IT Ad agencies and newspapers mount a new effort to shred paperwork barriers by Ann Lallande Lallande is an Annapolis, Md., free-lance writer. Newspapers and national advertising agencies have grumbled about the difficulty of doing business with each other for years.
Daily executives complain about agencies' slowness in paying bills.
Agency professionals counter that they can't pay more quickly because a staggering 50 percent of the invoices they receive involve discrepancies or insufficient billing information. The task force identified immediate problems that it brought before an Advertising and Media Credit Executives Association meeting Oct. 16 in New Orleans. Some newspaper representatives also plan to explore and test electronic data interchange, or EDI, applications as one way to reduce billing discrepancies. Task-force members will ask agencies to look for improvements in newspaper performance in the next few months, while newspapers will monitor whether payment disagreements decline. 2000 is highly important.