• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, October 13, 2011

Ad stewardships companies Donovan Data Systems and MediaBank recently announced plans to merge into a combined company to be called MediaOcean.  How should we think about it?  I will start with this premise: the advertising and media industry needs better and truly open and neutral multiplatform advertising management, stewardship and billing.

It is my hope and belief that this merger, if it passes muster with government regulators, could help deliver that. First, I don't have any personal or financial interest in this merger. I know and like both CEO’s, MediaBank’s Bill Wise and Donovan’s Michael Donovan, but my interest here is as an involved and passionate member of the industry.

Here are the reasons why I hope that the merger ultimately happens:

Multi-platform media coming fast. Every major advertiser in the U.S. now spreads its ad dollars across multiple digital media. All of the major agencies are now trying to coordinate their buys across these platforms. All major media owners and ad sellers are trying to do the same. Nielsen is now including web video viewing in its C3 TV ratings, together with TV viewing. Someone has to build multiplatform into the stewardship systems. I don’t know that these companies can't do it on their own, but I believe that together they can.

Need transparency among media owners and among media buyers. Love them or hate them, Donovan has done a great job keeping the TV ad market highly competitive among TV media owners. Its system, while certainly very dated, is standardized and pretty open and gives all TV sellers a level playing field. It does the same for buyers.

TV systems need modernization. The systems running TV ads today must modernize. Donovan only recently added web interfaces. A future of data- driven targeted ads delivered across multiple digital platforms – on TV, computers, tablets and mobile phones – is coming fast. They need to combine their extraordinary legacy experience, relationships and systems with the digital chops and vision of MediaBank to get us where we need the systems to be.

Reduced friction in online advertising and targeting. Online display advertising could have grown much faster over the past ten years, and attracted more brand advertising, if the buying, trafficking and billing processes surrounding it had not been so expensive and cumbersome. Efforts to fix this at the industry level have all failed because each of the big online players, the search and portal players and large media buyers, wanted to own and control the "industry-standard" platform. MediaOcean could fill that vacuum.

Neutrality. What happens if Donovan and MediaBank don't merge? I don't know, but I bet that Google will have a better shot at being the long-term winner in advertising automation and stewardship. Or maybe, we might see a strong move by the number three player in TV ad stewardship, Strata. Strata has a great system for smaller media companies (my company Simulmedia is a customer). Of course, Strata is owned by Comcast, the owner of NBC Universal, which now collectively owns and controls one-sixth of all TV ad spots in the U.S. How do folks feel about the owner of the winning stewardship market being controlled by either the largest owner of online ad inventory or the largest owner of TV ad inventory, and having every company’s pricing and sales data?

What do you think? Is MediaOcean a good thing for the industry?