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Robert S.K. Regular has over 13 years experience in offline and online media. He is the owner of New York Publishing Group, Inc., the Publisher of Adotas.com. Mr. Regular has also served as President of Active Response Group, a full service display network and lead generation provider. Formerly, Mr. Regular was President of Oridian, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Conducent, Inc. and Media Marketing Director and Producer for television divisions of Clear Channel Communications.

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Is Media Buying Harder than Selling?

Written on
October 13th 2006
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by Robert S.K. Regular  |
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Media buying is quickly becoming one of the most important roles at online media companies. Inventory of every type including banners, pops, search keywords and even text links are in high demand while prices are sky rocketing. The market is definitely healthy and I am encouraged to see that even offline advertisers are making serious moves to the internet. The momentum is there and as advertisers look to reach the millions of eyeballs media inventories will become scarce and prices will rise. Welcome to the joy and hell of media buying.

We have a modest size media buying department and I am shocked at how challenging it is to purchase media. In fact I am now debating whether media buying is actually harder than media selling; I’m leaning towards buying. Sure, you would think that spending money would be so much easier than asking for money. Spending money is so easy in day to day life, but being a media buyer is more like working as an auctioneer than shopping at Walmart. The supply, demand, price and type adjust and change rapidly and since everything is in motion you can’t rely too heavily on the past to be a predictor of the future. You have to be an amazing negotiator, organizer, and relationship expert to survive in this marketplace.

Working closely with the media buy department has taught me a lot about salespeople, too. You would be shocked at how many sales people drop the ball on an hot or fresh lead. Our buyers sometimes have to call, leave voicemail or email multiple times to get a simple response, occasionally we never hear from them at all. Sales people reading this column would say, “I never drop a lead”, but I assure you it happens many times. In addition it’s common for ad campaigns to not get live on time or in the right way. It’s a common complaint I hear frequently from other companies.

It would be interesting to get feedback from heads of sales and media buying on the time it takes for their organization to respond to a lead, or follow up to a request, or get a campaign live. I wonder how many know or have those key indicators at hand and are optimizing them. When media buying becomes harder than selling you know we’re in a healthy marketplace and I believe it has much more room to grow. However, I hope sales people will welcome the demand from buyers by managing the relationships professionally and closely. We want to buy, do you want to sell?



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Reader Comments.

Bob, it always comes down to the chicken or the egg questions. In this case is buying convertible inventory is the most important thing a performance driven network must do. It might make a year see why this is so, but when we noticed retention rate of advertisers are dropping like flies, it is too late then and down goes your brand. Then again, I am preaching to the choir.

Posted by Ben | 2:09 pm on October 13, 2006.

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