• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, August 5, 2003

On Sunday afternoon I was relaxing at home, after having sat by the pool for an hour or so, and looking forward to this coming Monday which I had decided to take as a personal day.

I was looking forward to delaying for one day my return to work so that I could spend some time with my family and relax for just a bit longer. It was at this time that I thought I would write this week's article detailing three of my biggest pet peeves concerning the Interactive Advertising Industry. A little "vent session" if you will to allow me to express some of my frustrations in the hopes that we could all hear, truly listen, and act upon them so that maybe we all can feel a little better about our daily experiences.

MEDIA PLANNER PET PEEVE #1 - THE BUYING PROCESS

There are a number of tools that allow us to automate the RFP process and many of them will issue insertion orders as well, but possibly my biggest pet peeve is this whole counter-signature of Insertion Orders.

I send you an IO, you sign it and send it back to me, and I re-sign the form that I sent out to you just so you can be sure that I sent it to you in the first place. Could this possibly be any more inefficient or more of a waste of time? This back and forth wastes hours on a large buy, is a constant distraction, and is worse when our fax machines going nutty, which sometimes happen. I once had to refax a counter-signature 4 times to a rep because it kept getting lost in the shuffle.

MEDIA PLANNER PET PEEVE #2 - INVOICING

The process for delivering invoices to the agency for campaigns that have run can be more than difficult. On our Insertion Orders we have made 3 addendums detailed right upfront and one of these addendums states that if we do not receive an invoice from the site within 90 days of the end of a campaign, then the payment is forfeit. Unbelievably there are still a few sites that push back on this line. By pushing back on this line the sites are saying their billing system may not be able to guarantee that they can invoice us correctly for all inventory within 3 months of the end of a campaign. Are you kidding?

Agencies need to close the books and reconcile campaigns within 30 days of the end of a campaign, hence this clause. This is not a difficult request, and in defense of most of the top 50 sites this is rarely an issue, but for the rest of you online - if your systems cannot take care of this then please stop accepting IO's and get this fixed immediately.

MEDIA PLANNER PET PEEVE #3 - LISTEN FIRST, SPEAK SECOND

This is one of my more repetitive points but if you are a sales person who is calling either myself or any other media professional to try and pitch our clients the please take note as this is very important.

First thing to do is ask who are our clients are and what their online campaign objectives. Do not immediately launch into a monologue on why we should be purchasing media from you without having some idea what we are doing. This is a HUGE turn-off and is the surest way to get me to not listen to you at all.

I know it sounds like my pet peeves all involve the sales process, and unfortunately that is the source of some of my pain. The rest of my pains are things that I have the power to change and these are things that my teams and I improve upon on a daily basis. The items I mentioned here are ones that I am sure many other media professionals share with pain.

What are your pet peeves? Visit the message boards and let us know.

Thanks.