Buying Media Is Easy. Buying the Right Media Isn’t.

Sep 8

6 min read

The advertising industry is becoming increasingly self-service.

Comcast's Universal Ads is making TV and streaming advertising easier to access, while Global's AdPower is bringing the same self-service approach to radio, digital audio and outdoor.

For SMEs, that's potentially a very positive development.

At TVADSWORK, we've always believed that TV and other premium media should be more accessible to growing businesses. Anything that removes complexity, lowers barriers to entry and challenges the perception that TV and radio are only for major brands with enormous budgets is something we welcome.

But there's an important distinction that risks getting lost in the conversation:

Buying media and planning advertising are not the same thing.

A self-service platform can help you buy an advert.

A good media agency helps you decide whether it's the right advert, in the right place, reaching the right people, at the right price, and sometimes whether you should be advertising there at all.

Self-service makes buying advertising easier. That's a good thing.

Technology has transformed countless industries by giving consumers direct access to products and services that once required an intermediary. Booking.com didn't remove the need for travel advisers. Rightmove didn't eliminate estate agents. Trading apps haven't made financial advisers redundant. What they did was make the transaction easier for people who already knew what they wanted.

We see self-service advertising platforms in much the same way.

If you know precisely who you need to reach, which media you need, how much you should spend, how long you should advertise and what your creative needs to achieve, the ability to execute that plan quickly and efficiently can be extremely useful.

But that's quite a lot of ifs.

You can book your own TV ads. But should you?

This is where we think the distinction between media buying and media planning becomes important.

A self-service platform can potentially allow you to spend £20,000 on TV advertising in five minutes. We'd rather spend a little longer working out where that £20,000 should go.

Before a campaign is booked, there are some fundamental questions to answer:

Who do you actually need to reach?
Where should you reach them?
How much should you spend?
How long should you advertise?
What combination of TV, streaming, radio and digital audio makes sense?
What should your advert actually say?
Does the deal you're being offered represent good value?
How should the campaign be measured?
And sometimes, should you be advertising at all?

These aren't booking questions. They're advertising questions.

Answering them properly can make the difference between simply appearing on TV or radio and running a campaign that has been properly planned around your business.

PLAN → BUY → IMPROVE

Perhaps the easiest way to look at it is to divide the advertising journey into three stages:

PLAN

Audience. Objectives. Budget. Geography. Channels. Creative. Measurement.

This is where the important decisions should be made.

Who are we trying to influence? What do we want them to do? Where are they? Which media are most likely to reach them effectively? How much investment is appropriate? What should we say to them? And what will success actually look like?

BUY

Broadcaster negotiation. Inventory. Rates. Targeting. Scheduling. Delivery.

This is the transactional part of the process – and it's where self-service platforms can be particularly useful. Technology can make buying inventory faster, easier and more accessible.

But even here, experience matters.

Is the rate competitive? Is there another package available? Could the targeting be improved? Is the budget being deployed at the right time? Are there broadcaster incentives or opportunities worth considering? Could the same investment work harder elsewhere?

Being able to buy something doesn't automatically tell you whether it's good value.

IMPROVE

Reporting. Attribution. Optimisation. Learnings. Creative changes. Next campaign.

The campaign shouldn't end when the media goes live.

What happened? What worked? What didn't? Did one audience perform differently from another? Did certain regions respond particularly strongly? What did we learn from the creative? Should the next campaign use the same approach or change direction?

Advertising should be a learning process. Each campaign should help make the next one better.

Self-service largely addresses the middle of the journey. At TVADSWORK, we work across all three.

A platform starts with inventory. We start with your audience.

There's another important difference.

A self-service advertising platform exists to provide access to the media available through that particular platform. That's perfectly reasonable – it's what the platform is there to do. But an independent media agency can approach the question from the opposite direction.

Rather than starting with "What can we buy here?", we start with:

"Who do we need to reach, and what's the best way to reach them?"

That answer might involve linear TV. It might involve streaming. It might be radio, digital audio, cinema or another channel. More often, it could be a combination.

That's particularly important for SMEs, where budgets need to work hard and there may be less room for expensive mistakes.

When something becomes incredibly easy to buy, it's also incredibly easy to buy the wrong thing.

That's perhaps the danger of making media buying increasingly frictionless.

The technology may be able to tell you that you can target a particular audience, region or demographic. That doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Likewise, a package can look attractive because of the number of impressions, spots or viewers being offered. But is it actually good value for your particular business?

That's where experience, independence and knowledge of the wider marketplace become valuable.

At TVADSWORK, we don't want you to spend more on advertising. We want you to spend it better.

And what about the advert itself?

Media is only part of the equation.

You can identify the perfect audience, negotiate an excellent rate and secure fantastic inventory, but if the advert doesn't connect with the people watching or listening, you've missed a huge part of the opportunity.

Creative and media shouldn't exist in separate worlds.

Who you're talking to, where you're reaching them and what you're trying to achieve should influence what you say and how you say it.

TVADSWORK combine media planning and buying with independent in-house production expertise, which means we can consider the media and creative together.

We're not simply asking where your advert should appear. We're also thinking about what people should see or hear when it gets there.

What happens when your campaign crosses several media channels?

This is another area where the distinction becomes particularly important.

Businesses rarely operate in neat media silos.

A campaign might combine linear TV and streaming with radio and digital audio. Another might use addressable TV alongside cinema or outdoor.

Self-service platforms can make accessing each medium individually considerably easier. But someone still needs to look at the whole picture.

Are the channels complementing one another? Is the budget split appropriately? Are we unnecessarily duplicating audiences? Is there a gap somewhere? Does the creative work across each environment? And how do we measure the combined impact?

That's not simply media buying. That's media planning.

Booking platforms and agencies have different jobs

This isn't an argument against self-service.

Far from it.

We believe there's room for both.

Self-service platforms can be extremely useful for businesses with experienced marketing teams, established media knowledge and a clear understanding of exactly what they want to buy. They can also be useful tools for agencies themselves. But their role is different.

A booking platform is designed to help you book advertising. TVADSWORK is here to help you make the right decision.

That's an important distinction.

Don't just buy advertising. Plan advertising.

At TVADSWORK, we're passionate about simplifying TV advertising and making it accessible to SMEs and businesses considering television for the first time. So developments such as Universal Ads and AdPower are something we welcome.

They help demystify media buying. They make premium advertising feel more accessible. And they could encourage businesses that may never previously have considered TV or radio to take another look.

But making something easier to buy doesn't remove the value of knowing what to buy in the first place.

That's where we see the role of agencies evolving rather than disappearing.

Less about simply placing an order. More about strategy, independence, creative thinking, negotiation, integration, measurement and learning.

Choosing the right audience, channels, budget, campaign length and creative still requires experience.

Because ultimately: