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Tacks on the Wall: Finding (and Fitting) Your Target Audience

by Jessie Johnson

Media buyers should be able to spend more time on the activities that create value for their clients, such as negotiating placement and rates, rather than manually collecting and organizing information related to a buy. That’s the premise behind Avenue Right’s web-based media buying software.

Avenue Right founder and CEO Brian Gramer was interviewed by “Media Man” Michael Massey on his Internet radio show Your Ad Here (February 12, 2010). This is the third and final post in a series of excerpts from that interview. You can listen to the full recording of the show here.              youradherelogo1

In this excerpt Brian shares a bit of his background and experience in advertising, along with an overview of Avenue Right’s media buying software, the target user for whom the product is designed, and why a “pragmatic approach” to development works in this changing media landscape.

Michael Massey is also author of Your Ad Here: Demystifying the Business of Media and Advertising and an Avenue Right power user.

MM: Welcome to the Friday, February 12, broadcast of Your Ad Here hosted by Media Man, that’s me, Michael Massey. Today’s topic is streamlining the media planning and buying process, and I gotta tell you, anyone that does this can tell you it can be a daunting, frustrating process. Today my guest is Brian Gramer, founder and CEO of marketing technology company Avenue Right. He’s going to share how his company is working to make this process a bit less painful, right Brian?

BG: Correct.

MM: Why don’t we take a couple minutes and sort of explain how you got where you are, what jazzes you, and why Avenue Right.

BG: I got exposed to the advertising business from him when I was 12 years old. My dad brought me to his agency one day, and he said, “We’re going to do some mapping so we can target my clients’ customers and figure out where they’re coming from.”

In the 1980s with advertising, there wasn’t a lot of technology, and my dad’s agency was doing their books by hand. And shortly after that they got their first computer and with it an accounting process.

But he put up a map, which was the state of Minnesota and counties in North Dakota, and took the receipts of his clients and gave me some tacks, and he read of the zip codes from the receipts for where the customers were for his clients. I put the thumbtacks on the board, and that’s how we figured out the geography of where the client’s customers were coming from by looking at where the tacks were.

Then he’d draw up a report by hand and deliver it to the client and say, “Based on where the tacks were, here’s where most of your customers are coming from percentage-wise, and I’m going to break it down county by county. We can continue to build brand awareness and advertise where your customers come from to keep that competitive advantage, and/or we could market in other areas around where your customers come from to try to get other people to visit your retail store.”

But anyway, that was my first exposure, and I’ve been interested in it ever since. So I’ve been for more than 20 years now exposed to the advertising industry and that was my first love.

At the age of 28, I started my first company. It was a niche search engine to help high school kids find colleges, started in 1999. Then I got into the database marketing space and started a marketing automation company called Vtrenz, and after those two ventures, I decided to start Avenue Right.

MM: Tell me who your primary target is. You’ve said media buyers, but can you say more about that?

BG:  Yes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 30,000 advertising agencies that have 100 employees or less in the United States, and represent about 20% of all media bought in the United States. But the smaller part of the media spend in the US is about $60 million dollars.

Depending on how well the economy is doing and what report you look at, there’s about $300 billion dollars spent on media, annually, in the United States. Most of that media buy is done by the largest brands and largest agencies, okay, and so 80% of it is spent by them, but 20% is spent by these smaller agencies.

MM: Like me.

BG: Right. So that’s who we’re going after. Because most of the products being built are addressing that larger side of the market, and they’ve neglected to provide products that are affordable and pragmatic for small advertising agencies.

MM: You know what, that’s a perfect mission statement right there, Brian. That’s one of the things that turned me on to this particular product.

BG: That’s why I was saying you have to pick what functionality you’re going to build first when you start these things, and so we decided to address the biggest problem first, which is collecting information. But now we have a customization rolling out in a near-term release where you can actually pull in and manage all the different media, even if it’s not in our searchable database. You can add stuff in there and customize it for budgeting and reporting purposes. And so that’s exactly one of the things we’re adding is the ability to do that, based off feedback, and it’s always been on our roadmap. The question was, what priority are we going to give it, and right now it’s a very high priority.

MM: We just got a question so I want to be sure we address it. Why would someone use this sort of product over something like a Strata or a Donovan or a SmartPlus or a Google TV.

BG: I think all those products have their place in the marketplace, and I don’t think they’re going anywhere. Some of them are very, very expensive, so we like to build pragmatic software.

