• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 22, 2010

Interpublic and Microsoft today will announce a move that is expected to reenergize Madison Avenue's ongoing attempts to develop a simple, industry-wide system to remove much of the paperwork, faxing and human labor involved in processing media buys. The initiative, which Microsoft and Interpublic's Mediabrands division have been incubating internally for the past year under the codename "MOMS" (Media Operations Management System), will officially be turned over to the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) today, which will invite other agencies, marketers, media and technology solutions providers to become part of an industry coalition.

While Interpublic and Microsoft have already made significant progress in the process, developing blueprints for the steps necessary to overhaul the workflow involved in planning and buying media, as well as managing the overall advertising campaign process, the companies say it is important to begin involving others in the industry - specially other big agency holding companies and media technology platforms - to develop genuine industry standards and specifications for using technology to replace mundane human tasks that create redundancy and rack up extraneous costs in the media and advertising process.

"It is the Holy Grail," says Quentin George, Chief Digital Officer at Mediabrands, adding that the effort has gone by many names in the past - EDI (for electronic data interchange) and eBiz (for electronic business) - but he says it has taken on new impetus with the emergence of digital media platforms, exchanges and trading systems.

In fact, a 2006 AAAA assessment of the media industry's ability to conduct business electronically, ironically found that online media was the least capable of doing so, and that most big publishers and agencies still conducted many of their most routine processes - things like requests, orders and invoices - with paper and faxes.

While trade groups like the AAAA and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and various online industry players have since focused on digitizing those processes, Mediabrands' George says the new online advertising "ecosystem" that has emerged in its place still lacks standardized protocols that would enable all of the industry's players to seamlessly integrate their data processing. And the emergence of a multitude of new, third-party intermediaries - online ad networks, data exchanges, demand-side platforms, etc. - have only served to complicate the process of processing even further.

"Nobody wins when the data is not normalized," George says, noting that as sophisticated as the myriad of players are, there still is a "tremendous amount of pain" and "friction" in the process, which reduces the profit margins of agencies, drives up the costs to clients, and slows payment and processing down to the media.

"Agencies make less profit. Clients don't win. And we end up with the finest digital minds working on the most mundane tasks," he says.