Teaching Old Advertisers New (Media) Tricks

Written by Aditya Kishore

Friday, August 22. 2008 at 10:50 AM EDT Post a comment

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It's increasingly clear that the growth of new media will be dependent on advertising. But new digital advertising approaches have been hampered by the lack of consistent metrics and the ability to consolidate ad buying across the board.

Advertisers and media buyers want to reach their key demographics, and have no innate fondness for one medium over another, whether it's old media or new. As a result, most ad campaigns today are cross-media buys that include a combination of TV, newspaper, billboard, etc.

With new advertising possibilities emerging via channels such as online video, gaming, and mobile, advertisers are intrigued. Still, they are struggling to integrate these media and their performance metrics into the existing buying process.

As a result, there's a tendency to simply hold off on some digital buys, or limit them to small, experimental investments. Established vendors that provide the software and systems for buying traditional media have been slow to address this issue, and therefore have delayed the evolution of the advertising market to some extent.

New players, however, are starting to target this challenge. I spoke to Media Bank this week, a company that is targeting established vendors' positions in this market with a system focused on integrated, cross-platform ad buying and analysis. The company has been in business for about four years, but acquired advertising software company Datatech last year, which was founded in 1980.

The media buying process and the systems that facilitate it are clearly not the sexy part of digital media. Still, for "new" media to succeed it seems to me that new cross-platform ad buying is going to be critical, and the industry will need the software and systems to enable it.