• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, March 1, 2006

ORLANDO -- Spot radio has made great strides in e-business, particularly in electronic invoicing capabilities, a top agency executive said here Wednesday.

"Spot radio has been tremendous," said McCann Worldgroup CIO Greg Smith as he moderated a panel session at the 4As' media conference dealing with e-biz. Much of the headway is due to a landmark co-venture by Katz and Interep.

Smith said one agency told him 25 percent of its invoices were sent electronically in February 2005, a figure that jumped to more than 50 percent in February 2006.

The two rep firms joined together last year to launch radioinvoices.com, providing electronic invoicing opportunities. Together the firms do $850 million in e-invoicing business. Clients and agencies have been pressing for increased e-biz progress in order to cut costs.

"If we could cut the cost of buying local (television and radio) by 20 to 25 percent, that would be huge for this industry," said Michael Donovan, chairman-CEO of Donovan Data Systems.

In addition to electronic invoicing, Katz can now send proposals electronically, receive orders electronically (all Donovan agencies will be able to do this in the next few weeks), and send orders to the Clear Channel stations which have their own traffic system (it expects to add Wicks and Marketron soon).

So far, some 3,000 stations and over 150 agencies have signed up for e-invoicing with Katz. Katz CIO David Prager, who sat on the panel, acknowledged spot television is ahead of radio, but radio is "rapidly catching up."

"We've spent a lot of time making this happen," Prager said.