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.