One of the things I would say first off is that in relation to this, some businesses need QuickBooks to run their accounting, and some need programs like Microsoft Dynamics and these huge accounting programs for companies that have multi-national operations in 80 countries and they have 4,000 users using the accounting system, from office admins to controllers to CPAs, right? And with QuickBooks, it’s an office manager that needs to input simple invoices and billings and stuff, which most businesses need QuickBooks, not the big one.

It’s not that these other systems aren’t valuable; it’s just way too much functionality for their needs and way too costly. Some of the products they described, that’s the limitation—it’s way more functionality than a small agency needs, and it’s too costly. That’s going to be the determining factor for the agencies. People don’t need all that functionality in many cases, and they don’t want to pay for if they don’t need it.

Strata is a different product. I don’t even think of them as a competitor. They do a great job, but for a bigger agency that needs all that functionality. And so in many instances small agencies bit the bullet and said this is the only choice I have. I don’t need 80% of the functionality they’re delivering, but I’ll buy it.

The second thing is that they are limited by media type with a lot of the products. The third thing is that many are seller-side solutions and we’re a buyer-side solution. Our whole goal is to make tools to make media buyers more efficient, and we think the sellers will naturally come. So again, we’re making buy- side solutions, not sell-side solutions.

MM: Another question we got is to have you share, in your opinion, what are one or two strengths and one or two weaknesses that you feel are there in Avenue Right.

BG: One of the strengths is that we’re multi-channel, media agnostic, and not involved in the commission process. We don’t have any financial stake between the buyers and the sellers, which allows you to things a little differently, and better.

Another strength is that we look pragmatically and simply at the problem, we try to add the most valuable functionality that solves your biggest problems first. We know it’s not going to solve everything, but I think our pragmatic approach is why people are buying us, even though the system doesn’t do everything already that they wish it would today.

The disadvantage we have is that we’re new, so we’re finishing building our roadmap.

The other disadvantage we have—and this is a disadvantage for everybody—is that the media buying landscape continues to get more complicated. And this is always going to happen in media, so you’ve got to make the system flexible like we’ve talked about so you can customize it and have an open API. But the disadvantage for all of us is there’s always a new type of media. There’s always a new outlets being created. There’s always someone else providing content and trying to make money off advertising, you know. So being fluid.

That constant change is a disadvantage for a software company because you really have to think about how you develop the product in a world of constant change, and if you’ve never done it before, it’s really hard to do. So I think that’s an advantage for us is that we’ve done it before.

Read more from Brian’s interview on Your Ad Here. Check out part 1, Information Collection, Visibility, and the Value of Simplicity in Media Buying, and part 2, Tell the Courier to Fax Me: Adapting to Changing Technology.

Learn more about Avenue Right’s web-based media buying software here.


Posted in Advertising, Announcements, Media Buying, Multi-Channel, Planning, Trends | 1 Comment »

Information Collection, Visibility, and the Value of Simplicity in Media Buying

by Jessie Johnson

Media buyers should be able to spend more time on the activities that create value for their clients, such as negotiating placement and rates, rather than manually collecting and organizing information related to a buy. That’s the premise behind Avenue Right’s web-based media buying software.

On February 12 Avenue Right founder and CEO Brian Gramer was interviewed by “Media Man” Michael Massey on his Internet radio show Your Ad Here. This is the first in a series of blog posts with excerpts from that interview. You can listen to the full recording of the show here.                      youradherelogo1

Michael Massey is also author of Your Ad Here: Demystifying the Business of Media and Advertising, to be released next month, and an Avenue Right power user.

MM: Why don’t we take a few minutes to explain how you got where you are, what jazzes you, why Avenue Right?

BG: When I started Avenue Right 2 years ago, I said I’m going to solve a problem and it’s this—how do we create one place for media buyers and advertising professionals to go and find media buying opportunities for their clients so they don’t have to manually gather this information?

The thing is, you can say that seems pretty simple, is that really going to provide value? And what I’ve found talking to advertising agencies is that they spend half their time manually collecting information. And the information they collect isn’t secret information, it’s not private. It’s media sales contact information and email addresses for media outlets. Things like rate cards, media kits.

This is what the media buyer has to do all day long instead of the things that they do really well, that provide value for their clients, like strategy and planning and placement. They are spending a good portion of their time just collecting information that I thought should be automatically collected and updated somewhere. It shouldn’t have to be manually collected all the time.

But the reason this is always manually collected is that the information changes all the time—rates change daily, the media outlet sales department has a 100% turnover, depending on the outlet, and inventory supply changes.

