I was recently talking to the Chief Digital Officer of a large agency that does a lot of digital media buying. He has been working closely with a number of software providers to standardize his operations on a media management system. Getting all his vendor information, order management, and billing information has been a huge undertaking. Apparently, half the battle at an agency is getting paid (getting paid in less than 120 days is the other half)!

We were talking about some of the upfront processes behind putting together a media plan, which were mostly manual: putting the actual plan together in Excel, trading e-mails back and forth with vendors in the RFP process, trafficking ad tags, collecting screenshots, etc. Wouldn’t it be valuable if computers could streamline much of that work, and connect buyers and sellers together more seamlessly?

He agreed that it would truly transform his business, but accepted much of that manual work as part of the cost of doing business (paid for, incidentally, by his clients). The real way to transform his business, he said, was to answer the following questions. If “programmatic direct” technologies simply nailed down these four things, the payoff would be enormous. I paraphrase his answers below:

How much should I buy?  “I basically know that I am going to have AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, and GDN on almost every plan. For my more vertical clients, in auto for example, I also know 95% of the sites and networks I am going to be on. Sure, I use research tools to validate those recommendations to my clients, but media discovery is not a huge pain point. Where we struggle is answering the question of media investment allocation. Should I spend 30% of my budget with Facebook? 40%? I really don’t know, and often don’t have the right mix until the campaign is nearly over. It would be great to have some business intelligence built into a system that recommended my guaranteed media mix programmatically.”

What should I pay? “I also have a pretty good idea what things cost, thanks to the RFP process. When you RFP 40 publishers in a vertical, you find out pretty quickly what your best pricing for guaranteed media is, and you can leverage that information to insure you are giving your clients competitive rates. Unfortunately, it feels like we go through this exercise every time on every RFP. We have the historical pricing data, but it’s all over the place in spreadsheets—and often in the planner’s heads. It would be great if this information was in the same place, and if a system could make pricing recommendations up front in the process, which would also shorten the negotiation process with publishers.

Why am I recommending this?  “The biggest thing we struggle with is justifying our media choices to our clients. When we present a recommendation, often we are asking our client to invest hundreds of thousands or even millions in an individual vendor. My deck has to have more in it than basic audience information. I have to talk about the media’s ability to perform and hit certain KPIs for the price. It would be really useful to have recommendations come with some metrics on how such placements performed historically, or even some data on how other, similar, investments moved the needle in the past. Right now, getting to that data is nearly impossible, and usual resides with your senior planner in the account. The other obvious problem with that is employee turnover. My best planners, along with everything they’ve learned over two or three years walk out the door along with my data and relationships. The right system should store all of that institutional knowledge.”

You need that when? “The other thing a system can help with is speed to market. Publishers hate it when we ask them for huge, innovative proposals—in 24 hours. The reason we do that is because our clients ask us for amazing and innovative media recommendations in 48 hours. The pressure to deliver plans is huge, and you can easily lose large chunks of business by reacting to such requests too slowly. What programmatic direct technology may be able to help with is giving planners access to tools that compress the pre-planning process down, and enable agencies to deliver thoughtful, data-backed recommendations out fast—and at scale.”

Especially for larger agencies, programmatic direct technology has to be more than just workflow efficiency tools and automating the insertion order. (Although that has to come first). The next generation of programmatic efficiency or guaranteed media has to include serious business intelligence tools that can solve the “how” while simultaneously answering “why.”

[This post orginally appeared in AdExchanger on 2.11.14]