Starcom launches its own media booking bot

As readers in the UK try to locate their post-match befuddled brains, and those in Denmark rue a dodgy penalty, here’s something to exercise the grey matter.

Publicis Media’s Starcom has launched the industry’s first “media booking bot” – Abacus. Abacus stands for Automated Bot for Amendments to Campaigns and Uploads. Strange they should use ‘bot,” which doesn’t sound very nice and we usually associate with hackers.

Starcom CEO Nadine Young says: “Automation is a key part of our new intelligence-driven strategy, designed to leverage the best of human capability and pioneering technologies, such as this. ABACUS allows us to liberate our teams from the more repetitive administrative tasks and unleash further opportunity to focus on more strategic and creative growth opportunities for our clients.

“This is the future, and a brilliant example of automation being used to enhance, rather than dampen, creativity.”

Putting an emphasis on creativity is a noble effort at spin, what it might actually mean is saving work hours to reduce people rather than more creativity.

Anyway, the bots are on our side now. Now you can back to sleep.