And now with the Internet, there are no barriers to creating a media publisher, or creating and distributing content. So there are more and more options, and how do you keep up with all that? That was the creation and idea of Avenue Right.

MM: Give me some typical examples of what media buyers are wanting, 5 or 12 things everybody wants. I can’t be atypical in some of the demands I’m making.

BG: You would think there would be a lot of commonalities in what media buyers want, but there are a lot of anomalies. And you have to manage all those needs so you don’t create too complicated of a product, but create the core functionality that provides the most value.

They do want visibility into what they’re doing in more granular detail, but they also want to provide that visibility to their clients. Any kind of reporting we can provide agencies, they can provide their clients, so the agency can show the value that they are creating for their clients. So if you think of media buyers in the past, all the work they do doesn’t show up on a neat client report. Negotiating with media outlets, all the services you provide, theirs wasn’t an easy way to show clients all that value you’ve created for them, all that work.

MM: Brian, I’m going to record what you just said, and send it to all my clients.

BG: Well, it’s been a difficult thing, right? One of the things we’re doing to augment our product is try to continually provide our agencies with better internal reports, for your own internal processes. How much media did you buy across certain geographies, how much media did you buy by client?

MM: As a buyer, I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and before that I was a seller of media. And really, when you’re working on a media plan, a lot of the work is up front, because you’re doing exactly what you just said. You’re contacting the media properties, you’re negotiating, you’re gathering all the data, you’re putting the plan together, you’re putting it in a nice report and then you just have to kind of shepherd it for 6 months or throughout the year or whatever it is.

But there is a ton of work that goes into it at the beginning. And I’m not even including the constant influx and volume of email and phone calls you get from media reps.

So any time you can show a client that this is the time you spent and the value created, there’s something to that.

BG: Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of visibility they want to provide if they are using an automated system to do some of their process. It’s very difficult to buy media if you have to manually do it in a spreadsheet after you’ve done all the work.

Other feedback is related to reporting and it’s being able to integrate our system to other tools to get data out of those tools. Even if you’re doing social stuff, or anything, any data source you might want to pull or you’re managing some other type of media buy that doesn’t go in our system.

For example, if you’re managing search for your clients, you can pull that data in and report on it on the spot. And that’s the other request we get—incorporating other data into our system to pull that data into the same system as their offline buys. So we’re going to work on integration—that’s feedback we’re taking to heart and going to make happen.

MM: Can you say more about the actual modules that are available? Originally I think it just started out with radio and print, but in the near past you’ve actually added some other components. Do you want to talk about those briefly?

BG: We’re in version 1 of TV, cable and broadcast. And again we’re taking a bunch of feedback from users to enhance that. We’re probably in version 4 of radio. Print includes magazines and newspapers, but if you look at online, our approach and what we want to represent is local display advertising.

So an example of that right now in our system would be a local newspaper that has pushed their content online, right? They are moving their content online, and some of those content sites have a lot of traffic for their geographies, and they can prove it. A ton of reach and frequency for a particular geography.

MM: I’m all about unique and new media, so I’m your timeline there for architecture. Are you guys going to look at mobile advertising, texting?

BG: Yeah, mobile is a big one. Our approach is this, and it’s a really simple approach—we’re going be the platform to take whatever data is necessary for you to plan budget and report on your media to your clients. At worst case you can enter and create these categories yourself in the tool if they don’t exist.

MM: So I’ll have the ability to customize it myself.

BG: You can customize it yourself, right. Let’s say you customize it and put in information on a billboard company, or say it’s park bench advertising on the busiest street in some city you advertise in for a client. And it just happens to be a great advertisement because of the type of client you have and the traffic that it gets.

So let’s say its park bench advertising and you put that in our system. See, we’re a software as a service, we’re a platform. If that information is not private, and its public, meaning the park bench advertising company wants to sell more advertising to other people, not just you and your clients, we release that for the whole community. So the next time somebody comes into the system, now that company is listed and that category will be listed. That’s where we’re headed.

MM: You’re almost making it like a Wiki, a community.

BG: It’s crowdsourcing, right? That’s the advantage of the platform, crowdsourced by the community. In addition to that we’re going to add some community features onto the tool that allows agencies to rank media outlets.

MM: Oh, watch out for that one!

BG: So the idea is to let you customize your dashboard, customize your reporting.

