electronic.
    The point simply is that you need standards so that all systems can talk to each other. Once the standards are in place then you don’t need any single technology. Any system can talk to any other system.
    The goal is that people will spend less time typing into their computers and more time evaluating media, whether selling or buying. It gets people doing what we call a high-value process rather than a low-value process.
    Typing the buy into the system is low-value. Negotiating or evaluating whether something is a good buy or a bad buy is high-value.


Why are you spearheading the effort to implement a standard?

    Because the ease of data transfer is the secret to efficiency for the industry.
    Once we move to that we believe that the industry can then save money. Instead of having someone manning the fax machine--something as simple as that--we won’t have to have that anymore. And that’s going to save money.
    My charge from our parent companies is to find ways to save the industry money.
    So we’ll build the standards first. Once the standards are done, we will build a system.
    Everybody’s system will work with those standards. But we’ll build our system based on those standards, which will help us move data efficiently between buyer and seller.


Have there been previous attempts to set standards? What’s the difference with what you are proposing, XML, from other standards, like EDI?

    Electronic standards started with EDI, specifically for cable.
   The problem is that EDI is a very expensive standard because you need technology to literally connect to another buyer or seller.
    The advantage of an internet-based language to create a data standard--XML--is that it can work through the web. So you don’t need to build an expensive electronic connection.
    But a lot of the work that was done for EDI will be useful in helping to write the XML standard as well.
    The Television Bureau of Advertising has been working on a project with the American Association of Advertising Agencies for a long time that is very effective. We’re involved in that.
    So there are other people working on standards, but we’re trying to coordinate all of it and move it to a solution as quickly as we can.


It seems that it would be easier to set a standard on the buying side, since most agencies are already dealing with a wide range of media types and presumably have an internal standard or could put one into place. Would it be more difficult to get agreement on the seller side?

    No, I don’t think so.
    Standards are difficult no matter which side of the desk you attack them from.
    But vertically, meaning media-type by media-type, you need to get the buyers and sellers around a table and say, "let’s agree that, for example, we’re always going to call an avail request an avail request."
    That agreement is as difficult for a seller as it is for a buyer because some people will say that in their system it’s called an AR and somebody else will say it’s called an AVR.
    All we’re saying is that it doesn’t matter as long as we all agree that whenever we see the words avail request we know what it means.
    What the standard does is translate it into the code that your system will understand.
    So I don’t think it’s harder for anyone. It’s hard for everybody.


Does the emergence of cross-platform or multimedia deals on the seller's side lend itself to setting an industry standard?

    It’s easier to do cross-platform buying and selling if there is a standard. Your system will then look across media types and gather the data necessary for people to evaluate it.
    Right now, because the systems cannot gather the data in one place, we have to take it out and put it into an Excel sheet by hand and try to add them together.
    A standard will make the evaluation and the selling of multimedia buys easier.

Who is involved in setting the standard with you?

    The TVB has been working on this project for a long time and it continues to move forward.
    And then people internally here are spending time meeting with many players within the industry to start to have these conversations across all media types.
    We expect to be able to get the industry to at least react to the standards in the next three or four months.


You say in your white paper that setting a standard can be accomplished in less than a year. How can that be done and why hasn’t it been done before?

    There are two main reasons.
    One is that everyone is coming to the belief at the same time that this is useful. So it’s becoming a priority for a lot of people in the industry.
    Second is that we are going to push this standard hard. We have full-time people who are focused on making a standard a reality.
    That means they are going to meetings, gathering information, putting it into a form that everyone can read, and sending it out for comment.
    These people are focused on getting a standard done.
    In the past, whenever we’ve tried to set standards, we would put together committees of people who had full-time jobs in agencies or as sellers. And then part of the time their responsibility was to try to come up with a standard. That’s what slowed the process down.
    The only job of these people is to get a standard done, and I think that will accelerate the process. That, and having a marketplace that is ready to get a standard together.
    The point of the white paper is really to educate everyone and make sure that we are starting from the same place. The word standard is sometimes used interchangeably with other words. It’s best that we see if everyone thinks that this makes sense.
    All of the efforts that are in place now to set a standard are for vertical media efforts; they are either for spot-TV or print or magazines. We wanted to make sure that everyone understood that the goal is to build a multimedia standard.


What is the next step in getting the industry to agree on a standard?

    We will continue to work with the trade organizations of each of the vertical media, as well as the Four As, to organize the meetings, to review standards, to comment on them, and to get agreement in the industry.

November 26, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for  Media Life.

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