On December 11th, the IAB UK and AdMonsters hosted a technical forum on buy-side trading systems. While I was not able to attend myself, all indications are that the event succeeded in bringing together the relevant stakeholders from leading agencies and media owners in the UK. The two groups collaborated to sketch out what short term next steps were needed to ensure that these workflow platforms are adopted successfully in the market. The best part of such a collaborative approach is that these steps reflect that increased efficiencies are a benefit to all the entire industry and not just agencies: buy-side trading systems aren’t a problem to be solved but a piece of the puzzle to be integrated into the whole.
Above all, the attendees unanimously agreed that the development of an API or some type of middleware that allows the multitude of systems — at least 3 currently deployed — to start to talk to each other. Additionally, a lot of discussion centered around product naming conventions on the media owner side and working toward some best practices to ease the flow of information.
The conclusion of this particular forum doesn’t apply just to trading systems. It is essential that vendors provide APIs for their products. It’s just as essential that publishers demand these APIs. Even if as a publisher you aren’t currently organized to take advantage of such an API, assume that you will eventually need to in order to remain competitive.
The discussion regarding buy-side trading systems will continue in earnest early in 2009 and will be led by AdMonsters, IAB UK, and the IPA.