NEW YORK — The TV Interface Practices (TIP) Initiative, the media industry group promoting open interfaces to streamline local broadcast TV advertising transactions, is cheering new developments as systems providers begin delivering what the TVB-associated group says are economic benefits to buyers and sellers through increased automation.
The TIP Initiative is focused on increasing access between system providers, streamlining the ad buying experience, and materially reducing transactional burdens facing agencies and television stations. Since its last update, the initiative has significantly expanded its membership and supported several system providers in deploying TIP interfaces, resulting in positive business outcomes.
“Increasing transaction efficiency is one of the pillars for maintaining a healthy ecosystem for advertisers, ad buyers and local television broadcasters,” says MAGNA Global EVP/Managing Partner of Local Investment Kathy Doyle. “As a key agency partner of the broadcasters we applaud accelerated media transactions and the TIP Initiative’s goals.”
The biggest news regarding TIP is the addition of The E.W. Scripps Co., Fox Television Stations and Graham Media Group as members. They join Gray Television, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations and Telemundo, Nexstar Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and TEGNA, the consortium’s founding members.
TIP now represents more than 740 local broadcast television stations.
Tom Fleming, SVP Sales at Fox Television Stations, commented, “It makes good business sense to support the TIP vision of open standards and streamlined transaction flow, and we plan to use TIP-compliance as a decision criteria for managing our operations in 2020.”
TIP Implementation Milestone
System providers are successfully deploying TIP interfaces resulting in positive business outcomes for their clients including next-day delivery reporting to agencies, reducing time spent reconciling invoices, and enabling broadcasters to correct the scheduling of commercial units before they air. The widespread deployment of the TIP Logtimes interface is supported by over a dozen system providers working for buyers and sellers in the local ecosystem.
Earlier in 2019, the consortium launched the TIP Initiative’s code repository for vendors to co-develop APIs that reflect the TIP Framework. The work is publicly available at tvb.org/TIP and will be foundational in moving TIP interface designs closer to implementation.
Trading Partner Forum Affirms Automation Objectives
“As trading partners, it is important to synchronize the automation changes we plan to make in 2020 by continuing to share our automation goals and priorities,” commented Brett Jenkins, CTO at Nexstar.
In December 2019, the TIP Trading Partner Forum, a group of forty standards-supporting broadcasters and leading media and advertising agencies, affirmed their automation priorities for 2020. The overarching theme was a renewed commitment to greater transparency of automation deployment roadmaps between agencies and broadcasters to better synchronize goal setting across the ecosystem.
Focused TIP Goals In 2020
The TIP Initiative has outlined a set of focused 2020 goals that were confirmed by the Trading Partner Forum:
- Continue to support the ecosystem with the ongoing widespread deployment of Logtimes interface including updates, documentation and testing support,
- Support the piloting of additional interfaces including Inventory Avails, RFP, Proposal, Commercial Instructions, and Invoices,
- Recommend how local Video, OTT and Addressable can be further incorporated in the TIP standards to support their continued growth.
TEGNA CTO Kurt Rao commented, “The industry is nearing the tipping-point regarding next-day Logtimes use. TEGNA plans to make our Logtimes feed available to more than a thousand agencies we do business with, and onboard any agency that is ready to participate in 2020.”
