South African media owners could increase sales by R1 billion this year through the use of a more efficient sales exchange, says Nic Bednall, MD of MediaHammer - a Web-based auction house where sellers and buyers of advertising space can interact.
Bednall says MediaHammer is the first to market with this way of transacting in media. "Unsold inventory is media which was not sold because it was not promoted timeously or priced correctly, or it may be newly released media or unsold due to cancellations," he says.
"On average this accounts for 12% to 15% of total media. The market currently buys R8.7 billion of space per year, a figure that will grow to R10 billion this year, leaving a net amount of close to R 1 billion unsold," he explains.
Bednall says www.mediahammer.co.za has already secured undertakings from media owners and will carry inventory from the traditional advertising vehicles including SABC, eTV, M-Net, Cinemark, Corpcom, Primedia Outdoor and TML. It will also enable new media owners to get their media offering to the buying market. These new media categories include online, niche publishing, community and campus radio and innovative advertising.
"For most new media owners getting access to agencies and media buying houses in SA has been a stumbling block." Bednall emphasises that MediaHammer is not a dotcom. He says the company will earn its revenues from a transaction-based fee, and will not be generating advertising revenue from its site, nor from selling its database of users, which is traditionally the way dotcoms attempt to earn income.
"Auctions are one of the oldest forms of business activity. The Web is simply the most efficient way to hold an auction in this market, so essentially all we are doing is taking a traditional, old style business and applying it to the Internet.
"We are smoothing the last wrinkle out of the media buying game," he says. MediaHammer is the brainchild of Bednall, ex-client service director at BBDO Cape, Quinton Miller, ex-BBDO Cape strategic planner, and Trent Mclelland, Nicky van Zyl, Graham Talbot and Dave Myers.
Bednall says MediaHammer is bound to attract competition but believes that the technological strength of the MediaHammer Web site, its first to market status and his team`s extensive experience with both buyers and sellers of advertising space will enable his product to outshine the others.
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