I’ve been doing some research into the online display advertising channel as a natural extension to NextMark‘s media planning tools. You might assume that everything is streamlined and super-automated in this world. But I am finding that it is messy and crude, perhaps even more so than the offline world (if you can believe that).
A video from Yahoo! previewing AMP! (since rebranded as APT) does a good job of explaining some of the messy problems with today’s solutions:
“Turns out that buying and selling ads online is byzantine with inefficient processes and cumbsome legacy systems. Nothing works well or together. [..] The current system is – to put it politely – slow. It may also be inaccurate. And you know going in that you will have to overbook to cover your promise. […] You have to cobble them all together. It took ten separate contracts and two weeks. […] A disconnected process full of time-consuming manual steps and multiple approval bottlenecks to catch the mistakes inherent with the process.”
Is it just me, or does this seem a lot like list rental? (more…)