The Future-State Campaign Management Architecture and Greater Industry Collaboration.

Mediabrands and Microsoft Advertising announced developments on the Media Operations Management System (MOMS), an agency agnostic, enterprise-level architecture to connect the marketing ecosystem. Since launching the MOMS project in June 2009, Mediabrands and Microsoft have expanded their team to include agency, publisher, data and industry trade organizations. As the leading national trade organization for US advertising agencies, the 4A’s has agreed to lead an industry-wide coalition to further develop the open and integrated cross-functional system across the advertising and marketing landscape. Initially, the coalition will collaborate to organize a set of operating principles aimed at solving critical business needs facing advertising agencies today. The 4A’s will announce details on the coalition members in the coming weeks.

“Today, marketers are continually forced to make decisions on imperfect information and suffer from a lack of truly actionable data. MOMS was designed to unite a disconnected marketing ecosystem and inspire greater collaboration and innovation across our industry,” stated Quentin George, Chief Digital Officer, Mediabrands. “We began with an aggressive ambition and are ready for partners along the entire marketing spectrum to coalesce and help develop a truly integrated solution. We applaud the 4A’s for agreeing to develop a coalition that will change the future of our industry.”

“Our agency partners constantly ask for solutions to meet key business needs and MOMS has great potential to address each of them via a supportive technology architecture that will enable interoperability and drive operational and economic efficiencies,” stated Nancy Hill, President and CEO, 4A’s. “Simply put, this is a way for agencies to finally realize the business and economic efficiencies that so many other businesses and industries have benefited from over the past 10 years. True industry collaboration will drive this forward and the 4A’s is committed to bringing together leaders who are willing to place a premium on advancing the cause of the industry as a whole and turning vision into action.”

MOMS, as originally conceived by Mediabrands and Microsoft Advertising, is designed to drive the following benefits for agencies:

* Establish a sharper correlation of marketing impact to business results;
* Create integration between advertisers, agencies, media owners and technology partners;
* Drive greater value and effectiveness of marketing efforts;
* Create better understanding of consumers’ interaction with brands in select environments;
* Enable the development of improved briefs for creative and content development;
* Establish standards for data transfer and data governance;
* Accelerate the adoption of marketplace and auction-based buying models;
* Increase the scalability and expansion of marketing activities

“When we launched the MOMS project with Mediabrands, our goal was to develop a framework that would help reduce unnecessary waste and friction, and enable an agency to devote more energy to creating compelling advertising campaigns and less time ‘connecting the dots’ and managing the complexity behind those campaigns,” said Marc Bresseel, Vice President/Global Agencies, Microsoft Advertising. “Since this challenge confronts all agencies, we are delighted that the 4As has agreed to help take MOMS to the next logical step in its evolution—that of a solution that has the potential to impact an entire industry.”

To date, the current MOMS team has created two key documents:

1. Media Planning and Buying Workflow Manual: Detailed media planning and buying business processes across advertisers, agencies and media owners; and

2. Technical and Functional Ecosystem Architecture: An enterprise architecture blueprint for an optimized campaign management experience.

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