We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months talking to agencies about what pains them most in the media buying process and the dilemmas they face in planning and placing media for their clients.

Regardless of the varying degrees of complexity in their media buys or the tools used, a few common themes emerged. Here’s how they fit into the circles of hell described in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Almost.

Circle 1: Limbo

The decent begins with the uncertainty of just where to begin a planning for a new campaign, especially if it’s an unfamiliar market. Where to look to find the most relevant media outlets? What is the population of that market? Should early consideration be based on reach and frequency into a target demographic, or is it okay to trust my gut on content      relevancy?

Circle 2: The Lustful
The folks in this circle lust for a large number of impressions—whether via traditional or online mediums—but don’t necessarily care if they are the right impressions to reach a targeted audience.

It’s why ads for the liquor store might perform better on a rock radio station than the local mommy mag, even though both media outlets may share the same audience description, 18-35 year-olds.

Ever had a client that cared more about quantity of impressions over quality? They need to see the fit of a medium or specific media outlet based on the relevance of the outlet’s content to the target demographic.

Circle 3: The Gluttonous
Many media planners and buyers have a notorious appetite for sticky notes. They devour a feast of sticky notes, fat-fingering info into multiple systems and spreadsheets just to plan a single media buy and manage the budget, media outlet contacts, negotiations, creative deadlines and mechanical info, campaign schedules, and so on.

Circle 4: Wastefulness
This circle of hell is marked by the amount of time wasted in trying to track and manage information related to a media buy (see Circle 3), including phone calls, emails, and faxes schedules and POs. In a client survey this last summer, one Avenue Right user mentioned that it used to take 30-40 hours of research, manual tasks, and follow-ups to plan and buy media for a small-scale $15,000 local advertising campaign.

Circle 5: Wrath and Sloth
The slow-moving time it takes to gather media outlet contact and inventory information, request and negotiate schedules, manage the budget, track deadlines, etc. is like the business process equivalent of sloth.

Wrath? Well, manual tasks are frustrating at a time when we’re used to automation, or at least the concept of it.

Circle 6: Dissent & Disruption
Dante’s circle for Heretics and their flaming tombs may be a bit harsh for this comparison. But in keeping with the theme of this post, we could say these are these are the folks who challenge traditional processes of buying media and embrace new technology to solve the old problem of inefficiency and outdated information. (Wait a minute…that sounds like Avenue Right!)

Circle 7: Violence
My own experience with media buying could be summed up as Violence Against Office Supplies and Eating Utensils. Mainly throwing pens at the wall, or stabbing plastic forks into erasers and then breaking off the prongs. All this while taking calls from media outlet sales reps, sending follow-up emails, and trying to keep an up-to-date version of the campaign information in a spreadsheet that showed the specific schedules and total potential reach of all media types used in the campaign.

Circle 8 & 9: Information (Ex)change
In Dante’s hell, these last circles were filled with fraudulent advisors, sorcerers, flatterers, the sowers of discord, and so on—this is the place where a side-by-side comparison of media buying to the epic poem ultimately comes to an end.

Unless, however, it really does require a bit of sorcery to keep up with the constantly changing advertising inventory and rates available in a given marketplace.

On top of that new media outlets become available, existing outlets consolidate or change format, or close entirely.  Information on actual rates has traditionally been protected by buyers and sellers as agencies compete for buying power in a given marketplace to win a client’s business.

Many media buyers and sellers are inherently biased when it comes to planning media, or proposing a campaign schedule. It’s what makes them good at their jobs. Sales reps are often trained to pitch adamantly against other mediums, regardless of the benefits the other media types might hold for an integrated campaign.

Cardinal Virtues of Media Buying?
Granted, not all the feedback on current media buying processes was reminiscent of hell and worthy of a trip through Dante’s Inferno, but it can highlight the path to better and more efficient media buys.

We’ll follow up with a post on the 7 Virtues of Media Buying. Until then, here are a few tips to avoid falling into one of the circles of media buying hell:

• Stay open to an integrated approach to media buying.
• Start with a broad consideration set of multiple mediums.
• Reach the right audience.
• Use technology to streamline media planning and buying. (Yes, as a software-as-service company, we’re biased toward using technology to automate unwieldy and inefficient processes and get better, real-time information. See how it can work for your agency.)
• Circle 7 is still okay. The office supplies won’t be missed once these manual processes are automated.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 5:28 am and is filed under Media Buying, Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.