We’re always going to be developing, enhancing, and we’ve got that built into the cost of our company. And that’s an advantage to customers, too, an advantage of being a SaaS product. With on-premise software, you develop all this functionality, and then you release it and everyone has to get the old version off their desktops or laptops and load the new version, right, and transfer their data into the new version.

In our world, you don’t have to do that, so we can monthly releases and constantly change based on your feedback to enhance the product. And that’s what we’re going to need to do to be competitive and stay ahead, because again, it’s always changing.

Read more from Brian’s interview on Your Ad Here. Check out part 2, Tell the Courier to Fax Me: Adapting to Changing Technology, and part 3, Tacks on the Wall: Finding (and Fitting) Your Target Audience.

Learn more about Avenue Right’s web-based media buying software here.


Posted in Advertising, Media Buying, Multi-Channel, Planning, Trends | 2 Comments »

How to Manage Multi-Channel Media Buys

by Jessie Johnson

There was a time when only a few major publications and a handful of radio and television stations existed in a local market, making it easy to plan and buy advertising. Today there can be hundreds of media outlets in the average US market, competing for both audience attention and advertising dollars.

For most advertisers, the target audience is no longer exposed to their messages only through daily newspapers or broadcast commercials. Now that audience can go online anytime to find exactly the content they want, when they want it, probably watching TV or listening to the radio at the same time.

Accordingly, marketers are spending more of their budget online, but traditional media—primarily television and radio—continue to capture a fair share of audience attention.

The US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009-2014 from Forrester Research reports that individuals are spending about 34% of their time online, with the rest of their time spent with traditional media—watching TV 35%, 18% listening to the radio, and 13% reading print media.

Keeping up with the changing media landscape and the divided attention of a target audience requires not only efficient tools to work with every medium, but also the real-time information and collaboration environment we’ve become accustomed to thanks to web-based technology such as search engines, social networks, and document sharing.

The challenge for media buyers and the agencies that provide those services is to be able to plan and manage multi-channel advertising campaigns efficiently, keeping up with market changes while eliminating time- and labor-intensive tasks related to planning, negotiating, and buying media.

Media Buying Automation
Media buyers can now plan, negotiate, buy, and analyze local online and offline advertising, together, with Avenue Right—radio, broadcast and cable TV, print, and online, and soon, the ability to add and customize whatever media type they want.

It’s not an ad network or exchange, but rather an agnostic media buying solution that allows its users to deliver an effective multi-channel advertising campaign without spending too much time on manual business processes, phone calls, and follow ups.

With a quick search of Avenue Right’s media outlet database, users can quickly find local advertising opportunities that specifically match their campaign criteria. Along with more mainstream local media outlets such as daily newspapers and popular radio stations, buyers can use search tags to find niche advertising opportunities, such as a community newspaper or local parenting website.

Other features and gadgets for media buyers include electronic RFP tools, multi-channel consideration sets, media schedule builders and templates, budgeting, and campaign reporting. To manage it all, there are campaign calendars, dashboards, contact management, and a customizable File Cabinet for each user.

Avenue Right not pre-purchase inventory or take commission on transactions, so the platform and any recommendations provided remain free of bias.

Learn more about Avenue Right. Contact us, request a demo, or read more.

Posted in Advertising, Media Buying, Multi-Channel, Planning | 2 Comments »

Are Media Buying and Transparency Mutually Exclusive?

by Jessie Johnson

The etymology of the word “transparent” has evolved since the 15th century–from having the ability to transmit light to being diaphanous or see-through in nature to being easily understood.

In business, transparency refers to visibility of information, made available to key stakeholders involved in a business process or practice.

And transparency in business is easier now than ever before.

The internet has changed the way we seek, gather, and verify information. It helps us solve problems in our industries, and has forever changed the way we bring products to market. This challenges the isolation and protection of information that was once used to conduct business to one party’s advantage, creating mistrust in the business environment.

After all, if a company isn’t forthcoming about its products, practices, and policies, there are always blogs and online communities that provide that information directly from consumer to consumer.

Media Buying by Nature is a Non-Trusting Environment
It’s an industry driven largely by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. (More on that here .)

The result of this non-trusting business environment is that the parties involved spend more and more on data—third-party verification of information because we don’t trust the information provided by the media sellers or, for agencies, because clients may not trust the agency media buyer’s experience and instincts on the right media, placements, and rates for an ad campaign.

Transparency in Media Buying
Top of mind regarding transparency in media buying today relates to ad networks and exchanges—online inventory that can be bought using an auction-style business model, where the advertiser that bids the most for a placement wins it.

