At the 2007 AAAA Media Conference, McCann Worldgroup’s Greg Smith said, “eBiz must be a priority for you and your organization.” GroupM’s Mark Goldstein in his opening address to the Media Conference said, “We must make significant progress in eBiz.”
So how have we done in one year?
Greg’s message got through … somewhat. And Mark, we’ve made some progress. However, there is still frustration and confusion.
Here are some comments that have come directly from some of the vertical trade associations, some that have had success in eBuisness, some that are still struggling and trying to get things adopted.
“The key to increased adoption is constant engagement and participation from the Agency community.”
“We would like to see agencies embrace eBusiness further and dedicate more resources in order to ensure the initiative is ultimately successful.”
“We need aggressive marketing of the benefits to all parties; pressure generated from the management of the affected companies and further cooperation among the various software vendors.”
“People are more interested in keeping their media's technologies proprietary.”
“Commitment from the buy-side systems has stalled; the media have spent significant time, money and resources to move projects forward.”
“The agency commitment to push their vendors to work with our media has not been realized.”
As you read through these comments, is there a common theme? Each of these comments tell us that there must be active and immediate agency involvement in eBuisness efforts. Vendors must be able to innovate. However they must innovate in concert with business practices. As agencies, we must get better at articulating and delivering consistent and clear messages to all our vendors.
There must be agreement amongst all parties to adopt common Standards, by industry vertical markets. Many of the vertical market trade associations have devoted time and effort to developing standards, there is no room in our industry for squabbling over who’s standards are more open, we must recognize the business needs, and vendor capabilities, and allow for varying degrees of use of a standards, not different versions.
eBuisness isn’t about standards. It isn’t about XML, it isn’t about the AAAA registry. It’s about system to system conductivity supporting business practices. Standards are the means of supporting this conductivity. We have to do things in a simple, transparent, and universal manner.
The AAAA has spent substantial amounts of money, building a cross-media registry of trading partners. How do we leverage across all media to accelerate eBuisiness adoption? How do you move eBusiness forward? Talk to the chairs and the members the various AAAA committees about developing industry priorities.
Agency system vendors will do what their customers ask them to do. However we are asking in a lot of different ways, and in some cases for other things, let’s all get on the same page.
