The company – which acts as advertising giant WPP's media investment management operation and parent to a host of top agencies – will be the launch customer for Facilitate Digital's Symphony electronic insertion order system.

It will be the first Australian media agency to mandate use of electronic insertion orders to confirm digital media buys. GroupM agencies Mediacom, Mindshare, MEC and Maxus will use the wholly-automated processes across their entire workflow from next January.

The Australian software is purpose built for media industry and workflow and trading platform for agencies and publishers in Australia. GroupM has been rollig out the technology across the Asia-Pacific – including China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore – over the last two years.

GroupM chief digital officer Danny Bass says Australia’s digital advertising spend will soon surpass TV: “Market opportunities for all stakeholders are being lost to a plague of inefficiency,” he says.

Adoption of electronic insertion orders is key to bringing down transaction costs. While overall spending is flat and the proportion committed to digital campaigns is increasing rapidly, “planning, buying, selling and administration of digital media is highly complex and costly,” he says.

“Whereas traditional media activity largely stops once the spot is booked, a digital campaign will be booked then changed and optimised up to 15 times through its lifetime. The manual input required by buyers and sellers, and the associated risk of data corruption, makes costs unsustainably high for all.

“We are eliminating these inefficiencies through our implementation.”

Facilitate Digital was established in 2001 and now operates across the Asia Pacific, United Kingdom, Europe and North American regions.