Online media buyers bogged down by admin

According to Shawn Riegsecker, president and co-founder of media services and technology firm Centro, the media-buying industry is relying on out-dated tools to manage the process.

There are consequences. They are evident from Centro's recent web-based survey of nearly 300 media professionals. It found 85% spend the bulk of their time on administrative or logistical elements of a campaign when they would prefer to spend more time on creative or strategic activities.

In addition:

- 43% of the industry spends more than four hours a day working in Excel

- Nearly half (49%) of the industry spends more than four hours composing or responding to email strictly for work purposes

- 45% of media planning professionals work more than 10 hours per day.

It was this use of outdated technology leading to time wasted on administrative tasks that prompted Centro to develop Transis, an automated media buying system. The software automates the planning process while negating the need for outdated technology, such as faxes and phone calls, because everything is handled through a browser-based application.

In an interview with AdExchanger.com, Riegsecker stated, "Our whole belief was that, with the fragmentation of media choices, agencies and buyers wouldn't be able to scale digital via old processes and using outdated tools like spreadsheets, emails, phones and faxes. Great software was going to have to come into the mix to automate the entire process from beginning to end. We figured if we could create automated software that could profitably scale local online, which is one of the hardest and most fragmented parts of the industry, we could help agencies become more profitable by giving them the software to use also."

Tags: advertising agency, media buyer, media planning, online media, software