Media Buying Process

To be successful in advertising, you have to be good at Media Buying. But what is Media Buying? How does it work? This article explains the 11-step process.

What is Media Buying?

In advertising, Media Buying is the process of actualizing the Media Plan which includes buying strategy, media research, RFPs, insertion orders (IOs), performance tracking, vendor bill reconciliation, and campaign reporting.

Who Does Media Buying?

The Media Buying process is traditionally performed by Media Buyers. Today, however, Media Buying might fall within the purview of Media Planners, particularly in digital adverting.

With evolving and integrating roles, others in the marketing department may take on some or all of Media Buying responsibilities.

The 11 Steps of the Media Buying Process

The eleven steps of the Media Buying process, which are described in more detail below, are:

  1. Review Media Plan
  2. Develop Media Buying Strategy
  3. Conduct Media Research
  4. Send Requests for Proposals (RFPs)
  5. Finalize Media Buying Schedule
  6. Prepare Insertion Orders (IOs)
  7. Send Insertion Orders (IOs)
  8. Implement Advertisements
  9. Track Media Performance
  10. Reconcile Media Vendor Bills
  11. Campaign Reports

Media Buying vs. Media Planning

In traditional advertising channels like TV, radio, and print, the Media Buying process has traditionally been separate from the Media Planning process. The Media Buying process would start when the Media Planning process ended – when the Media Plan was approved by the media budget holder. The focus of Media Buying was getting the best prices and terms, while the focus of Media Planning was developing the best media strategy.

Buying and Planning Now Integrated

This distinction between Media Buying and Media Planning is disappearing. In digital advertising, the terms “Media Buying” and “Media Planning” are practically interchangeable.

Digital Advertising Diminishes Media Buying

Digital advertising has reduced the need for negotiating terms and pricing.

Many forms of digital advertising such as Google and Facebook don’t require – in fact, won’t accept – insertion orders.

And prices for programmatic advertising are often set in a real-time auction. In an open auction, you have to be the highest bidder to win the advertising inventory. In other words, the core Media Buying job of negotiating prices and terms is eliminated. What’s left is ad ops.

Even when insertion orders are used in digital advertising – as with direct site buys or programmatic direct – the role of Media Buying is often performed by the same person doing the Media Planning.

Digital Media Buying Goes Mainstream

As digital advertising garners an ever-increasing share of media budgets, the workflows of digital advertising have influenced those of traditional advertising.

When digital was just a tiny slice of budgets, immature, and complicated by technology, the digital media team was separate from the seasoned core media team. In fact, digital media was so distinct that standalone digital Media Buying agencies were common.

That has all changed as digital advertising became mainstream.

Integrated Media Buying Teams

Media Plans are no longer siloed by media channel. Advertisers want to see a unified Media Plan across all media channels.

As a result, Media Plans have become integrated. You might see a magazine placement on line 1, a TikTok ad on line 2, an influencer promotion on line 3, and a radio placement on line 4.

In response, media teams have become integrated, too.

Instead of the digital Media Buying team off in one corner, the social team off in another corner, and traditional media team in another corner, we now see Media Buying teams integrated across media channels.

Unified Media Buying Workflows

As Media Buying teams have become integrated, Media Buying workflows have also become unified.

As budgets continue migrate to digital advertising, traditional Media Buyers are adopting the Media Buying workflows of digital advertising. The distinctions between Media Planning and Media Buying have blurred and have become one unified process.

The Media Buying Process Described Here

To keep it simple, I present the Media Buying process below using its traditional definition.

For a modern definition, prefix the Media Buying process with the Media Planning process for a complete, unified process. You’ll notice the Media Buying process shown below picks up exactly where the Media Planning process ends.

Review The Media Plan

Your first step in the Media Buying process is to review the Media Plan.

And the first thing to verify are signatures. Has the Media Plan been properly authorized by the client? Is there a signed media authorization?

If not, now is the time to stop and ask questions about the status of the Media Plan. Is the Media Plan complete? How many changes are expected?

If authorized, it’s time to carefully review the goals, budgets, timing, reach, frequency, costs, and KPIs in the Media Plan.

It’s common to find holes or imprecision in the Media Plan at this point. Now is the best time to get the details you need for your Media Buying.