On some networks, however, advertisers typically have little control over the sites on which their ads will run. And the auction-based pricing model naturally favors the seller by promising the highest possible price to be paid for the inventory. (Here’s a good post on the difference between ad networks and exchanges.

In his article “Why Ad Exchanges Need Transparency,” Adam Cahill points out that when we stop buying inventory directly from the publisher and instead rely on a third-party exchange, we lose the ability to understand precisely what we bought and have instead a general sense of direction of where our ads are headed.

With the internet being used not only as another medium on which to advertise, but also a means of connecting buyer and seller, where does traditional media fit in?

Clients want to know exactly how much agencies are paying for their media buys, how much their competitors are paying, and how much of their media billings are going toward the agency’s administrative processes for planning and placing that media. And it has been argued that the relative ease of measuring online advertising has contributed to the increase in spend on that medium.

This uncertainty around price and value stems from that fact that, as Jim Edwards points out, “prices are on display for everyone to see, and everyone knows who’s paying what” for nearly every other commodity out there—from the products that line the shelves of grocery stores to the stock market to the products on sites like Amazon.com. Except for advertising media sold outside the auction, PPC, or CPA models.

Exchange Information, Not Inventory
The world has grown accustomed to the real-time transfer of knowledge attainable through the internet—open, timely information and convenience has become our expectation.

As such, media buyers and sellers need the ability to connect and exchange information before they exchange inventory—for both on- and offline media.

The platform that succeeds won’t push the media buyer into a process both prescribed and limited by the technology they use, or the medium they’re buying. It will simply open the channels of communication to facilitate information collection and analysis, process management, and execution. It must be

  • Transparent,
  • Non-biased,
  • Media-agnostic, and
  • Altogether removed from the commission chain.

This utopia must not only connect buyers with sellers of multiple media types, but it should also connect both parties with the user-driven and market-influenced data they need to participate successfully in the new and improved marketplace for advertising media.

What are your thoughts on transparency (or lack of) in the advertising industry? Are they mutually exclusive? Post your thoughts here!


Posted in Advertising, Media Buying, Planning | No Comments »

Technology & Media Buying in 2010

by Jessie Johnson

It’s the time of year that’s full of predictions, especially in the media and marketing space. This is another one.

Common themes among the predictions for 2010 are more distributed content and media consumption patterns, more personalized experience with brands and engagement through social media, the rise of mobile, and a continued shift toward digital from traditional media.

So where does this leave media buyers?

We have ad networks and exchanges that attempt to streamline the buying process for targeted online advertising, and enterprise-level, on-premise software programs for planning and buying traditional media. Somewhere in the middle are internal processes and systems from demand-side platforms to spreadsheets and sticky notes. And data. Lots of data.

How media and technology converge this year could be the answer to a fragmented media landscape and the cumbersome buying processes that come with it.

Traditional & Online Advertising

Advertising in traditional media isn’t going anywhere, despite the growth in online spend and the decline in traditional media spend. In fact, a recent MediaPost analysis found that the percentage share of spending for each medium (except newspapers) hasn’t really changed. It’s just that online advertising (not to mention mobile, video, etc.) continues to increase, and  the apparent decline in traditional spend is just a leveling out of ad budgets to make room for digital media.

Nonetheless, it seems the coming year will bring a continued decline in traditional advertising spending, though not to the degree we saw in 2009. eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey also points out in his 7 predictions for 2010 that social media advertising will level off (it’s better earned), and advertising content and relevant creative will become a focus of 2010.

Technology & Innovation

This post isn’t about which media types will rise or fall in the coming year but rather the advances in technology that will enable the process of planning and buying these mediums to reach local consumers and stand out among the noise.

Increases in buying process efficiencies will improve the ROI of advertising in any medium.

The concept of bringing these systems and processes together into a single über media buying platform is not new. Some industry giants have attempted to provide the tools to buy broadcast and print media with the same convenience of running paid search campaigns through their platform, though met with little success.

At the heart of it all is an attempt not only to streamline but somewhat standardize the process of requesting proposals (RFPs), one of ClickZ’s digital media predictions for 2010 . The standardization of digital media buying through online platforms could scale to traditional media as well.

But the platform that succeeds this year won’t push the media buyer into a process both prescribed and limited by the technology they use, or the medium they’re buying. It will simply open the channels of communication to facilitate information collection and analysis, process management, and execution.

