Start-up Advvy aims to revolutionise media trading with new platform Unibrief
Advvy founders Tristan Ozinga and Chris Macauley claim new trading platform could save agencies millions
A Queensland start-up is hoping a new approach to media trading, from brief to booking, will revolutionise the sector and create a fundamental shift in the way agencies handle media.
With programmatic the word on everyones lips, Advvy founders Tristan Ozinga and Chris Macauley, believe the industry needs to take a step back and look at the entire media process before moving forward.
The pair, who share experience across traditional and digital media sales, built a radio trading platform initially that used a cloud-based database; however, industry players were not ready to embrace it.
“We were just a little bit too ahead of the curve but while there were efficiencies that the agencies could completely see, the radio industry was not ready for that level of management,” Ozinga said.
“What we have learned from this is that the problem for traditional media programmatic is not real time bidding systems – it’s not the transactional side of things, it’s really around workflow automation. We can’t get to a level of sophistication until we actually automate the basics.”
The result is the Unibrief program which allows agencies to take briefs from clients, pitch them out to media, assess, plan and book through a single interface that works across devices.
“We plan to build an end-to-end media training platform that will facilitate all the communication, all the trading and the seamless transfer of data from booking to billing,” Macauley said.
“Our platform will be able to give agencies the ability to create one brief once per campaign ands then it will synch into the contacts that they have and then the TV part of the brief will be sent to TV, radio and to as many contacts as you want with one click. That, in itself, removes about a day a week from a planning team.”
The pair have estimated that use of the platform at a large media agency could generate savings of $8 million per year over current workflow systems.
“It’s the training wheels of the future, because from there we are going to hook into the billings systems and then, eventually, straight out from the booking systems on the publisher side,” Ozinga said.
The system goes live on May 19 with first results expected by the partners within three months.
The company is already speaking with major agencies about the possibility of rolling out across Asia.
“The advantage for us is that there is four or five companies that control 80% of the media, so if we can show them efficiencies in the Australian market, there are enormous savings that can be found.” Ozinga said.
While the system has been designed to automate a lot of the processes around media planning and buying, Ozinga said it still needed to maintain the human element that allowed people to make judgement calls on plans that programmatic algorithms are unable to handle.
“The key to our platform is maintaining the human connection. Humans are still integral to our industry, it is a relationship-based industry and there are certain things such as radio with live reads, with talent, with events, which is not a programmatic buy,” Macauley said.
He said algorithmically-driven spot plans would be also be challenged by the consolidation of media, with companies representing a variety of different mediums.
“That is why we see the future not as man versus machine, it’s man and machine.”
Simon Canning
