Going back to my earlier thoughts about responsiveness to advertiser needs, much of the advice we provide to advertisers takes much too long to put together.

Currently, it's a lot easier for an ad agency to answer a client question along the lines of "what does a $2 million television buy look like?" than it is to answer the same question about digital. The tools and common currencies exist to answer those questions on the traditional advertising side within hours, not days or weeks, as is the digital norm.

Today, if we want to provide an accurate answer to that question for digital display, we need to query the market for available inventory (in the form of an RFP), deal with several sites and networks, receive responses and pull them all together in a format the advertiser will understand. If there are changes to the buy parameters, such as the budget level, it's a mad scramble all over again to put together a deliverable to the advertiser.

We can't go on like this. What we need are tools that will give us real market availabilities in something resembling real time. Furthermore, these tools also need to be able to distill that data into actionable information in the form of a scenario plan. We need to be able to crank out as many scenarios as need to be considered by either the agency or the advertiser.

Right now, we rely on sheer manpower and a toolset that isn't terribly well integrated in order to deliver this intelligence. This needs to change.