And just as marketers are finding new ways to incorporate social media into their strategies or manage their media buys in a single stop with the some level of simplicity we’ve grown used to in today’s applications, these same concepts will drive the advances in and adoption of new technology that challenges current media buying models.

In essence, the technology that will help us adjust to the fragmented media landscape needs to include, at minimum, the following concepts:

  • Increased efficiencies in process via internet access to comprehensive platform
  • Real-time information driven by platform users and marketplace activity
  • A connection of buyers and sellers through communication and “social” tools (content tagging, recommendations, comparisons)
  • Customizable tools to plan, buy, and compare any medium

In an iMedia Connection video that takes a look at the marketing platforms that will evolve in 2010, Nancy Marzouk (VP Sales, x+1) explains the industry activities to watch in the coming year will be how agencies increasingly adopt advances in technology, how the base technology built years ago will hold up against innovations in today’s technology, and how multiple media types will be adopted on the ad exchanges and online platforms.  The example used in the interview was video, but this could also apply to the notion of using online tools to buy and sell offline media.

Information Exchange

And another key piece of the puzzle is real-time data, a concept with a variety of different applications. It hasbeen at the forefront of industry news lately with Nielsen’s decision to drop live local TV ratings in favor of live-plus-same-day to account for DVR viewership, and the reversal of the decision soon after under pressure from agencies and industry organizations. Among the concerns with live-plus-same-day ratings was the potential inflation of audience numbers.

Alas, the quest continues across media types to find a way to accurately measure audiences as engagement with a medium or the content delivered changes within a marketplace. Media buyers look for more accurate and real-time data, but it must be transparent and unbiased.

The need for better data has an interesting implication for media buyers—the ability to do real-time comparison of advertising opportunities and proposals, maybe even with the benefit of potential reach and frequency calculations.

Bringing it all together will be the platform that allows buyers and sellers to interact and share information, using social concepts of tagging advertising opportunities that appeal to niche audiences or adding new media outlets as they arise. This will allow marketers to reach their consumers through long tail media buying opportunities as well which, for local advertising, will no doubt become increasingly more viable channels to reach targeted consumers in the time, place, and medium that works for them.

Media buyers in 2010 will demand the information, communications, and flexibility among the tools and systems they use to plan and measure multiple media types that reach a targeted audience.

The challenge for new media buying technologies will be to incorporate all mediums—online and offline—into a single platform without interfering with inventory supply and demand or negotiations, biasing information with a commission structure, or remaining static in a digital world grown accustomed to real-time information.

Want to see how this will work in 2010? Contact us.


Posted in Advertising, Media Buying, Multi-Channel, Planning, Trends | 9 Comments »

3 Ways to Organize An Advertising Campaign

by Jessie Johnson

“Out of clutter find simplicity,” Albert Einstein states in one of his Three Rules of Work.

The easiest path to this clutter-free, simplified work existence—if such thing exists— usually involves getting organized, whether it’s making a list of priority tasks, putting together a project plan, or creating a calendar of deadlines and other important dates, such as events or project milestones.

Planning and buying media for an advertising campaign—or multiple campaigns for multiple clients, or whatever the scenario—results in a whole lot of information to organize and communicate, not only for the media buyer, but the client (and the AE if different from the media buyer, and so on).

It’s All in the Details

As with every communication, the level of detail that needs to be included depends on 1) the situation, and 2) the role of the person receiving the information.

With media buying as an example, the situation would be managing and communicating dates and deadlines related to a media plan.

Keeping a media plan organized could require up to three different “views” of the campaign and schedule information. (The good news—no more than three.)

  • Internal Calendar for Agency
  • Client-facing Campaign CalendarRadio ad schedule
  • Campaign Calendar with Schedule Breakdown

Internal Campaign Calendar
This calendar is for agency eyes only, and its primary goal is to improve workflow and communicate deadlines internally. In addition to the overall campaign calendar with a schedule breakdown (a combination of the other two), the internal calendar includes

  • List of media outlets and contact info
  • Media types included in campaign
  • Ad specifications
  • Mechanical info for creative (ad sizes, file types, etc.)
  • Traffic deadlines
  • Internal notes, such as who needs to review the ad creative or whether the client has approved it

Client-facing Campaign Calendar
This calendar gives an executive-level overview of media campaign activities such as media used and run dates. The nitty gritty details of creative deadlines and date and whether to prepare a jpg or pdf don’t matter here.

What does matter is the ability to paint the picture of what ads are running when, in what mediums and through which media outlets on any given day or week or month during the campaign.

