What We Do Best
Media Buying
Media
Buying Services
Media Buying is a craft that relies on institutional access to the Nielsen ratings and other ratings systems to manage buys based on audience growth and efficient delivery. Relationships play a role, too. We believe in fairness and consistency and we deliver it to you by holding vendors accountable.
Negotiating
Placement
Monitoring
Auditing
Political
Non-Profit
A Common Question
What is unique about Brand Water’s services that can help clients place media and advertising?
Brand Water believes that helping you navigate the media landscape available to you in your markets makes you more competitive and lowers your costs by eliminating waste. When you work with us that comes standard. We call it “the essential marketing element.” If you’re looking to grow your share in your markets, you might want to get some!
The Essentials of Media Buying
Let’s look at how media buying and media planning is essential for your business and how it plays a role in social media marketing, digital marketing, and more.
Media buying is the process of using paid media to disseminate information and advertise goods and services. It deals with getting the most effective ad placement at the most efficient cost. It is carried out via media buyers or through automated advertising platforms. It also requires media planning.
The Fundamentals of Media Buying
Effective media buying requires the combination of placement, time, and context to achieve audience targeting and meet marketing goals.
The media buying process is divided into three stages, each as important as the next.
Pre-launch
At this stage, the media planner and media buyer research the available media options and the one best suited for the audience and message.
- Define the audience: The first research focuses on understanding the target audience. They are defined into categories such as demographics (gender, age, marital and social status), location (country, city, area), behavior (interest and body).
- Research audience reach: Find out the cross-section of the target audience that will respond best to the campaign. Look for similarities to form a buying pattern that can be harnessed.
- Learn from competitors: The successes and failures of competitors will produce ideas on who to target, the media reach, and the context for the message.
- Develop media buying strategy: Design a media buying strategy that aligns with audience type and advertising goals.
- Decide on the media channel: The findings from the audience research will determine the media channel to employ. Some audience types are best reached using traditional media, while others respond better to online media.
- Choose the media outlet: There are different traditional and online media outlets. Do research, negotiate pricing, and choose the most cost-effective option. Be open to working with competitors of preferred media outlets. This will give bargaining power.
- Create a budget. The budget should focus on the media buying strategy and show a cost-investment ratio. The budget should consider the duration of the ad placement and the advertising goals.
Launch
Once the pre-launch stage is complete, it is time to launch the media buying strategy. The media buyer must monitor and evaluate the process for effectiveness and maximum return on investment during the launch. There are three steps in this stage:
- Media delivery: This ensures that the message has the proper placement, is timely delivered, and is in the right context. The message must be screened for relevance, so the audience does not feel spammed or irritated.
- Track audience interaction: Sometimes, a media strategy looks good on paper but needs tweaks to work in real life. Observe how the audiences interact (or don’t interact) with the message and make necessary adjustments based on your findings.
- Evaluate based on milestones and trends: Each campaign has small goals to achieve within a period. Ensure the milestones are met timely. Also, watch out for the latest trends that can render your message obsolete and adapt where necessary.
Post-launch
Media buying extends beyond running campaigns. It also evaluates campaign strategy to learn from its successes and mistakes. Media delivery, return on investment, customer interaction, and milestone performance are things to consider.
- Advertising goals: analyses the campaign in terms of how it met the advertising goals. These will give broad ideas on whether the campaign was a success or not.
- Analyze data: Even successful campaigns can contain mistakes. Failed campaigns can owe their failures to ‘little mistakes’ and unforeseen trends. That is why data is analyzed based on what worked and what didn’t in a particular situation. This will give insights into what worked for the campaign and what went wrong.
- Draw experience and insights: interest data from the campaign with variables and changing trends. Invite others to draw insights from the data and share their ideas. Sometimes, campaigns fail because the playing field changes abruptly.
The Brand Water Approach
Brand Water’s Approach to Media Buying
At Brand Water, our media buyers survey the entire landscape, pinpointing growth, opportunity and engagement across all platforms and compiling that data into clear and actionable plans.
With advanced technology and software we can get information from any media vendor (TV, Radio, or any of the array of Digital options out there) in any market in minutes. By studying the numbers, past and projected future, we can consistently collaborate with vendors and build reliable and resilient campaigns that are cost efficient and effective overall.
At Brand Water, we have the tools to focus on the numbers and the costs per impression as well as the ability to customize your audience and determine who interacts with what message and when. If you’re selling a product or service, the first step is finding out who you need to talk to and then where they are most accessible and through which channels. This is the stuff that gets us excited and we’d love to talk to you about it any time.
Frequently asked questions
Yes and no. Media buying is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit but the parts that get left out are often the most important. Buying media is a craft and no matter how hard the big titans in the industry push to automate this process, like flying, it will always involve the inclusion of human beings.
A solid media buyer surveys the entire landscape, pinpointing growth and engagement across all platforms.
Asking the people that already work hard answering the phone, scheduling appointments and servicing your customers to also manage your media buy is not a sustainable strategy. You only get one bite at the apple, so to speak, so the people that represent your Brand to the outside world should have as few distractions from their true job as possible. Media vendors love to put you and your people on their timeline. Thats not how it works. You’re the client and you deserve to operate without being interrupted or having to explain your business to anyone.
In pretty much all cases, hiring an advertising agency won’t increase your costs one dollar. By eliminating waste, identifying and attributing efficiency, and negotiating directly with vendors in high volume, an advertising agency is going to put you in a position to grow revenue, not lose revenue.
As media buyers, not only do we have institutional access to the Nielsen ratings in each of our markets, but we also use state of the art software that speaks directly to stations across the United States. So, when a TV station or radio station tells us that a number of viewers or listeners will be generated when we buy “American Idol” on ABC, we can trust their assessment BUT we can also verify it. Then, we make sure it delivers and if it doesn’t we make sure you’re made good.
The days of Don Draper have definitely passed and advertising now is about creating custom audiences to increase conversions and not about three martini lunches on Madison Avenue. But we do have a guy named CJ who’s like the Don Draper of digital marketing.
