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for placing spot buys
Teaching folks how to use new electronic systems
By David Everitt
New electronic methods of placing TV spots are supposed to be a godsend. They can speed up the transaction process between advertising partners and create greater efficiency.
They also pose a problem.
Advertising people at rep firms, agencies and cable operators are not necessarily techno-wizards. So how do you get them all up to speed when it comes to a new way of ordering and billing through a high-tech internet-based system?
At the spot-cable rep firm of National Cable Communications, a new software system promises to use technology to teach technology.
Up until last summer, NCC, owned by AT&T Media Services, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications and Time Warner, was relying on the exchange of faxes to send orders to cable systems.
"The old system just wasn’t built to handle the transaction load," says Bruce Raisner, NCC’s director of training and development. "We had to move on to a new way of doing business."
The new system allows each party in the spot-cable transaction to transmit all the necessary information and documents about scheduling, ordering and billing via the web, but also requires a lot of training to familiarize all the deal-makers with the intricacies of the procedure.
Here again, the old way of doing things wasn’t up to the challenge.
According to Raisner, NCC would have had to instruct everyone by traveling to each group’s location and training them one-on-one. Now, a new system from Centra Software allows people to learn by visiting a virtual classroom on the web.
Centra’s software has been around since 1997 and is being used by almost 700 customers in both the private and public sectors. The system’s online instructor can speak to and interact with the trainees. The sessions can include Power Point slides and test-taking, as well as stints in which the trainees can work on the program that they’re learning.
A Centra online classroom can accommodate up to 1,000 people but is most often geared for 10 to 20. In some cases, trainees can be broken up into groups that work together electronically on solving a particular problem.
"Consider all the friction and cost ordinarily involved in getting people together for a training session of this kind," says Chris Reed, Centra’s vice president of corporate strategy.
"This system can make these meetings happen faster, especially for those people who are constantly on the move. One person can be in Singapore and the others in Europe."
NCC’s Raisner believes the Centra system will save his company a lot of money.
"You can virtually eliminate all travel expenses," he says. "We had 12 trainers last January, and we were down to seven trainers in October, with only two travel visits since we started using the system."
With the help of the eLearning software, NCC trained its own people to handle media schedules on the web and is now in the process of training people at the cable operators. Agency executives will be the third group to use the virtual classrooms.
Raisner is hopeful that the Centra system can be used in other ways as well.
"I think we’ve just scratched the surface," he says. "For instance, we could use Centra to create chat rooms on running the spot-cable transaction system, for mentoring purposes.
"It could be a way of getting people together to talk about important events of the week, such as perhaps a new Nielsen ratings product being introduced. It’s not as advanced as video-conferencing but still it can be both audio and visual."
January 23, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-David Everitt covers technology for Media Life, writing from Huntington, N.Y.
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