Develop Media Buying Strategy

Now that you have a clear direction, the next step is to develop your Media Buying strategy.

It’s impossible to be prescriptive about the best way to develop your Media Buying strategy. There’s no one “right” way create a Media Buying strategy.

Your Media Buying strategy should consider the goals, budgets, timing, reach, frequency, costs, and KPIs in the Media Plan. Of particular consideration are the media channels because the strategies for each channel vary wildly. For example, strategies for television and social media will be quite different from each other.

When you have your strategy, it’s important to take a checkpoint before moving on. Share your Media Buying strategy with the Media Planning team. Is it on track? Or are changes needed?

Conduct Media Research

When you feel good about your Media Buying strategy, it’s time to conduct media research.

In fact, you might start with your media research while developing your media strategy. Your research will inform your strategy. So, feel free to “jump the gun” your media research early.

Media Research Tools

There are lots of great media research tools available. Each tends to focus on specific media channels. Some examples:

This list is far from complete.

Pull Ranker Reports

When Media Buying for broadcast, you’re typically given a market (e.g. New York Metro), a budget, a GRP goal, and a CPP goal. Using this as a guide, you can use your media research tool to pull “rankers” which tell you which stations have the highest ratings. Then you can use a tool like Advertise with Us, Bionic, or SQAD to gather standard rates.

AI-Powered Media Research Tools

Most of the tools mentioned above require human guidance. The challenge with this approach is the ever-increasing complexity of the media landscape. It’s hard to source fresh ideas and the best placements using only manual search methods.

This is where artificial intelligence can help.

AI is no longer out of reach technology limited to the few. AI is now becoming a tool for media research.

For example, Bionic Media Buying software uses an AI technique called “Collaborative Filtering” to recommend media for your Media Plan.

Amazon uses collaborative filtering to recommend books. Spotify uses collaborative filtering to recommend movies. Netflix uses collaborative filtering to recommend movies. As it turns out, collaborative filtering works well for Media Buying, too.

Develop a Consideration Set

The goal of media research is to develop a “consideration set,” which is a list of media programs to consider buying for a given Media Plan.

Your consideration set is far from a final list of media buys. In fact, you should plan to abandon two-thirds of your consideration set. As a rule of thumb, only one third of the consideration set ends up in a media buy.

You can move on from your media research when you feel good about your consideration set. But you’re never really done with research. You’ll keep cycling back to research as you gain new insights.

Send Requests for Proposals (RFPs)

Now that you’ve a solid consideration set, you’re going to need to gather the information you need to winnow down to your final list of media buys. One way to do this is through Requests for Proposals – or RFPs.

Your Request for Proposal

Unlike in the Media Planning process, where RFPs are used to generate ideas, the purpose of the RFP in the Media Buying process is more tactical – inventory availability, pricing, packaging, etc. It’s all about negotiating deals and securing advertising inventory.

Many RFPs make the mistake of asking for general information. As a result, you get a lot of extraneous information that confuses the buying process but don’t get the information you need to make media buying decisions.

Your RFP should specifically ask for all the information you need to make buying decisions. Stay focused.

Your RFP should also ask for a list of specific placements, and each placement option should include:

  • description of the advertising program
  • available inventory
  • price
  • flight dates
  • net media cost
  • ad specs

Gathering Proposals

The next step is to send your RFP to each of the advertising vendors in your consideration set. This process includes:

  1. Find vendor contact information
  2. Send RFP to each vendor
  3. Track responses
  4. Follow up with non-responders
  5. Gather media proposals
  6. Evaluate media proposals
  7. Reject media proposals that don’t make the cut
  8. Accept media proposals into your Media Plan

How to Run an RFP

Many try to run RFPs through email with Excel spreadsheets. As you might imagine, this can be an administrative nightmare. Running an RFP manually is tedious and time-consuming.

It’s better to use purpose-built software to run your RFPs.

A good Media Buying tool will automate your RFP workflow with integrated RFP management capabilities.

Finalize Media Buying Schedule

Your next step in the Media Buying process is to finalize your Media Buying schedule.

At this point, you should have all the accepted proposals from your RFP process in your Media Plan. And you’ve added a bunch of programs from your media research.

