/ 01.11.2010 12:00AM
TVB ePort Passes $500,000 Mark
NEW YORK: ePort, the electronic marketplace for buying and
selling TV air time, has surpassed the half-billion-dollar mark, the Television
Bureau of Advertising said.
“This is an important milestone on the way to our goal of making local
broadcast television the medium that is easiest to buy and steward,” said TVB
President Steve Lanzano. “We are looking for big growth in the year ahead.”
Total ePort volume in 2009 was $584,289,000, and the fourth quarter was 24
percent higher than 3Q09, which was the previous high-water mark, the TVB said.
Said Tom McNaboe, senior business analyst at ABC National Television Sales, “We
have a lot of happy AEs and assistants who processed well over 450 orders in a
24-hour period. It used to take them days to process manually.”
TVB said that more than 127,000 orders have been sent by 150 agencies and/or advertisers
via ePort to more than 1,000 TV stations and all of the national rep firms over
the past two years. Agencies and advertisers continue to sign on to ePort,
recently including Hoffman York, Intermark Group, Publicis Group Media, and
Sleepy’s. Additional vendors, such as Harris, MediaBank, OneDomain and
WideOrbit, continue to develop to enhance their ePort interfaces.
ePort Connect is a Web-based version of the larger system designed to cater to
smaller agencies and advertisers with no buying systems.