What does a media buyer do?
Media planning decides where, when and how much to advertise to reach a target audience. Media buying carries out that plan: negotiating rates and positions with publishers, broadcasters and platforms, placing the orders, delivering creative to each vendor to spec, and confirming that every ad ran as booked.
A good buyer also protects the budget after the order is signed. That means checking delivery against the insertion order, claiming makegoods or credits when a placement under-delivers, and auditing invoices before they are paid.
How do you decide the channel mix?
We start from the audience and the objective. Building awareness is a reach problem, best measured in cost per thousand people reached; generating leads or sales is a response problem, measured in cost per result. The answer decides how the budget splits between broad-reach channels such as TV, radio and out-of-home, and targeted, measurable channels such as programmatic (including connected TV), paid social and search.
Then we look at where your audience actually spends its time and attention, what competitors are running, and which channels have produced results for you before. For larger budgets we compare channels on cost per result and incremental reach, and shift spend between them as the data comes in. See splitting a budget across campaigns.
What is programmatic advertising?
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying of ad impressions through demand-side platforms (DSPs), which bid in real time on inventory that publishers offer across websites, apps, streaming services and audio platforms. Each impression is priced and bought individually, based on who is likely to see it and where.
Beyond open auctions, programmatic also covers private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed deals with selected publishers. We set the targeting (contextual, audience, geographic and device), apply frequency caps and brand safety controls, and use site inclusion and exclusion lists, so the efficiency of automation does not come at the cost of where your ads appear.
How do you verify that the ads actually ran?
- Digital: ad server and platform data, third-party verification where the budget warrants it, and placement reports reviewed during the flight.
- Television and radio: post-buy reports and station affidavits confirming when each spot aired.
- Out-of-home: proof-of-posting photos and play logs from digital screens.
- Print: tear sheets or digital copies of each insertion.
Delivery is then reconciled against the order and the invoice. When something falls short, we claim the makegood or credit from the vendor.
Why work with a media buyer who is also a publisher?
We sell advertising on our own network of owner-operated websites, and we buy media for our own sites and products. Seeing both sides of the transaction shows us how inventory is priced, where fees sit in the supply chain, and what separates a placement worth its CPM from one that only looks cheap.
That perspective goes into every plan we build for clients, along with the reporting discipline we apply to our own spend.