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American Association of Advertising Agencies Contracts Vexcom to Develop a Central Industry Hub.

The AAAA has initiated a new project to help usher the advertising industry into the digital age. XMLforMedia is a communications hub that will standardize advertising transactions. The system will allow trading partners to integrate their own systems with others and exchange information on a purely electronic level. Vexcom, the developers of the Ad-ID system, have been working with the AAAA and several media groups to develop the web based interface that will enable these transactions.

August 20, 2004 -- XMLforMedia seeks to create a unified set of communication protocols to be used by the advertising industry. There are several parts to this project including a collection of XML schemas that provide a context for all facets of the media life cycle, from avail to invoice. Another part is an industry Registry for all trading partners to list their communication capabilities. The AAAA has created a committee with representatives from each media group to help shape the direction and composition of these documents.

In 2003 Vexcom completed development on the current working version of the Ad-ID system (advertising digital identification) for the AAAA and the ANA. The top four U.S. broadcast networks, CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox, have signed on to comply with the new 12-character Ad-ID code for tracking all advertising. This system is heralded by the two advertising trade groups behind the system as a new standard for monitoring the $263 billion U.S. ad industry.

"We are very excited to be working with the AAAA and the ANA on these projects. Ad-Id and XMLforMedia have presented some unique challenges; connecting so many different systems is not an easy task. Thankfully, we have had the help of many industry leaders from all major media to assist in making the project successful," states Wesley E. Warren, CEO of Vexcom.

Entities wishing to participate in eBusiness transactions with trading partners must have a way to communicate with each other. For this reason, we have created the XMLforMedia UDDI Registry. The Registry will allow trading partners to locate other compatible trading partners, such as an advertising agency and a television station, and then use the information in the registry to initiate pure machine-to-machine communication via XML web services.

These components will allow advertising industry transactions to take place seamlessly and instantly. Instead of faxing in an avail request, receiving an email back a day or so later and then placing the order over the phone, all transactions will be fully automated through a common network of communication protocols.

The XMLforMedia is currently in beta testing, and is set to be fully released later this year.

Web services allow you to expose selected business system processes via a platform independent API web interface using XML and/or SOAP to accept data, process it, then return a response. The response may be a simple success/failure or it may be a complex data object. Web services are the future of systems integration. You can allow your clients, partners, vendors, distributor, etc., to exchange information and process data directly from one system to another without any human interface required.

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) is basically a search engine for web services and is itself a web service. Web services are access points on the internet that systems can communicate with. A web service resides at a specific URL and in most cases accepts a data packet in the form of XML, processes the request inside the XML and then returns a result. This allows multiple systems from multiple entities to communicate and do business on a purely electronic level. Web services replace email, faxes, mail-in forms, etc., and act as a public access point into a business system.

The XMLforMedia system is loosely based on the UDDI 2.0 Specification. Many of the UDDI functions are supported, and many additional functions specific to the needs of the system have been added.