What Is Media Buying? Overview and How It Works and How to Get Started (2025)
How many ads have you seen today? Where did you see them? Depending on your daily activities, it could be several on television, billboards, social media platforms, or search results. Each ad you saw represents a transaction between the advertizer (company) and the ad vendor.
Media buying involves the entire process of purchasing and positioning different types of advertisements. An experienced media buyer can advise you on the best ad placements, helping you to get a cost-effective and objective-oriented media mix, run campaigns and leverage performance data to enhance results.
What's Media Buying?
Media buying is buying ad space for a business's marketing campaign, including digital and traditional media placements.
Media buying has two major categories:
- Programmatic media buying: This involves buying digital ads using an automatic ad-buying site. Instead of choosing one media outlet, the buyer registers with a DSP (demand side platform) and specifies campaign specifications. The DSP buys as inventory through an ad network or an ad exchange through a real-time bidding method.
- Direct buying: In this scenario, a media buyer purchases ad space from a media company, such as an ad vendor or publishing company. For example, the buyer may contact a website or a daily publication and choose and buy ad options. You can use direct buying to purchase traditional and digital media placements.
Who can do Media Buying?
Media buyers mainly perform media buying. However, in digital advertising, media planners can handle media buying. With evolving and overlapping roles, other marketing team members may also assume all media buying responsibilities.
Media Planning vs. Media Buying: What's the Difference?
Media planning involves performing media research with the help of your marketing budget, objectives, target audience details and vital campaign content to develop a media plan for a particular marketing campaign. Your media plan will define your campaign's media mix and point out crucial channels for owned media, paid media and earned media tactics.
After your media plan is set, the company media planner will forward it to the media buyer responsible for executing the paid media aspects of the plan. Media buying is responsible for choosing and vetting media outlets and buying ad space.
It is also the media buyer's role to negotiate with vendors. They also traffic ad placements, manage campaign deadlines and monitor campaign performance.
Some businesses employ separate media buying and media planning staff collaborating to plan campaigns. However, small businesses can delegate both tasks to the same individual media or marketing team.
Media Planning vs. Media Buying: Comparison Table
Importance of Media Buying
Media buying is vital for businesses that want to advertise, and advertising plays a huge role in businesses. Without advertising, it's challenging to meet your marketing goals, drive sufficient organic traffic or maintain substantial revenue.
Advertising is also vital in start-ups and product launches because organic efforts like SEO may take a long time to impact traffic significantly.
Here are key reasons why you should invest in media buying:
1. More informed negotiations
Skilled media buyers know the industry trends and are experts in negotiation techniques to strike the best deal possible. They can make publishers or networks agree to added value to boost the ROI of ad spending and accomplish first-to-market opportunities that help a product stand out from the competition.
2. Optimize ad placement
Media buyers have connections within the industry that help them get prime ad placements and optimize ever-evolving campaigns. A deep bond with network partners is crucial for ongoing collaboration and ensuring strategies align with brand KPIs.
3. It enables you to compete
Media buying allows you to be competitive and stand out from your competitors. Placing ads on your competitors' platforms reminds your customers of your brand name.
4. Affordability and effectiveness
Media buying allows businesses to reach their potential customers at an affordable price. Depending on your budget and how it best suits your strategy, you can use it.
Media Buying Process Overview
If you want to know how media buying works, follow these vital steps
1. Review your media plan
You must review your media plan at the start of your buying process. Verify signatures and ensure the client authorizes the media plan. Once they verify, carefully review the media plan's budget, goals, reach, timing, frequency KPIs, and costs.
Although you don't complete ad creative, it helps you narrow down the type of ads you'd prefer to choose. For instance, select online publications if you plan to run video ads.
2. Create a target list
Create a list of ad agencies, media outlets and ad vendors. If you're considering programmatic and direct placements, include a list of media buying platforms and note pricing.
3. Develop and send request for proposal (RFP)
An RFP helps simplify ad buying by delegating some of the work to ad agencies and media outlets. Your media buying should include advertising campaign information like target audience, goals, approximate budget, response deadline and KPIs. Vendors will reply with customized campaign proposals with these particular details.
4. Assess options and buy media
Gather and evaluate RFP responses and put in order these data points into a spreadsheet:
- Tactic
- Audience
- Estimated KPI performance
- Cost
Although media buyers don't send RFPs to media buying tool providers or media buying platforms, listing these vendors enables you to compare agency contracts or direct placement costs.
After organizing your data, you should compare options and choose an economical set of add placements, ensuring you've selected a media mix that matches the criteria specified in your media plan.
5. Send insertion orders (IO)
An IO is a legal agreement between the ad vendor and the ad placement organization. The IO contains the run dates, cost, ad specification and KPI information. A skilled media buyer notices when a negotiation is possible, and they can use tactics to get favorable terms for the advertiser.
6. Launch your campaign
Coordinate with your creative team and account managers to develop creative assets. Then, place your ads with vendors based on your IO-specified deadlines.
