Adstream COO on why the media industry will move to a digital advertising workflow

We might be at a tipping point for digital ad delivery, but getting here has been “a slow process”, according to James Carpenter, chief operating officer of Adstream.

“It has taken 10 years to become an overnight success,” he says. Founded in Sydney, Australia, in 2001, Adstream is now responsible for the management of more than 3 million advertising-related digital assets across the world. While it was inevitable that the global media industry would eventually move towards producing and transmitting most of its ad content digitally, it has taken a firm push for many businesses to reach a point where it is now almost the only option. Carpenter acknowledges that recession has been partly behind this shove in the right direction.

“I do think recession has acted as an accelerant and brought focus to the challenges we face as an industry anyway. It has focused people’s mind on one idea: that they have to do more with less.”

In a tight market that has reined in spending – as the advertising industry clearly has recently – technology can often be the selling point that causes a business to go back to a customer to show something new. This can drive uptake, which ultimately drives wider progress.

According to Carpenter there are several reasons why Adstream’s digital advertising workflow has earned attention when companies come to make these kinds of considerations. Digital automation of previously analogue, manual processes and reporting is one such reason. An upshot is that the technology “typically delivers hard cost savings in distribution of materials and soft cost savings in time spent up front”, he says.

More fundamentally, however, and perhaps more compellingly, the advertising business is set to change drastically in the next couple of years. Individually targeted advertising, which is being employed or developed in most media including TV (see our interview with Sky’s Steve Hutchinson, page 18), is already leading to an increase in the number of ads being produced. Furthermore, audience fragmentation means that brands must use different media to reach prospective customers.

As an indicator, Carpenter points to the “explosion in creativity” that has resulted in the Nordic region from advertising spend in internet-based TV exceeding that in offline TV around 18 months ago – the first place in the world where this has happened. “They have produced loads more ads because of the nature of the environment they have found themselves in,” he says. As a result, number of impressions rather than airtime is now the key metric, meaning that advertisers also have different data reporting needs.

Carpenter believes that Adstream will be at the heart of this paradigm shift for one reason: “because we have a platform”. Its workflow software functions as a single point of access to a central asset management system, called Adbank, for creative and production agencies, media companies and clients. Thanks to its modular components, people with various responsibilities within the workflow can collaborate within a single community.

Adstream intends to enhance the integration of all these process in its latest software release, due in the second quarter of 2010. Carpenter says: “Version 4 of our software will be a core platform built around Adbank. It is the first revamp in seven years, so it requires buy-in from our customers and we have got that. Ultimately we want to have just one product called Adstream.

“We believe a single point of access is really important, but we also believe that creating communities is really important. We provide communities with access to the workflow depending on what their role is.”

In the media business of today, brands reach around the globe but must still be sensitive to local requirements. They are also finding a necessity to produce more ads while keeping a closer eye on costs. As a result, effective digital workflows are showing themselves to be more and more crucial in transmitting timely messages targeted to the right audiences. Driven by this, Carpenter says, the philosophy of Adstream’s technology has to be to address the needs of companies that think of themselves as global businesses but have not previously been operating in a global way.

In summary, he explains, “We have always said we want to be the language of advertising.”