• by Wayne Friedman , December 16, 2020

A new TV advertising advocacy group is starting and is looking to advance automation of media ad sales, with a number of local TV station group executives as initial members.

The Media Ad Sales Council is being formed by Matrix, whose Monarch ad sales platform manages more than $13 billion in media ad revenue, according to the company.

The council will meet monthly, with the goal of talking about the entire media advertising ecosystem and how TV will be bought and sold within the next three years.

This includes examining manual buy-sell transactions that can be automated and exploring the development of what it says is a “next-gen independent rep firm platform.”

For the last several years, local TV stations -- with growing competition from digital media -- have been moving slowly to accelerate the automation of local TV advertising, including advanced advertising and programmatic solutions.

Executives from local TV station groups who are contributing members include:

Al Lustgarten, senior vice president of Hearst Television; Melanie Webb, vice president, sales operations at Tegna; Missy Evenson, vice president of sales, local media, E.W. Scripps; Brett Adamczyk, vice president of finance and strategy at Cox Media Group; and Peter Jones, head of local sales/senior director of strategic partners, at Premion, the OTT advertising sales group, a division own by Tegna.

In addition, Joe Lampert, senior program manager, CNOmniMedia Solutions Group, a media consulting firm, is also on board.

The founders of the group are Mark Gorman, CEO, Matrix and Brenda Hetrick, CRO of Matrix.