The often-stormy relationship between buyers and sellers took a huge step forward at the iMedia Summit in Maryland two weeks ago. They discovered they could actually sit in a room together -- without a bar -- and hammer out good ideas for subduing some of the industry's most vexing problems.

Each group met separately before the Summit, and came up with a list of topics that needed work. Then they went into breakout sessions together with basic rules: no kicking, no biting, respect your friends, play nice ? oops, sorry, those are the rules at my little boy's Montessori school. The breakouts were about coming up with clear, implementable solutions -- not about recrimination, finger-pointing, taunting and jeering (that's what bars are for).

All kidding aside, the sessions were productive and genial. The teams tackled: requests for proposals (RFPs), terms and conditions (T&Cs), user experience and rules of engagement.

Over the next four weeks, I'll share what they came up with, along with some comments from folks who were there. And we want your feedback. This is a dialogue the industry must have. So email me -- or write your comments on the back of a crisp $50 bill and snail-mail it.

RFPs are on this week's title bout card. That acronym really doesn't mean "request for paperwork," although it feels that way. It has always felt to me that no one likes RFPs -- they're a pain -- but everyone plays along since "we've always done it that way."

Maybe so -- but for the longest time, we burned witches, too. But now there would be too many environmental impact statements to fill out because of the ash, so we stopped burning them. We give them TV shows instead.

Here are the recommendations that came out of the working sessions (you should be able to tell which are theirs and which are my asides):

• Buyers should limit the number of RFPs to a reasonable amount for evaluation -- say two to three times what they will buy at most -- don't hit up 100 sites.
• If you can't do a media day, consider conference calls using WebEx or LiveMeeting.
• Inventory: need communication from buyer to seller when dates slide. Communicate!
• Establish lead time and expectations upfront. What? Communicate -- again? What a concept.
• Sites need to charge clients for inventory ordered but not used when creative is late. Sounds fair.
• Agencies need to tell sites why they did not get the buy. This will do more to improve things faster than any of these other steps -- you can't fix what you don't understand is broken.
• Make sure your RFP and the response are both complete and accurate.
• Do not use the automated tools as an end-all, but as a shortcut. Provide additional information as appropriate. Tools still need a human touch.
• RFP vendors should pay attention to site needs and difficulty in filling out RFPs. Needs more automation (with a human brain driving it, of course).
• Sites should consider standard packages, like radio for smaller budgets to avoid RFP process. Radio was always an easy buy back in the day, as were small town newspapers -- because the process was simple.

Mediasmith's Dave Smith, one of the breakout leaders, says, "A lot of the RFP breakout discussion centered around communications. This is definitely a best practice. Talking to each other early and often. That's why it is a good idea to limit the number of RFPs to those you can have a dialogue with. Media days are great but not always possible. The suggestion of a follow-up conference call via WebEx or LiveMeeting was sound. And communication about expectations and timing changes is crucial to good ongoing relationships."

Absolutely. And in regard to the whole issue of automated RFPs, Smith makes even more sense -- get the vendors involved.

"There was also discussion about the difficulty of the automated RFP from a site side," he says. "Each RFP takes a lot of time. The RFP software vendors need to spend some time with the sites to simplify this so that the site is not typing in the same info over and over into multiple RFPs. Some automation of repetitive tasks is clearly called for here."

Come to think of it, most of this is common sense. Sounds like my son's Montessori rules after all.

How do you feel -- anything they missed? Email me.