AN OVERVIEW OF WHAT IS MEDIA
Advertising Media plays a vital role in ensuring the advertisers message is being seen, read, or heard by the appropriate people, in the most relevant environment, with an appropriate level of exposure at a competitive cost – There is a lot more to it for sure but these are the fundamental functions of the media process and core services provided by a Media Agency.
It is not uncommon for an advertiser to invest around 80% of their advertising budget to media, therefore the role of media planning and buying requires a substantial amount of accountability, efficiency and innovation.
MEDIA AGENCY SERVICES PROVIDED
A Media Agency is equipped to provide a variety of tasks that are utilised to varying levels, subject to the needs of their clients. The universal expectation is that a Media Agency can provide a multitude of services and expertise, which include some of the following core functions as an example
Client Servicing
• Keeping the client happy
• Brand management and partnership
• Portfolio management
• Media Training
Strategic
• Target and consumer insights
• Media Channel connections and recommendations
• Strategic development and innovations
• implementation Planning
• Competitive analysis
Investment
• Media Negotiations
• Media Buying
• Performance tracking
Research
• Maintenance of proprietary and syndicated research
• Outputs
Financial
• Invoicing
• Budget Management
• Contract control
Standard Flow of Tasks:
Briefing
The Advertiser produces a comprehensive brief.
This will include things such as
• What they are aiming to achieve from their advertising campaign
• Information about their brand/product/service
• Research information about their market, product, consumers
• What markets they need to cover
• What results they are expecting to achieve
• How much money they have to spend
• What they have done in the past and how it worked
The Strategic Response
The Media Agency’s Strategic planners will then look into all the available research to help better understand the consumer and their behavioural patterns and media habits to come up with the following recommendations:
• Target audience profile (demographic/psychographic)
• Strategic idea that leverages knowledge of the target against the task at hand
• Medium(s) (based on relevance and impact to target audience, ability to meet the objectives of the campaign and value in terms of providing the best environment to make it all work more effectively)
• The effort required in each medium (i.e. TV to reach 60% of the target at least 2 times)
• Timings for each medium
• Estimated costs
Strategic Approval
The Advertiser reviews the recommendations provided by the Agency and then gives approval to the concepts of the campaign. The details of how the campaign will be activated then become the next step.
Implementation Response
The Media Agency then takes the approved strategic concepts and investigates how to deliver this campaign with more detail.
Examples of what is reviewed and proposed then includes:-
• What specific environments to use (which genre of TV programmes, magazine or newspaper titles, radio stations, bus routes, cinema complexes etc)
• What times of the day and days of the week to target
• The specific weeks of activity for each medium
• Any promotional opportunities negotiated with the medium
• Final and negotiated costs to deliver
Implementation Approval
The Advertiser then reviews the media proposals in more detail to see how the strategic ideas and insights will be implemented and to obtain firmer cost estimates to deliver.
Buying and Negotiating
The Media Agency then proceeds with booking all the activity that has been proposed and approved.
This process includes:
• By negotiating actual placement in all mediums (ie specific programmes, sections in print, segments in radio etc)
• Negotiating with the mediums for better rates
• Confirming all activity is placed where booked
• Managing the budgets across mediums, markets Monitoring The Media Agency monitors all activity on a weekly basis to:-
• Ensure that all activity appeared where booked
• Negotiates appropriate compensation where necessary.
• Reports back to the client on the results
