There’s a great article on Clickz by Eric Picard called ‘Ad Exchanges Are the Future‘. Eric works for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. He has written a very clear description of what’s wrong with the current trading practices in media buying (outside of search) and how that’s going to change in the next 5 to 10 years.

The opening paragraph of his article states:

Advertising is one of the last significant business markets that remains opaque, manual, archaically complex, and requires a large relatively skilled set of humans to perform each transaction. It’s a market ripe to embrace technology for automation, liquidity of inventory, pricing transparency, and simplification of business process.

Extremely well put.