Now it’s time to complete these placements. At a minimum, you’ll need to include:

  • Program name
  • Vendor Name
  • Flight dates: start, end, weekparting, dayparting
  • Cost Method
  • Pricing
  • Quantity
  • Net Media Cost

Your Media Buying software will guide you through this process and perform all the calculations. If you don’t have access to software, you can use this Media Plan Template as a guide.

Prepare Insertion Orders

Your next step in the Media Planning process is to prepare insertion orders – or IOs.

Burst Your Media Plan into IOs

Your Media Plan contains all the vendors and all the placements you need to order. You need to burst your Media Plan out into individual insertion orders, at least one for each vendor.

How you burst your Media Plan may vary.

In most cases, you will create one order for each vendor in your Media Plan. In other cases, you’ll create one order for each program in your Media Plan. So, you might have more than one order for a given vendor. In rare cases, you’ll hand-pick certain placements for each order.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to create an IO for each deal you make.

Add Terms and Conditions

Now for the fun part – terms and conditions.

For each order, you’ll need to attach the terms and conditions of the order. Every order might have a different set of terms and conditions.

There are industry standard terms and conditions.

However, in my experience, setting terms and conditions is a power play. Powerful media vendors will insist on their terms and conditions. Powerful brands will insist on their terms and conditions. Powerful agencies will insist on their terms and conditions.

And sometimes terms and conditions are negotiated on an order-by-order basis.

You need to be ready to handle all of these situations. To facilitate deals, it’s best to keep a library of pre-approved Terms and Conditions. This way, you don’t have to go through your legal department on every insertion order.

Additional Resources:

Get Internal Approval

Now that you’ve established a placement schedule and terms and conditions for every insertion order, your next step is to get internal approval. You should do this before sending IOs to vendors to avoid embarrassing miscues.

Getting internal approval is as simple as presenting the IO in its final form and requesting a signature. Ideally, you should get a signature on every IO before placing orders.

“We don’t do IOs. It’s programmatic.”

Now is the point where some will say, “we don’t do IOs. Everything is programmatic.”

I disagree. You should create IOs even if your advertising is programmatic. Here’s why…

Capture The Deal

One reason to create insertion orders for programmatic advertising is to capture the deal.

If you’re advertising on a bunch of different platforms, your deals will be all over the place. It’s good media governance to centralize all your deals. Creating IOs solves this problem. The IO contains all the placements, the KPIs, and the terms of every deal.

Set Baseline for Reconciliations

Another good reason to create IOs for programmatic advertising, is to set yourself up for vendor bill reconciliations.

Among other things, your IO should break down spending into a month-by-month plan. When the vendor bills arrive, this makes it easy to compare the billed amount to the ordered amount.

The Only Difference with Programmatic IOs

The big difference between programmatic IOs and other IOs is you don’t actually send them to vendors. Other than that, the process is the same.

How to Create Insertion Orders

You can certainly create insertion orders manually with Word or Excel. Both have their flaws. Excel is bad at terms and conditions. Word is bad at the media schedule. Both Word and Excel require lots of manual effort and room for errors. The 4A’s provides insertion order templates to help you get started.

A better way to create IOs is with purpose-built software. With good Media Buying software, you can generate all the orders in your Media Plan with automation. This will save hours of work and eliminate costly mistakes.

You’ll be much more confident with your insertion orders when using a good system.

Send Insertion Orders

Your next step in the Media Buying process is to send your insertion orders. For vendors who don’t take IOs (like programmatic), jump to Implement Advertisements.

The reason for sending insertion orders is to get vendor approval on the deal. The IO lays out all the placements, pricing. terms, and special instructions. If there is anything wrong, the vendor will let you know.

If the IO looks good, the vendor will sign it and return to you.

Email Not Good for IOs

Nobody sends orders by fax anymore. Everyone sends orders electronically. However, in many cases, “electronic” means email.

While email is great at sending IOs, that’s the easy part of the job. The purpose of sending the IOs is to get vendor approval, which means getting signatures.

Email is not good for getting signatures.

Assuming you have software to electronically sign, signing an emailed IO means downloading the document, signing it, saving the signed version, replying, attaching it, and sending it back. That’s a hassle!

Signing Tools, Better for IOs

A huge step up from email are signing tools like Adobe Sign (fka EchoSign) or DocuSign.

