The understated success of J-ET

Thanks to J-ET, the radio industry has been able to trade on a cost effective and transparent basis for the past 18 years. Here, the IPA’s research director, Lynne Robinson, reveals how the entire project was launched on a whim.

It may only be eighteen years ago that the J-ET system was launched but it certainly was in a galaxy far, far away…

All things online were embryonic: business communications revolved around the telephone and the fax machine with email starting to take some of the strain from the postal system, whilst the media landscape was dominated by TV, press, outdoor and radio – the latter of which was rapidly expanding its station count.

As the radio medium grew and fragmented its bookings, admin and post-campaign evaluation were becoming more and more difficult and time consuming, making radio an increasingly uneconomic medium to buy. Is this starting to sound familiar?

My earliest memory of the genesis of the J-ET system is from a meeting of the IPA Radio Working Party, a group consisting of the major agency radio buying directors.

The relatively newly-formed and very dynamic Radio Advertising Bureau had proposed the creation of an electronic, industry based, post-campaign analysis system…and then, as a throwaway line at the end of the meeting, the then chair of the group – a Derek Morris of BMP – asked if they could also throw in bookings and admin since the sheer volume of paper these generated was fast becoming a threat to the environment.

So the process started: Justin Sampson took the helm for the project at the RAB, we set up a JIC – Joint Industry Committee for Radio IT Futures – jointly owned by the RAB and the IPA to oversee the system’s development and operation, and the contract went out to pitch.

It was Mediatel that won it and the build began and the system was branded as J-ET (I got to choose the name).

I would love to say that everything was plain sailing but, of course, it was not.

The biggest obstacle was that quite a lot of the individual radio stations still had manual booking and play-out systems – pen and paper! – all of which had to be migrated to electronic ones for the new service to work.

We disagreed about things, we argued about the time it was taking and the money it was costing but finally J-ET was operational in Spring 1999 and it has been a fantastic, albeit understated success, ever since.

The basic J-ET system has administered just under £5 billion worth of radio campaigns since it went live, meaning that the radio industry has been able to trade on a cost effective and transparent basis for the past 18 years despite even more fragmentation within the industry.

The basic J-ET system is consistently updated. In recent years J-ET has introduced:

– Extended Accountability Reporting
– A finance link to agency invoicing systems was launched in 2010
– A mobile version of J-ET
– J-ET Copy Plus – bringing creative / production departments into the family
– Digital Log reporting and enhanced log matching
– Multi-functional dashboard
– And, most recently, automatic feed through from Buyer briefing to traffic / Scheduling system – due late 2017/2018

All of this has been specified and delivered on a consensual, transparent and cost effective basis.

Other mediums have tried to emulate JICRIT and have failed, however. It is held up as the exemplar in its field and I still regularly recommend that people who are considering similar industry online projects should speak to Robin at JICRIT to find out how it is done.

So why do you hear so little about J-ET in the news? The short answer to that is because it works – it runs quietly, efficiently and very cost effectively in the background. That’s a testament to the JICRIT and Mediatel teams.

Lynne Robinson is research director, IPA