Guide to Automated Media Buying for Linear TV

Media buying refers to the process of identifying and purchasing ad space on channels that are relevant to your target audience, at the optimal time, for the least amount of money. It’s a very resource-intensive process where significant work hours will be spent on repetitive processes, while many key decisions that need to be made require extensive research and understanding of the researched behaviors of your audience. 
 

Automated media buying is simply referring to media buying where most of the steps have been fully automated. It transforms the media buying process into a faster, easier, and more transparent version of itself where the whole process, from negotiation to order reporting, is completed in a fraction of the time. 
 

The term “media buying” is used both within the area of linear TV as well as buying digital ad space online. In this article, we’ll specifically cover the topic of automated media buying for linear TV.

Linear TV still retains its power to offer high ROI for advertisers even though the competition from our modern diversified media markets and powerful social channels has significantly increased. Linear TV is still a brand-safe medium that dominates many companies' advertising budgets. 

But, the industry's pivot towards digital advertising has highlighted many flaws of the traditional process where it has failed to optimally utilize modern technology. The concept of automated media buying seeks to rectify this, involving solutions that envelop the keywords associated with success in many industries: fast, smart, and agile. 

When it comes to advertising, we would also like to add the keyword “automated” to the mix. We believe that automated media buying is an important innovator that creates efficient advertising workflows that a business requires to be successful in the modern-day and age. Automated media buying ensures that:

• Media buying processes are both fast
• Media buying workflows are stripped of needless complexity
• Resources are used optimally
• Creativity is maximized

These in turn results in the following benefits:

• Increased sales, increased revenue
• Speed up time to market
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Improved business agility

Read more about the benefits of automated media buying.

Our media buying automation and optimization engine enable agencies to manage the increasingly complex requirements of both the advertisers and the TV broadcaster in one package. 

By providing it with qualitative information such as budget, target demographics, target ratings, flight periods, station/time band mix, and placement preferences, our solution will help you gain the most value out of your campaigns. It will continuously provide an optimized spot booking schedule, maximize ROI by increasing efficiency and profitability, and eliminating time-consuming and resource-demanding repetitive manual tasks.

Our media buying automation and optimization engine simulate and evaluate several different buying scenarios based on the given parameters. It then provides you the result for each one where you can pick and choose freely to match your needs and demands. The process looks as follows:

1. You provide the Vidispine automated media buying solution with the main parameters: campaign objectives, inventory of the TV broadcaster, placement preferences, legal and corporate constraints, and compliance guidelines
2. The solution performs a fully automated simulation of buying scenarios, optimized against your KPIs.
3. It delivers the results of each simulation including all spot placements together with analytics so users can evaluate the projected results for the different given scenarios.
4. The Vidispine media buying solution then continuously optimizes campaigns via APIs whenever any parameters are added or changed.

Read more about the Vidispine media buying automation and optimization engine.