The Broken Digital Buying Process

By Shawn Riegsecker, Founder & President

Dozens of spreadsheets, email correspondence, and paper-based contracts sent back and forth. Multiple tools integrating with different systems and dozens of report formats that need to be broken down and merged. The digital media industry is still reliant on tools and processes that were the standard over a decade ago, and, as a result, media planners are struggling with long workdays and a disproportionate amount of time devoted to logistics versus strategy and high-value activities.

Something needs to change.

Recently, we conducted a survey of the digital media planning community to gauge workforce productivity and efficiency. Although this is often discussed in the industry, the study findings introduce evidence of the need for greater efficiency and scalability in the digital media planning process.

According to the result findings:

• 85 percent of respondents state directly that they would like to spend more time on highly strategic work, but are required to devote the bulk of their time to managing administrative or logistical activities

• Nearly half (43 percent) of the industry spends more than four hours a day working in Excel

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

• 45 percent of media planning professionals work more than 10 hours per day

The conclusion can be drawn that nearly half of a media planner’s workday is spent utilizing legacy technologies to conduct administrative tasks, leaving little time for strategy, client services and data interpretation.  There is a need for a more efficient process to not only balance the ratio of administrative to strategic work, but also improve overall job satisfaction.

The need for automation has been evident for years, but these survey findings are a further illustration of the demand from the front lines for a better work flow system. When Centro launched Transis in March, it was the culmination of many years of exploring the unique needs of the media buyer and creating the tools and features that would solve them. Feedback that we gained from this survey is immeasurably valuable as we continue the evolution and enhancement of our technology and services to help agencies become more profitable and allow their teams to focus on more strategic and creative activities while providing a more sustainable work-life balance.

We plan to conduct future research to better understand the digital advertising workplace which will, in turn, help us better serve you through our services and technology.