Radio goes high-tech
Hailey-based Marketron vies for end-to-end Internet ad exchange
"Marketron’s headquarters will stay in Hailey for the
indefinite future because the area offers well-educated employees at lower wages compared
to high-tech Meccas such as Silicon Valley."
Justin Seagraves, Marketron sales manager.
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Life before the
Internet. Marketron sales manager Justin Seagraves explains how the software firm got its
product to market in 1972. Express photo by Willy Cook
For those who listen to the radio and imagine some hip disk jockey,
perhaps with a name like Wolfman Jack, spinning one record after another under the
one-fanged cobra, think again.
These days, not only do a lot of stations operate without DJs, but most no
longer even use compact discs, much less tapes or records. Instead, they obtain their
content from satellites and the Internet.
As radio has gone high-tech, a Hailey-based software company, which
recently teamed up with a northern California dot-com, hopes to lead the industry in
digitally streamlining the links between broadcast media and the clients that buy airtime.
It’s hard not to notice the boxy, gleaming Marketron structure
located north of Hailey. In a town that takes pride in its Old West heritage, the software
firm’s headquarters, with its green-tinted windows, brushed aluminum trim and
tan-colored stucco and wood, screams Silicon Valley.
In April, BuyMedia.com, a Burlingame, Calif.-based company that uses the
Web to expedite the process of researching, negotiating and placing broadcast advertising
orders bought Marketron, which provides stations with software to manage sales, scheduling
and accounting.
Marketron sales manager Justin Seagraves, during an interview Friday, said
the recent acquisition will create the advertising industry's only "end-to-end,
business-to-business Internet exchange."
That means advertisers like Coca-Cola negotiate media ad sales entirely in
cyberspace.
Reducing, or eliminating, the fees charged by traditional ad agency
middlemen, Seagraves said, creates cost benefits for customers and increased revenue for
the five-year-old BuyMedia.com and for Marketron.
"Anybody that has any contact with an ad is making some money off
it," Seagraves said. While reluctant to predict the demise of the old-guard
negotiation process that depends heavily on long-established personal relationships,
Seagraves admitted Buymedia.com and Marketron look forward to a day when they directly
facilitate deals between buyers and sellers.
It’s an idea that has BuyMedia.com already dumping money into its
newly purchased firm. May 1 marked the end of a recent hiring drive that increased
Marketron’s staff from 47 to 77 employees. Seagraves said additional hiring of around
20 more employees is scheduled to begin Sept. 1.
After that, he said, the building will no doubt be full, a problem the
firm will handle by creating new communally shared workspaces, which Seagraves calls
"virtual offices." Or, potentially, he said, the firm could expand the building.
New hires from all over the Northwest master broadcasting software
during a 10-week training program. Express photo by Willy Cook
Either way, he insisted, Marketron’s headquarters will stay in Hailey
for the indefinite future because the area offers well-educated employees at lower wages
compared to high-tech Meccas such as Silicon Valley.
The company’s recruiters look for a college education and a good
resume, but also personality, Seagraves said, "and we kind of go from there."
The starting salary, he said, is $28,000 with a 401(k) retirement plan and
health insurance.
Marketron’s founder, Jerry Cronin, moved the company from San Mateo,
Calif. to Hailey in 1998. But in fact, the company has been producing software for radio
stations since 1972.
A prominently displayed photograph inside the building shows just how far
the business has come since then. In the pre-Web days, travel trailers and a Boeing DC-3
airplane packed with computer gear whisked demo software to potential clients around the
country. Now, a laptop computer replaces the planeload of gear, and data the DC-3
transported across the United States in a day zaps instantly via the Internet.
Despite the flashy new building and the gee-whiz Internet image,
Marketron’s product is surprisingly simple.
Until just six months ago, the company’s software package ran on DOS,
a veritable dinosaur among computer operating systems. Now, the company offers its
five-tool software package for the up-to-the-minute Microsoft Windows operating system.
At the core of the package is a radio traffic monitoring tool that helps
stations schedule hundreds of radio programming slots around the clock. An electronic log
the tool creates can be fed into an automated system that intricately and precisely
orchestrates commercials and music supplied from satellites, and increasingly from the
Internet.
An accounting tool manipulates the log data into invoices. By January,
Seagraves said, Marketron hopes the tool will be able to send invoices to customers
electronically.
The software package also allows stations to draft sales proposals and
keep track of inventory and budget.
But, Seagraves said, becoming a subsidiary of a dot-com has placed
Marketron smack-dab in a business where resting in the status quo means certain death.
Though he declined to elaborate, for fear of giving away secrets to the competition, he
said the logical next step for Marketron is a full-scale assault on the television market.
"BuyMedia is putting a great deal of money into Marketron to further
develop our Windows product and get it out," he said.