These signing tools streamline the signature process. They also track progress and archive signed documents. These are all good things.

However, there are three problems with signing tools:

  1. You are on your own to create and upload the IO document
  2. You need to manually enter recipients and designate data entry and signature blocks
  3. The signed IO is disconnected from the Media Buying workflow

Electronic Signatures in Your System, Best for IOs

Your best solution for sending IOs is with a Media Buying system that includes electronic signatures. This eliminates the back and forth between your Media Buying system and other systems.

A good Media Buying system eliminates delays. It’s always current. It automatically files with the Media Plan. It never loses anything. And it never makes mistakes.

Implement Advertisements

After getting sign-off on the orders, your next step in the Media Buying process is to implement your advertisements.

Traditional Advertising is Easy-ish

If you’re doing traditional broadcast advertising, the core of implementation is supplying the station with your creative. Nowadays, this is done via digital delivery of your creative assets.

Digital Advertising is Complicated

Implementing digital advertising should be easier than traditional advertising, but it’s not. So much for progress!

Because of the way advertising technology currently operates, much of the burden of ad setup falls to the Media Buying team. You have to log in to various advertising platforms and set up your ad placements in each of them.

We could write a book on advertising implementation. To avoid making this article even longer than it already is, we’ll just highlight the most common problems to avoid when implementing your advertising.

Follow the Ad Specifications

It’s a big problem when the advertising creative does not adhere to the ad specifications. The ad can’t run if it violates the vendor’s standards. So, the creative team has to re-work the ad to fit the specs. This creates delays.

The easy way to avoid this is to be diligent about collecting ad specs before you get to this point in the Media Buying process – during Media Planning, media research, RFP, and other earlier phases. You should not be scrambling to gather ad specs at this point in the process. It’s an unnecessary distraction from the creative process.

The creative team is not off the hook, though. They need to make sure the creative meets the specs before delivery.

Deliver Creative on Time

One of the leading causes of late advertising is late creative.

It should be clear from your Media Plan when the creative is due. So, why is creative often late?

The creative team typically works separately from the media team, in different systems. Miscommunication is a problem. Oversight and project management are bigger problems.

For starters, your Media Buying system should have a way to track the status of Media Buying tasks, like creative delivery.

You Need a Good Project Management System

And your creative team should use a good project management system. There are dozens of good agency project management tools to choose from.

Here are purpose-built agency project management tools we see most often among advertising agencies (in alphabetical order):

Adhere to Placement Naming Conventions

When implementing your ads, it’s important to establish and adhere to placement naming conventions.

This is easy to say, but hard to do.

If you’re generating placement names using concatenation functions and VLOOKUPs in an Excel spreadsheet, you are doomed to failure. The formulas are hard to get right, and it’s even harder to keep everyone consistently using it properly.

This problem is exacerbated when you have certain clients with their own naming conventions that deviate from the agency standard naming convention.

The problem is further exacerbated when you decide to change your placements naming conventions. You will have a period of time where some people are still using the old version. This creates a mess.

The best way to solve this problem is to use a Media Buying system that automatically generates placement names according to your placement naming conventions. This ensures that your placement names are perfect every time.

Assign Placement Tracking IDs

Each or your placements should be assigned its own unique placement ID. This is literally the key to good analytics and performance monitoring.

When you traffic your ads onto various platforms, each of those platforms will have their own system of IDs. When you get performance data from one of those platforms, it will be tagged with their ID which is useless to you on its own.

To compare actual performance against your planned performance, you’ll need a way to link their IDs to your media placements. This is where your placement tracking IDs come in handy.

You’ll need to create a cross reference between their ID and your ID on every placement. While this can certainly be done manually, it’s a tedious and never-ending task. You’ll feel like Lucy working the line at the chocolate factory.

A better way to establish these cross references it to embed your placement ID into your placement naming convention. When performance data arrives, your automation can parse out your placement ID and create the cross-reference with their placement ID (if it doesn’t already exist).

Track Media Performance

Now that your ads are up and running, your next step in the Media Buying process is tracking performance.

If you’re advertising in a channel that doesn’t provide real-time performance data – such as print, billboards, TV, radio – there’s not a lot to do at this stage.

