EDI Publicté

EDI pilot experiences in the French TV and radio advertising market


The following status report summarizes the information about the advancement of EDI within the field of TV and radio advertising in France gathered at meetings of Peter Winiwarter with

TF1 Publicité :
Michel ENTAT (Directeur Informatique) and Damien PERNEZ (Chef de Service Qualité et Prospective Informatique), who is in charge of the EDI project of TF1 Publicité within the framework of the EDI-Publicité organization. Meeting at TF1 on December 17th 1996.
Tel.: +33 1 4141 3387
fax: +33 1 4141 2105
e-mail: tf1pubd@tf1.fr
IP France :
Jean-Claude BOISBELAUD, who represents together with Isabelle WEILL the interests of IP-France within EDI-Publicité. Meeting at IP on December 22nd 1996.
Tel.: +33 1 4640 2130

E.D.I. Publicité

E.D.I. Publicité is a non profit organization (association loi 1901) for promoting the use of EDI in the French advertising market, especially in the field of TV ads.
E.D.I. Publicité is part of the EDI User groups of EDIFRANCE, an organism regrouping the major EDI users in France.

Address :
E.D.I. Publicité 1, Quai du Point du Jour
92656 Boulogne Cedex
(see IT director of TF1 Publicité)
Tel.: +33 1 4141 3174
Fax: +33 1 4141 2105

See the presentation slides of E.D.I.-Publicité in the annex (in French).
Work in progress of the French EDI project
The members of EDI-Publicité
The members of EDI-Publicité can be classified into four major groups :
1. Sales-houses owned by media
2. Large intermediate Sales-houses (centrales d'achat)
3. Agencies
4. IT and EDI related service companies

1. Sales-housesowned by media


active member, media TF1, sales-house TF1 Publicité major actor in French TV ad market
active member, media M6, sales-house M6 Publicité
active member, media Eurosport, sales-house Eurosales, Cable channel only
member, but not active CANAL + no IT staff available
interested, but not active A2, FR3, sales-houseFrance Espace, public channels

2. Large intermediate Sales-houses (centrales d'achat)

Group sales-house
active member group CIA, Media Network <10% market share
active member group TMP 30% market share
active member group Publicis, PMS major sales-house
active member group Havas, IP France mainly radio ads
member but not active NRJ Régies radio FM
not present CARAT major sales-house
not present group Havas, Euro RSCG major sales-house

3. Agencies

active member group Nestle, SPEDIC

4. IT and EDI related service companies

JFC, radio and TV sales admin. software
IMS Popcorn, media planning software
EDI-TIE EDI, software house also present in Belgium and the Netherlands
SEDINOV, EDI converter
INFLUE, EDI services

The messages

So far EDI-Publicité is developing four EDI messages conform with the EDIFACT standard :
1. Program grid for TV and radio
2. basic Rate card
3. Order
4. Order confirmation

note: a message for INVOICE is not yet considered

Program Grid (message PRECAT)

The message has been developed but not yet tested.
There is no link with the TF1 in-house system conducting the broadcast.
(Problems to link the provisionary grid with the actually broadcasted off-air schedule.)
The message provides to exchange weekly grids, monthly grids, modifications and snapshots of the grid at a certain moment in time.

M6 wants to test this message exchanging data with OPTIMUM of the TMP group.

Rate card

This message serves to exchange the basic rate card with the name of the time-slot and its program context (before and after).
The message exists, but has not yet been tested.

M6 wants to test this message with OPTIMUM of the TMP group.

The rate card message does not allow for prices of « packages », i.e. combinations of several time-slots in one or more combinations of media. Therefore the message in its present form in not very valuable for IP France.

Order and Order confirmation

Both messages exist and are being tested at the moment between TF1 Publicité and SPEDIC 5Nestle).

The pilot experiences

The major pilot experience, which has actually been carried out, connects the information systems of TF1 Publicité with the information system of SPEDIC (Nestle).

The Order transmission has been tested for the above configuration between TF1 and SPEDIC (Nestle).
During 4 months 55 orders concerning the insertion of 3.000 spots were exchanged.
On both sides the EDI translators were running on PCs, which were linked to the in-house systems (VESPA at TF1 Publicité and POPCORN at SPEDIC) via a network.
The Transmission of the EDI messages took place over the VAN (Value Added Network ATLAS 400 of France Telecom).

However the electronic transmission was limited to the initial orders emanating from SPEDIC (50 documents) and order confirmations emanating from TF1 (20x50 = 1000 documents).
Modifications of the initial order emanating from SPEDIC are still done by telephone (20 phone calls per order). The users were reluctant to abandon their traditions and habits!

Future developments

A future version of the message shall contain a reference (pointer) to the film material, which is provided in the form of cartridges or soon as a digital file (MPEG2).

Future developments (1998 and later) will concern an INVOICE message.
It is also planned to inquire the possibility of including a descriptive header file for the electronic delivery of ads.