What is Media Buying?

The typical person can be exposed to more than 4,000 advertisements each day. Not surprising, given that people around the world spend an average of 170 minutes online per day! There are so many opportunities for advertisements to cross their screens.

If an advertisement catches your eye and it’s a product or service that you are interested in, there’s a good chance that it’s part of that brand’s digital campaign strategy. This is where a media buyer comes in—it’s their responsibility to strategically plan and place advertisements online to drive specific results for brands.

In digital media, there are two main parts to a media buyer’s job—media planning and media buying.

Media Planning

Media planning includes:

• Researching a target audience and their traits
• Identifying where they spend time online
• Determining what media channels and creatives make the most sense for the campaign
• Establishing KPIs for each media platform/channel

Media Buying

Media buying includes:

• Forming relationships with partners/vendors on the media plan
• Building the media plan
• Setting up specific flight dates
• Negotiating rates
• Managing contracted impressions/clicks/video views/etc.
• Managing campaign setup and launch
• Monitoring and optimizing campaign performance

Brands and agencies rely on media buyers to ensure that their online advertising dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. Media buyers are also instrumental in tying online advertising dollars back to business objectives. This often includes increasing brand awareness, driving online sales, increasing site engagement, and more.

There are many tools available to help media buyers streamline day-to-day processes. At Centro, we are fortunate to have Basis—our own comprehensive & automated digital media platform that allows our team to run direct, programmatic, search, and social media buys through a single interface. This platform is the foundation of our company and has enabled us to service over 1,000 media teams throughout the years.

Some of Basis’ features include:

• A robust 9,000+ vendor inventory directory
• Negotiation & contract management
• A fully integrated, top rated Demand Side Platform
• Universal reporting & analytics capabilities
• Business intelligence & insights data

So as people continue to spend more time online and see thousands of ads each day, know that media buyers are behind the scenes, carefully crafting digital campaigns to place a lot of those advertisements. Hopefully these media buyers are using platforms like Basis to make their jobs easier and ensure advertisements are put in front of the right people, at the right time, and the right place!

Sources
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/8/17441288/internet-time-spent-tv-zenith-data-media
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/08/25/finding-brand-success-in-the-digital-world/?sh=315a3c66626e