• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 8, 2011

Marketers at brands or agencies managing dozens of media buys across the Internet know it can get complicated. Important information, from pricing to placement, sometimes can get lost in transactional back-end processes. On Tuesday, TRAFFIQ will officially roll out supply chain and workflow management ad media-buying tools.

The tools -- Private Marketplaces, Finance Management, and Multiple User Permissions -- plug into TRAFFIQ's marketplace aggregating publisher and ad network relationships.

Since many agencies want to maintain a direct sales relationship with publishers, Private Marketplaces allows marketers to add publishers and information on direct relationships with salespeople. They can keep the relationships intact, whether they sell through the TRAFFIQ network. Previously, advertisers were restricted to working with the more than 3,000 vendors and using a specific sales representative assigned to the Marketplace.

The third-party hosted system can also plug into internal agency systems, according to TRAFFIQ Chief Product Officer Eric Picard.

Aside from the Private Marketplace, the move to rationalize data between multiple media-buying reporting systems prompted TRAFFIQ to create a Finance Management tool. "There are many cases where an agency, depending on their contractual relationship with advertisers, will have overhead expenses or built into the media plan as part of the cost," Picard said. "The tool was designed to accurately reflect the costs in the reporting features."

The Finance Management tool aims to become a time-saving feature for buyers, so when reports get pulled they don't have to go back and tweak the numbers to reflect the actual relationships. Picard said agencies can expose clients to the data and the platform management fees separately. Fees are managed on a campaign-by-campaign basis, reflecting the varying costs agencies have for different clients and campaigns.

Multiple User Permissions gives agencies the ability to set multiple user permissions, so managers can assign specific advertisers to specific individuals or teams within an agency. Multiple levels allow managers to set platform access levels depending on the need, making the platform scalable for large agencies with multiple clients and buying groups.

TRAFFIQ has competition in some services it offers. For example, Centro's Transis product offers digital media planning. Its tools automate time-intensive, repetitive parts of the media-buying process and centralize all communication into one hub. Both Mediabank and Donovan Data systems offer reporting and analyses for media buyers.

While there's room for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or SAP to come in and design a workflow system for media buyers or a supply chain management process around advertising, the outdated back-end infrastructure of agencies that need the systems is not designed to handle them. Picard believes TRAFFIQ has an advantage here.

TRAFFIQ's marketplace offers more than 100 billion daily impressions from 2,200 brand-name and niche publishers and more than 400 leading agencies and advertisers.