One way of categorizing this information into an executive overview for the client is by grouping it by medium, with the details below.

For fun, let’s say our example campaign uses a combination of print, radio, online, and television to promote a Christmas concert and silent auction, with a budget of $20,000 to reach 25-55-year-olds. Our Client-facing Campaign Calendar might be organized like…

  • Radio Ads

- Media Outlet: Lite Rock 55.5
- Run Dates: November 10 – November 19, 2009
- Ads Per Week: 40
- Length: 30 seconds

- Media Outlet: Country Hits 77.7
- Run Dates: November 13 – November 29, 2009
- Ads Per Week: 50
- Length: 30 seconds

- Etc.

  • Print Ads

- Media Outlet: Local Newspaper  (daily)
- Run Dates: November 9 – 15, 23 – 29
- Ads per week: 3
- Size & Format: 1/4 page, color

And so on, for each media type and schedule included in the campaign.

Some clients may be interested in seeing the estimated number of impressions by media type or schedule, too, for example when the “client” is the marketing budget decision maker of an in-house agency.

A nice touch is color-coding advertising schedules by medium or media outlets in a standard weekly or monthly calendar format. Charts that break down the campaign’s budget allocation by medium and/or the potential reach of each medium used in the campaign provide nice summary visuals as well.

Campaign Calendar with Schedule Breakdown
And finally, this particular calendar lies somewhere in the middle of the previous two, good for keeping track of all the details related to a campaign in a single spot. It provides a more detailed summary of the media schedules confirmed for a campaign, without the noise of traffic deadlines and creative specs for internal use.

So, it includes all the info in the Client-Facing Calendar, plus

  • Placement-specific details

- For radio and television, daypart and program information
- For print and online, ad size and location on page or screen
- Estimated impressions
- Placement total

Campaign Summary
Somewhere along the way, these details should roll up into an overall campaign summary that provides a snapshot of

  • Campaign Criteria
  • Total Budget
  • Run Dates
  • Media Types Used
  • Budget Allocation by Medium
  • Overall Potential Reach

The categories required for each calendar will vary by agency, client, or campaign.

Nonetheless, a standardized approach to tracking and managing media schedules and their preceding deadlines will help you save time, stay organized, and improve communication among campaign stakeholders.


Posted in Advertising, Media Buying, Multi-Channel, Planning | 1 Comment »

Right Message, Right Person, Right Time

by Jessie Johnson

With each campaign, media buyers strive to reach more of the right people, more often, and with a relevant message.

But, this isn’t always as easy as a numbers game. The optimized mix of reach, frequency, and relevancy depends on a number of factors:

  • The price of the product being sold,
  • The stage of the buying cycle a prospect is in,
  • The industry or type of product being sold,
  • Whether the message is passive or intrusive, and
  • Whether it’s a brand message or a call-to-action.

Reach and the Buying Cycle

Early Consideration – Create awareness through an advertising campaign targeted to the audience segment deemed most likely to want or need the product or service.

Search to Fill Need or Want – Invest in paid search and organic search, and have the appropriate technology in order to gather, route, and measure lead sources.

Evaluation - The longest stage, nurture marketing, the proper frequency of messaging, and the right content are critical to moving prospects through this phase.

Purchase Decision - Blogs, website, and collateral materials need to offer the appropriate amount of credibility via customer value proof points (case studies), testimonials, and positive viral chatter/messaging.

Again, the right mix as aligned to the buying cycle depends upon the product or service being advertised, and the immediacy of the need being filled—someone who needs a fancy latte to jumpstart their day is just as qualified a prospect at the Early Consideration stage as a person evaluating life insurance options would be in the Purchase Decision stage.

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9 Circles of Media Buying Hell, Almost

by Jessie Johnson

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

Painting Inspired by Dante's Inferno

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.


Posted in Media Buying, Planning | 2 Comments »

Why Multi-Channel Matters

by Jessie Johnson

The media landscape today is often described as fragmented—the abundance of options we have as consumers to view, read, or listen to content.

For advertisers, it’s the abundance of media outlets available to deliver their message.

Consumers are no longer exposed to advertising messages only through daily newspapers or broadcast commercials—now they can go online anytime to find exactly the content they want, when they want it.

And the trend in advertising spend reflects this shift in audience attention. In 1998, 95% of advertising dollars were spent on print, radio, and television—traditional media. Research  predicts roughly 33% of the $605 billion global advertising spend will move from traditional to online media over the next three years (”Social Media/Networking.” America’s Growth Capital, Sept. 2008).

