Media agency bosses to debate move to electronic trading

Tim Burrowes

March 21, 2011 2:20

The key players in a multimillion dollar drive to bring Australian media buying onto an electronic platform will debate the issue at June’s Mumbrella360 conference in Sydney.

The move by Australia’s media agencies will revolutionise life in media agencies and for media owners as they move to a media equivalent of the ASX. Among those discussing the plans at Mumbrella360 will be:

From left: Tajer; Parkinson; Sintras; Horgan and Steedman

Media Federation president Henry Tajer, who is also executive chairman of Mediabrands including media agencies Initiative and UM;
James Parkinson who heads up trading for WPP’s media buying arm Group M, including agencies Mediacom; MEC, Maxus and Mindshare;
John Sintras, CEO of the Starcom Mediavest Group for Vivaki Exchange which represents the combined expenditure of Starcom MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia and Razorfish;
Peter Horgan, CEO of OMD and lead negotiator for Opera which also includes PHD.
The panel is being curated and chaired by John Steedman, CEO and chairman of Group M.

In an interview with Mumbrella last year, Tajer warned that if agencies do not make the move the industry “won’t survive” as the trillions of transactions carried out per year rise because of media fragmentation.

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Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes is the publisher of Mumbrella and Unmade. He co-founded Mumbrella in 2008 and sister title Unmade in 2021. He's worked in the UK, Middle East, Asia & Australia and has specialised in writing about the communications world for the last 25 years. He wrote the book Media Unmade, published in 2021, and became the presenter of MediaLand on ABC Radio National in 2025.

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3 COMMENTS

Gezza 21 Mar 11

Timbo…for the media trading discussion , surely you would need to have at least one of the sales directors of a metro TV network for this panel to make sense.

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mumbrella 21 Mar 11

That’s a fair question, Gezza.

As it happens, this session is one curated by Group M with the formated voted on by the readers, so allow me to discuss it with them.

It strikes me that even if we don’t have sales directors on the panel, they’ll certainly be in the audience and able to have their say on the day.

I know that one of the key people behind this session is currently on a plane, so I may not come back with an answer immediately.

Cheers,

Tim – Mumbrella

Ex-TV 22 Mar 11

Good luck to them…….Why would the major TV Networks want to allow inventory access to the Media Buyers? They can’t yield manage without transparency, and we all know the Networks are not transparent!

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