Guides . Advertising

What is media buying?

Media buying is two jobs in one. You pick where your ads run, then buy that space at a fair price.

No jargon. If you would rather just talk it through, that works too.

The whole thing at a glance

A media buy, start to finish

Media buying is buying attention. The skill is buying it in the right places, at the right price. Every buy moves the same way.

Plan the buy budget, goal, right places
Buy the space haggle price, place orders
Ads run in front of your customer
Check the bills catch shorts and errors
One report where every dollar went

A little vocabulary

Paid, owned, and earned, in one minute

You will hear these three words a lot. Media buying lives in the first one.

Paid media
Space you buy. A TV spot, a search ad, a billboard, a streaming slot, an ad inside an app. You pay, so you get to say where it runs and when. This is the part media buying handles.
Owned media
Space you already own. Your website, your email list, your store window, your own social accounts. It is free to post. But only the people who already follow you will see it.
Earned media
Attention you did not pay for and cannot control. A news story about you. A customer review. Someone sharing your post. It is great when it happens, but you cannot plan it.
The channels
Just the places ads can run. Streaming and TV, radio, online search and social, billboards, print, and direct mail. A good plan picks the few that fit your customer, not all of them.

How it works

What a media buy actually involves

When we run a buy for you, it moves through three steps. Step three is the one most buyers skip.

  1. 1

    Plan it

    You tell us the budget, the goal, and who you want to reach. We build the plan. Which places to use, how much goes into each, and when they run. You approve it before any money moves.

  2. 2

    Buy it

    We haggle the prices, place the orders, and lock in the dates. Now the sales reps call us, not you. So you stop fielding pitches and keep your day.

  3. 3

    Check the work

    We make sure your ads really ran, when and where you paid for. We check every bill against the order. If a station shorted you a spot or billed you wrong, we catch it and get your money back.

Why an agency

Do it yourself, or hand it to a buyer

You can run it yourself. Plenty of people do. Same budget, two very different outcomes.

Doing it yourself

One-off calls, boost the post

  • Take the first price a rep offers
  • Money lands where it is easiest
  • Six separate reps, six bills
  • Nobody checks if ads ran
A media buyer runs it

One team, one plan

  • Fair price from buying all day
  • The few places your customer uses
  • One plan, one report, no markup
  • Every bill checked, errors caught

The Weber angle

Why it helps that we make the ad too

Most media shops buy the space, then wait on someone else to make the ad. We make the ad in the same building that buys the space.

We own the presses, the big-print gear, a video team, and a sound booth, all on site. So the TV spot, the billboard, the flyer insert, and the mailer can all come from us. When the ads start Monday and the artwork is not ready, that is usually two vendors blaming each other. Here it is one team, so the ad is ready when the space is.

It also means your budget is not paying a design shop, then a print shop, then a media shop, each adding a fee. As a rule of thumb, we like to keep less than 10 percent of a budget on making the ads, so the rest works harder out in the market.

One thing worth being straight about. For a weekly grocery flyer, we design it, buy the media, and manage the run through trusted printing partners near your mail routes. You still get one person to call at Weber for the whole job.

Straight answers

Questions people actually ask

Is boosting a post on Facebook the same as media buying?
It is a tiny slice of it. Boosting spends money to show one post to more people on one site. Media buying first asks if that site is even where your customer is. Then it lines it up with everything else you run, so the whole budget works together.
Do I have to buy every channel?
No, and you should not. You buy the places your customer actually uses and skip the ones they do not. A good plan is usually a few well-picked spots, not a little bit of everything.
Will an agency cost me more than going direct?
At Weber we do not add a markup on your media, so your budget goes to the buy. The bigger savings usually come from paying a fair price instead of the first one you are offered. And from catching billing mistakes you would never have seen.
How do I know my ads actually ran?
That is the check-the-work step. We make sure each ad ran when and where you paid for. We check every bill against the order. If something was shorted or billed wrong, we catch it and get your money back.
Can you handle the whole thing so I do not have to?
Yes. You hand us a budget and a goal. We plan it, haggle the price, place it, check every bill, and show you where every dollar went in one plain-English report.

Keep reading

Where to go next

If you want the deeper version, or you are ready to talk, here is where to head.

Still fuzzy on any of this? That is fine.

If media buying feels like a lot, or you would just rather hand it to someone who does it all day, give us a call. We will walk through where your budget should go, in plain English, with no pressure.

Get help with this Or call 717-299-1277

Not ready to talk yet? You may be after something so unique we have not built a page for it yet, and given our history of unexpected jobs, we are sure we will find a solution.