But for now, that advertising spend remains disproportionate to the time spent with each medium.           time-spent-vs-budget

This gap might suggest that some media types—in particular radio and online—are still perceived as more difficult and complex to plan, buy, and measure.

No One-Size Fits All

Further complicating the media buying process is the difficulty in determining which media are truly most effective in reaching a given target audience, and there’s no shortage of research and reports available to show the advantages of one medium over another.

But ultimately, the effectiveness with which a medium (broadcast, print, online) or media outlet (specific publication, radio station, website, etc.) can reach a target audience depends more on the campaign itself—advertising objectives, budget, and above all, target audience media consumption habits.

It all depends on the target audience—what channels and content are relevant to that demographic.

Different media types can be used to complement each other as well.

One study measured the impact of multi-channel advertising by looking at the combination of television and online media, demonstrating greater brand recognition and recall among people exposed to an ad in multiple mediums—30% of respondents remembered the ad after seeing it only on television, compared to 78% recall among those who saw the ad both online and on television (eBusiness Center, Dec. 2008).

Another study found that newspaper ads sent consumers online or to the store 56% of the time to research and purchase products seen in the print ads.

Ultimately, there will never be a one-size-fits-all medium that reaches 100% of the target audience 100% of the time.

An integrated, multi-channel advertising campaign has the greatest potential for reaching a specific audience with enough frequency to drive action. Results.


Posted in Advertising, Media Buying, Multi-Channel, Planning | 2 Comments »

Is Perfect Reach Perfectly Impossible?

by Brian Gramer

The process of enhancing your company or your client’s company’s ability to get more customers—whether B2B, B2C, or B2B2C—is the same today as it was 100 years ago: a marketer needs to determine the best way to communicate to the greatest number of people who may be interested in the product or service.

Regardless of whether it’s traditional advertising or an interactive marketing campaign, the same three principles apply—Reach, Frequency, and Relevancy. Much like a three-legged stool, these principles must all be at work in an ad campaign for it to be effective.

A few months ago we put up a post to help define these concepts; this one touches on why those concepts matter now more than ever before.

In a fragmented media landscape and an era in which consumers are becoming more and more accustomed to getting g content and information that is tailored to them, and they have so many choices of media outlets for the content they read, listen to, view, or otherwise consume.

Reach is the number of different people in a target demographic (age, gender) that can be reached with an advertising message.

  • One-hundred-percent reach would mean the message reached all people in the demographic and geographic footprint in which you do business.
  • Perfect reach would mean reaching 100% of the target audience that you want to buy the product or service at the time you are advertising.

Neither “perfect reach” nor “100% reach” is achievable.

It could be argued that some giant brands like Coke achieve 100% reach because of their impressive brand equity and the sheer number of ads they run, but at the end of the day, perfect reach is unattainable. Why? Because Coke’s geographic footprint is worldwide, and there are still parts of the world that don’t watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers, or have the internet. That said, Coke’s reach is still impressive, likely 90% in the US alone.

Optimum Effective Reach

Frequency is the number of different times you reach a target audience (demographic) with your message. The proper amount of frequency needed in order to get someone to take action or remember your brand is an ongoing debate.

Regardless, herein lays the opportunity to enhance a combine by using the right mix of reach and frequency.

An old rule of thumb some brand advertisers use for optimum effective reach is trying to reach a target audience three times within a reasonable time period (such as monthly) or several times over a longer period of time.

Really, the appropriate reach varies depending on a number of different factors, such as

  • The price of the product or service being advertised
  • Whether the message is passive or intrusive
  • The stage of the buying cycle a consumer is in when they are reached for the first time (granted, different for a restaurant advertiser and an automotive advertiser)
  • The type of product being sold
  • Whether it’s a brand message or a call to action

But What Does it Mean to Me and Why Should I Care?

Relevancy is trying to develop the appropriate content and creative elements for an advertisement to get your message to the target audience as succinctly as possible. They need to know…

  • What you do
  • How it can solve a need or want they have now or in the future
  • How they can obtain the product or service when they need or want to

This is why reach and frequency alone are not enough for a successful advertising campaign.

The Three-Legged Stool

And the nirvana for marketers in terms of reach, frequency, and relevancy?

Getting the Right Message to the Right Person at the Right Time – reaching someone in the target audience with the right information at the time they want to purchase.

To get there, Reach, Frequency, and Relevancy must all be in play to ensure effectiveness of an advertising campaign.


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