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Tii'o of the three men in charge of Broadcast Clearing House, new firm
offering central spot billing, are John Palmer (I),
president, and Lee Mehlig, exec. v.p. Arthur W. Sawyer is sec'y.
paign. The representative calls on the agency timebuyer to clarify campaign needs. Then the rep sends the request to the station for verification or request of avails. When verification is received, the rep informs the agency and a signed order for the time is issued.
The time order is sent to the station by the rep for verification and signing. A copy is then returned to the agency and authorizes the station to initiate its accounting process.
In the meantime, the station be
gins to run the schedule ordered ami submits a bill and affidavit for the campaign to the agency. Upon receipt of the bill, the agency painstakingly checks delivered spots against ordered spots for discrepancies. According to one large agency, the chances are two-to-one that some error will be discovered, some clerical others missed spots.
If the agency does find an error for which it will hold up payment, it so informs the rep so that he can initiate a reconciliation with the station. The station then tracks
Officials of Bank of America, San Francisco, a?id BCH examine ERMA, machine for automated billing. From left: Emmett Jenkins, mgr.. Bank of America ERMA center; Robert Reilly, bank v.p.; Palmer H. A. Keith, asst. v.p., processing; Mehlig; Ed Martin, bank's research dir. Plan is now being agency-previewed.
down the source ol the discrepancy —through traffic, programing 01 accounting. Once the source of the error is found, an explanation is forwarded to the rep, who transmits it to the agency.
Upon healing the explanation, the agency may let it drop at that and ask for an adjustment in the bill. But more often than not it requests either a new schedule or make-goods, which the station and rep approve much as they would a new time order. Both the agency and rep verify the arrangement, and the station executes whatever steps have been required after renegotiation.
Then the station submits a new or corrected bill to the agency, and if found to be lacking in error, thebill will be approved for payment. However, the chances of error the second time around are no less than the first. Industry sources report that renegotiations on one campaign may be instigated as many as three or four times.
Such is the jungle through which buyer, seller and mediator must tread.
Caught in the squeeze is the representative, whose function as a mediator is carried on by the rep salesman. Many salesmen find themselves in the trap of an errand-bov existence when they rightly feel that their function should be to sell time exclusively and thus advance billings for their stations and all of spot broadcast. But equally involved in the hassle are the agency and the station, which lose countless man hours because of the system, fraught as it is with not only human error, but the native inability of the station to send the agency a box of air with its spot inside as proof of performance (newspapers and magazines send a tangible proof of performance: the tear sheet).
The first group to unveil its proposal is Broadcast Clearing House Inc., New York and San Francisco.
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