You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

In media buying, treating your vendors, especially your sales reps, as partners, rather than opponents, will help you supersize your media buy beyond the amount you spend for the ads you purchase.

To get the best deal on your ad buy, you need a solid plan of attack. The best deal comes from the right fundamentals. Being a grinder is a shortcut for the unprepared.

This is because most media companies have more to give you than just ad time. There are extras and perks they dole out to the businesses they like best and think of first. Don’t fail to forge a positive relationship between your company and theirs during the buying process. This approach gets your company the whole value you deserve for your money.

To be very clear, at Wizard of Ads, we believe the rewards should always go to our clients, not to our media buyers. We don’t want anyone to think we might be swayed by shiny things when it comes to spending our clients’ money. Besides, we are Wizards. We already have shiny things.

Wizard of Ads buyers employ a unique set of fundamentals in our approach. These techniques always get us the best deal. Shiny things don’t sway us and we give them over to the business owners. We are ‘media-agnostic’. As such, cool trips to Cancun won’t get any station on an ad buy. Efficiency and getting us what we need to grow the client gets you on the buy. Lots of stations don’t make our buys and never will.

But, for the business owner, the perks can be niiiice.

The biggest audience I ever delivered to a client with any one commercial was in the Super Bowl. The email came in from the rep a few days before the broadcast. “Hey, KC, the boss offered me ONE chance to upgrade a client, and I chose your guys.”

Bam… My client got an ad that delivered 12 rating points in Atlanta, a market with about 6,000,000 adults. That’s about 720,000 viewers. A $45,000 value, free. Not to mention the thrill my client had seeing their ad in the Big Game.

It happened again last week. “Hey, Kyle, we moved one of your ads into the College Football Playoff. Thanks for your business!”

This was in Texas. Football in Texas is a religion. Better yet, it was an Aggies game in Texas. The Texas A&M Aggies are up-and-comers in college football’s elite Southeastern Conference. This game was maybe their biggest ever. In fact, I can’t wait to see what the audience delivered for the spot was! It will be massive. My clients spend about $100,000 each year on TV. This single upgrade was worth well over $7,500. This TV station rep loves our client and thinks of them first because we’ve fostered a partnership, not a grinder-ship.

And it’s not just spot upgrades. Media Companies get tickets to the big shows, games, and events. They hand these down to the sales reps to give them away. But wait, there’s more.

You want to do a canned food drive for your community and need some free ads to make it work? Your sales rep can help with PR, bonus ads, and more. They can get you interviewed on the news, on the morning show, or showcase your company in a live on-air segment, in some cases.

All at no charge.

This is not to say you should sleep on your ad buy. On the contrary, be vigilant. There are times when your media buy needs to be opened and reviewed. City populations can change, and stations can change. For example, a TV station in Atlanta just lost its affiliation with CBS. Radio stations change formats all the time. These occurrences and others require a hard re-look at the market. But, if you make it a fair and square look, in the client’s best interest, any decent sales rep will fall in line.

You will get more value out of your media spend by creating relationships that empower instead of tearing down, so long as you have a plan and a (secret) formula to get to the best deal in any market. Your company can win by creating an environment where your station sales reps, sales managers, and station managers think of you first and like you the best.

Want to know how your schedules measure up? Book some time and let’s talk it over. I am happy to offer a no-cost review of your current plan.

Create partnerships with your stations and set your company up for victory in the Big Game.

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