In what feels like a great use of unforeseen use cases by eBay themselves for eBay Innovation, a old type of marketplace via a new market system is emerging.

Admarketpilot.com is driving solicitation and pitching closer together in a wholly-online, mostly-anonymised way.

Advertising Age MediaWorks News describes the system:

EBay is developing two trading mechanisms that will serve both buyer and seller. The first is a “buyer-driven format” that can be used to solicit offers from sellers on pitch requests from identified advertisers with specific budgets. A marketer can set a beginning and end date for the trade, much like an eBay seller would. It can also restrict the number of potential sellers to avoid drawing, say, 60 cable networks to a pitch that might only be appropriate for a few.The identities of the bidders on the marketer’s budget would be known only by the marketer. The accepted bid would be posted so each bidder could see what the final price was.

A second format being discussed is one driven by the sellers. The available inventory would be posted and buyers would bid on the package.

Notwithstanding that this neatly carves out an entire substrate of off-the-books and over-a-beer deals, it at once makes transparent a whole ecology of the advertising industry that is often obscured. Indeed, the relationship between buying-and-selling and the actual market itself may become a lot easier to understand for the newcomer and outsider alike…..myself included.

I’d be very interested in taking part, if they accept applications for Asia-Pacific, but I’m unsure where my clients’ interests lie most strongly: on the buy, or sell, side of the equation.