For over 20 years in the media business, we have lived in a world where workflow automation has taken a back seat to strategic initiatives (such as ROI metrics, audience measurement, and proprietary client initiatives) instead of moving forward with it in tandem.
As Irwin Gotlieb said at this year’s AAAA Media Conference and Tradeshow, reinventing business practices is now about our survival. To be clear, what I consider to be automated workflow is not online negotiations, but rather automating the fulfillment of the results of our negotiations, and the stewardship of those campaigns through integrations between buyer and seller systems.
There are still media buyers that depend on faxes to communicate orders to their media sales counterparts. To those buyers, shame on you; your systems suppliers have offered electronic transmission capabilities for years!
However, even these automation capabilities are inadequate at best.
Other industries—such as healthcare, automotive, consumer packaged goods, publishing, and major retail—havemandated integrated technology workflows as the cost doing business with them, and have gained co-operation and operational efficiencies as a result.
The majority of the media-buying community has paid lip service to workflow, but done nothing. Our media trading partners have developed workflows, and innovative ways of using technology, in a vacuum. Meanwhile, media buyers have failed to grasp the importance of automated workflows, and therefore have not moved their vendors to actively participate in the workflow conversations that have taken place under the auspices of our vertical trade associations and/or implement their recommendations.
Automated workflows in emerging media have been slowed by this legacy thinking, and now agency systems vendors are realizing that our current highly manual model of stewardship is not sustainable.
We have been complacent, and allowed our vendors to make us choose between workflow and strategic enhancements, instead of moving them both forward or exercising the supreme motivator of finding vendors that will do so.
The media business is at a crossroads, as we reinvent business practices while we sustain legacy practices. We must strike a balance between the effort required to compensate for 20 years of complacency, and living in a world where change happens all around us every day. Agencies must actively partner with media and trade associations, and demand that our systems vendors do the same.
So, is it too late for eBusiness? Perhaps in the legacy model. However, as new business practices emerge, the opportunity exists to transform a highly manual ecosystem to a well-oiled integrated workflow machine, or have technologists impose their solutions upon us. It’s your choice.
