• by David Kaplan , March 3, 2005

Almost akin to Alexander Graham Bell's famous first telephonic words, "Watson, come here, I need you," Horizon Media Wednesday completed the first electronic data interchange order to local Viacom stations, under the watchful eye of the Television Advertising Bureau's EDI Committee. TVB, along with many other industry organizations, has been working to achieve a paperless, open-standard order process for several years. Horizon and Viacom both employed the TVB open-standards schema, the industry-endorsed "hub transport" based on Web services, a non-proprietary architecture, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies' electronic registry. The registry is publicly available to any media buyer and network.

Microsoft, Spot Buy Spot, and Strata Marketing all provided the software and platform for the trading process. By sending orders electronically instead of the inefficient handwritten method, media buyers and sellers hope to end the need to re-key orders. The full life cycle of a buy includes Order, Revision, Makegood, Broadcast Instructions, and Invoice.

Last month, the 4A's held a brief seminar at the offices of Universal McCann to preview the electronic data transfer hub--known as "eBiz for Media." The registry, at www.eBizformedia.com, is comprised of two parts: the Advertising Industry Registry and the XML Schema Repository. XML is the software transaction standard developed by the AAAA's and MediaPort, a defunct venture sponsored by Interpublic, Omnicom, and WPP, and headed by media veteran Mike Lotito, who now runs his own media audit service, IQMedia.