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As "Old Media" increasingly turns to the Internet, many of the old rules no longer apply. Understanding the new rules is important to the success of businesses that drive their revenue from internet advertising.
In the "old media" model, optimizing the order-to-cash model was the key to success. Not surprisingly, this is also true in the "new media" model. What is surprising is that while this process shares a common name, the process, terms and definitions are very different. Understanding these differences is critical to success.
To help drive this understanding, ESG teamed with The Northern Virginia Technology Council's (NVTC) and Oracle to host a forum entitled "Old Media Meets New Media: Advertising Sales and the Internet'.
The forum was initiated by a keynote speech by Kelly Bridges, Executive Director IT at Condé Nast. Ms. Bridges' presentation focused on the case study of a solution for order-to-cash for supporting the internet advertising requirements of Condé Nast's online division (CondéNet).
Key components of her speech were both the strategic issues (the gap in common understanding of process and terminology between old and new media decision makers), as well as, the tactical issues (how to calculate "open to sell" to support the sales cycle). Condé Nast initially embarked on this project to improve the company's ability to invoice and collect on internet advertising sold and delivered, but quickly expanded to a full order-to-cash solution as differences in old and new media were exposed.
The Condé Nast solution was comprised of traditional ERP and CRM with key integrations into the internet advertising delivery partners. The solution has allowed for greater control and insight into the business side of internet advertising with a surprising side benefit of educating executives across the old/new media divide on the differences introduced by the new model.
To illustrate and explain some of these differences, a panel discussion followed the keynote address. The panel discussion was moderated by Bill Cage, Vice President, Technology Services for ESG. Ms. Bridges and Mr. Cage were joined on the panel by John Rathbone (Oracle), Erik Swain (Clearspring Technolgies) and Jeff Burkett (Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive).
This mix of panelists representing both content and technology companies allowed discussion of a broad range of topics. Some of the conversation served to provide a basis of understanding of terms and topics in the internet advertising space. This includes definitions of the terms involved which sometimes means learning different definitions for terms that people thought they already knew (new media inventory is not your father's inventory).
The panel was able to address numerous topics around internet advertising including the coming role of viral marketing, the role of widgets content and ad delivery, how to monetize alternative media delivery (video, pod casting), and the process to collect, analyze and increase the value of traffic information.
The discussion was able to highlight many aspects of new media, but the most profound dialogue was that new media and the ability to manage internet advertising is still being defined. The panelists in this forum are at the forefront in defining how this model will work in the future and concrete, tactical solutions for dealing with the issues faced today.
To view a video replay of the discussion, click here.
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