The work done in the media department is very complex and involves many different people. The people in media work closely with people in other departments, and their work reflects the work done by those departments.
For example, take the people in marketing. When they figure out what their marketing objectives are for a particular project, they relay them to their comrades in media. Then, based on those marketing objectives, the folks in media define the media objectives.
What do all of those eight-dollar terms really mean? Let's say the project in question is an advertising campaign for an established household cleaning product. And, let's say the marketing people have decided that the way to move more products is to attack a new group of people, a market at which advertising for this product has never been directed before. Marketing determines that they have to sell a certain amount of that cleaning product to make the venture profitable.
Basically, very basically, that's the process. But rarely does it go smoothly. There are invariably changes which necessitate extra work and aggravation, and even under the best of circum-stances, there is much, much more to it than that.
For example, how does a media buyer decide exactly what to buy? Each show on various TV and radio stations has a certain size audience. These are the ratings you've probably heard about before. In the case of television and radio, the higher a show's ratings, the more expensive it is to use as an advertising medium.
That's where the negotiating comes in.
It's when a station says it can deliver the desired target audience at a CPM of $X and a media buyer says it should be $Y, that a buyer really earns his keep, because the lower the price he can get, the more exposure the advertiser's media dollar will buy.
As a rule, the cost of advertising space in magazines is determined by the magazine's editorial content and circulation. Sometimes a magazine's editorial quality and compatibility with the product you're advertising means more than its CPM. For example, if you're selling stereos, you could be more concerned with running ads in stereo publications with high editorial quality than you would with running ads in say Reader's Digest. (That's not to say Reader's Digest is a stupid place to run a stereo ad. I'm merely making a point.) In such a case, you would use a magazine's editorial content as a determining factor rather than its CPM.
Media is loaded with variables like these. To the people who work in media, variables are part of what makes life fun.
There's one more division in the media departments of some large agencies: media research. One of the biggest jobs of any media research department is to gather background information. The media research group of any agency works with outside research companies to find out the media habits of particular target audiences. These outside research firms also supply agencies with specific information about specific products as it relates to their media habits.
For example, say an agency is working on a chain of fast food restaurants. A research firm can tell that agency, among other things, how competitive fast food restaurants have spent their advertising dollars and how much they spent in television, radio, and print. That way, that agency and advertiser can learn by the mistakes and successes of the competition.
The people in the media research department of an agency also act as watch dogs for the rating services: Nielsen and Arbitron for television, Arbitron for radio, and Simmons for magazines. When agencies are planning to buy television time, media research reviews the data from both major television rating services, Nielsen and Arbitron, to find out what the track records are for the programs on which they're considering buying time. Then it's up to media research to decide if those track records will hold for the future - if as many people as before will continue to watch them.
The people in media research perform many other tasks, too. One of these is especially interesting. They preview all the new TV shows for an upcoming season. They then work up estimates of what they think the ratings for those shows will be, taking into account all of the important factors, like what time slot a particular show is running in, who's starring in it, what the subject matter is, and what's running opposite the show in question. Those predictions determine how many advertising dollars will be spent on these shows. So, to a degree, media research helps determine the economic success or failure of TV shows.