However, if you’re digital advertising or in a channel that provides a steady stream of performance data, you’ve a big challenge digesting and analyzing all that data.

Centralize Your Performance Data

Your first step is to centralize and standardize all of your media performance data.

According to Chief Marketing Technologist, most marketers use more than 100 software programs on a regular basis. That number feels high to me, but the key takeaway is your marketing performance data is scattered in lots of disparate systems.

Clearly, you don’t want to be logging into each of these systems, running a report, downloading into excel, and manually merging with the results of dozens of other systems every time you have a question.

To enable quick and accurate reporting and analysis, you’ll want to centralize all the data from all your platforms. You’ll also want to standardize the data to enable reporting across platforms and to compare KPIs on an apples-to-apples basis.

Compare Actuals to Plan

The most common mistake I see with media reporting systems is failing to compare actual performance to planned performance.

When asked about performance, most reporting systems can answer questions like “how much did we spend?” and “how many ad impressions did we serve?” However, a flawed reporting system cannot answer the question “how does that compare to our plan?”

The reason flawed reporting systems can’t answer this question about variance is because they don’t have plan data to which to compare.

So, the obvious way to solve this problem is to load your plan data in a suitable format along with your actual performance data. Simple, right?

If your Media Plans are in Excel, this is practically impossible. You’re out of luck.

If your Media Plans are in a database, you’re in good shape. You’ll want to ensure the data is properly structured for reporting and analysis.

To connect your placements with performance data, you’ll also need to load your ID cross-reference tables. You’ll use these IDs extensively to join data in queries that compare actual performance to planned performance.

Monitor Your Pacing

To enable daily monitoring of your advertising performance, you should be loading incremental data at least daily.

This steady stream of updates will enable you to track “pacing” of your advertising KPIs.

You can think of pacing as an early warning system that tells you when your ads are going awry before it’s too late.

Rather than wait for a monthly report to learn a placement is falling short of goals, your pacing report tells you every day where you stand. This enables you to fix problems before they become big problems.

Reconcile Media Vendor Bills

For each of your orders, it’s typical to be billed monthly while the ads are running.

When the bill arrives from a vendor, you’ll need to reconcile the bill before scheduling its payment. Your reconciliation needs to answer these questions:

  • Did we order this?
  • Did we already pay this bill?
  • Did they deliver the advertising they promised in the order?
  • Is this bill priced correctly?
  • Is the bill amount more than what we ordered?

Done manually, answering these questions can require team meetings or passing the vendor bill back and forth between the finance and media department. It can take days or weeks to reconcile a vendor bill. It’s no surprise why reconciliations are a key reason for delayed payments.

A better way to reconcile vendor bills is with a Media Buying system that includes features that automate the reconciliation process.

Campaign Reports

Although listed here as a final stage of the Media Buying process, it’s best to be reporting all the while your ads are running.

By tracking media performance, you already have a solid campaign reporting database in place.

Your Media Buying system should provide basic campaign reporting for day-to-day media performance monitoring.

For custom reporting and ad hoc reporting, you’ll want to use a purpose-built dashboarding and reporting system, known as a business intelligence tool.

Popular BI systems in advertising include:

Regardless which system you choose, you’ll want to make sure you have a reliable data pipeline. Even the best BI tool will fail without good data.

Or you can avoid the delays and hassles of a data feed by connecting directly into your media performance database.

How to Media Buy

As you have seen above, Media Buying is a complex, multi-step process that both produces and consumes a ton of data.

While you can certainly perform the process at a small scale with spreadsheets and docs, it breaks down quickly with more than trivial scale or sophistication.

Media Buying Software

When you find yourself in this position, you’ll need to upgrade to a real Media Buying system. Some of the popular Media Buying systems include:

If you notice a “Media Buying” tool missing from this list, that’s probably because it does not perform all of the functions of the Media Buying process and did not make the cut.

When shopping for a Media Buying tool, be sure that your software is capable of performing ALL of the Media Buying functions across ALL the media channels in which you advertise.

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About the Author

Joe Pych is the CEO of Bionic Advertising Systems, which provides advertising agencies and advertisers with software that automates media planning and media buying workflows. You can reach Joe on LinkedIn.
Last Updated: March 17th, 2023