7. Track results
After launching your campaign the next step is monitoring campaign performance data like click-through rates and conversions. Then, adjust your creative assets to enhance the outcome. Ensure your campaign meets the performance metrics that your vendor guaranteed. If the metrics are not met, contact your vendor to negotiate compensation.
8. Review campaign final spend
After campaign completion, conduct a debriefing. Assess how much you spent on the campaign and what results it achieved. Brainstorm with your team whether something could have been done better and what lessons you acquired from the campaign. If the campaign went well, note it for future use.
How to Overcome Media Buying Challenges
Media buying is an intricate process that may come with challenges. For instance, if your media plan is poorly thought out, it will be a waste of your efforts, or if the audience isn't clearly defined, your efforts won't be successful.
Let's look into media buying challenges:
1. Measurement
You must be able to measure the performance of the ad campaigns accurately. This is because, without the right metric, you can't know what's working and what isn't.
You need measurement to make data-backed decisions to enhance your ad performance in the future or justify the ad spend. Remember, performance means campaign effectiveness to impact KPIs vital to a brand, such as brand awareness or conversions. You must maintain bottom-of-funnel metrics to keep your business on track, making measurement vital regardless of the campaign's ultimate goal.
2. Ad fraud
Click hijacking is a fraud that cybercriminals use to redirect clicks on your ad to another ad. In simpler terms, a scammer steals a click that you're paying for.
Media buyers should be aware of this and understand the signs happening to their ads. Your ad might be targeted if you're spending money on the ad and don't see the traffic that equals the click data. Target your ad network and report the problem.
3. Ongoing optimization
If you can modify your live campaigns in real-time, you will have increased your over performance, especially when your measurement is consistent and accurate.
4. Brand safety
Programmatic advertising poses a challenge in maintaining brand safety. You may have a brand reputation issue if your ad contains the wrong words or elements by ad algorithm. For example, adult toy brands should not place ads next to children's content.
As a media buyer, you can avoid such issues by using custom keyword lists. You must take care of tactics, but if you're too cautious, you may limit your advertising opportunities.
Media Buying Platform Examples
Numerous media buying platforms are available, and when purchasing ads for various campaigns, you may need to get more than one. Therefore, research the ideal media buying platform options that will work best for your business.
Let's look at popular platforms that may be ideal for your business:
1. Google Display and Video 360
Google Display and Video 360 offers comprehensive management for display and video ads across the Google network. As the leading digital network, Google provides a lot, including collaborative workflows and outstanding data.
You can keep track of your media efforts and involve your team by customizing the dashboard. Audience management becomes easy since your audience insights are in the same place and support all ad types.
Additionally, Google tools boast a high level of automation powered by Google, making it easy to enhance your ad efforts.
2. Amazon DSP
This demand-side platform provides access to ad placements on Amazon and other online platforms. Amazon DSP offers access to Amazon ad placements, which is vital for business with Amazon stores or products on Amazon.
However, you can still use this platform even if you don't sell products on Amazon. This platform offers managed service and self-service options, enabling you to select the right level for your organization.
Amazon provides training to pave the way for individuals who want to use DSP effectively. Professionals and agencies may take Amazon DSP certification to boost their knowledge.
3. Adobe advertising cloud
This Adobe product integrates seamlessly with other Adobe software solutions. It makes it the ideal platform if you're already using Adobe for project management or ad creative since you can include the media buying process into your workflow.
Adobe Sensei enables you to project ad budgets and optimize ads. You can access real-time actionable insights that will help you drive your ad performance and improve future media buying strategies.
4. Criteo
The Criteo platform focuses on connecting advertisers with publishers and retailers. It works with companies like Best Buy and Shopify, helping get ads from potential buyers. Criterio's strength lies in first-party data that support automated ad decisions. This helps minimize the effects of restrictions on third-party data in internet advertising.
Trends to Consider in Media Buying
With ever-changing technology, digital landscapes evolve fast, so you need to track trends.
Here are the most popular trends you must consider when buying media today.
- Social media and video: So many users turn to social media to learn about trendy products and brands. Video content is the most engaged media format on social media platforms like TikTok. Therefore, your media plan should focus on videos, and you must evaluate the impact of social platforms on your strategies.
- Streaming: almost all households in the US streaming service, and very few subscribe to cable television. This shows the future of TV is streaming, meaning the future of advertising is streaming. However, don't assume linear TV. If you have a sufficient budget, it can still play an essential role in allowing you to reach a vast audience alongside your OTT ad purchases.
- First-party data: As privacy concerns continue to rise, third-party data becomes more restricted or removed, and first-party data grows in importance. Media teams should focus on their own data and explore other available first-party data to make the most informed ad-buying decisions.
Winding up
Media buying gives life to your ads and puts them in front of the right audience. From media planning to buying, it's a rough terrain that needs marketing energy.
Media buying can be costly but profitable if done well. It's also highly sophisticated, emphasizing acquiring the ideal ad space for maximum conversions; it's a precise and intricate task.
A sturdy media buying strategy can help you stand out and drive excellent results. However, you must set clear goals to achieve this, understand your audience, and keep trying until you find the perfect formula. Do you have any question about media buying? Kindly contact one of our Foundeck experts here.
