Once the “gorgeous creative asset” also known as a television commercial has been birthed, it still needs to be scheduled and delivered. With more delivery points than ever, technology that’s a half-century old is clogging up the process, says ECN President and CEO Angela Tietze.
Representing more than 90% of the country’s top advertisers, ECN has been the behind-the-scenes connector of people process and technology for 27 years, Tietze explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent WideOrbit Connect conference.
The biggest challenge is to take data from disparate sources and “get it all flowing in one uniform way so that it can be ingested into receiving systems,” Tietze says.
“What seems automated even in the digital environment is ultimately still going in Excel spreadsheets to publishers around the country. Our goal is to try to not just have the digital asset be distributed or the broadcast asset delivered but to automate the scheduling behind that.”
One of ECN’s efforts was to create a standard that piggybacks on the BXF standard from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. “But that was just the beginning of it. Ultimately, it comes down to the people who have built the systems to adopt those standards in order to make it easy for people to do business. It’s still about people getting it done.”
With so many touch points between advertisers, agencies and tech providers, Tietze says a common mistake is that companies “will go build something before truly understanding the workflow and what someone just has to do in order to get their job done.”
The better course is to “go back to the source and find out what systems are being used, how they’re being used by people and what’s missing. And then be able to develop solutions that bridge that gap by enrolling the people who actually have to use them every day.”
Calling ECN’s business “the last mile,” Tietze says technology enabling more granular audience targeting “is running at light speed. What we now have to do is take these other systems and find ways to bridge that gap in order to utilize and adopt these other technologies.
“We have to make it easy for buyers to basically purchase time on in any medium for that same kind of spot and be able to transact business through the same workflows that exist today.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series on advanced TV produced at the WideOrbit Connect conference. WideOrbit is the sponsor of this series. Please find more videos here.
