• October 2, 2000

AdExchange issues Lieberman study highlighting the ingredients to saving time, money and allowing professionals to focus on strategic and business goals.

AdExchange recently commissioned Lieberman Research Worldwide to conduct research and interview both online advertising buyers and sellers in an attempt to understand how they allocated their time across key business activities and their reaction to the processes.

Not surprisingly, the study found that media professionals - buyers (64%) and sellers (60%) - spend a significant portion of their time on administrative activities in support of the media process instead of critical strategic tasks such as client development, media planning and analysis. This means that nearly two-thirds of professional time is currently devoted to activities that do not contribute directly to a company's bottom line.

Additionally, according to the study, buyers and planners consider online media buying more time consuming than traditional media buying

The majority of advertising sales reps polled reported that client development, although considered to be the most important task for sales people (80%), only receives 40% of the reps' time.

As it stands, buyers and planners perceive the process to be even more time intensive than traditional buying and find site reps difficult to reach. The result is often the loss of business for the site, and of course, lost time for the buyer.

The impact of not reaching a site rep is the risk that the site will be excluded from the buy (86%). Further, because this is a barrier to completing a buy, many sites will be repeatedly excluded thus directly affecting their revenue stream.