Buy Now – Save Later. A Media Strategy For The Recession

By Karen Macumber, SVP Media Services

If a store suddenly called you to offer a 50-80% discount off their entire inventory would you say “no way?” It seems today that most consumers would be more likely to at least go to the store and stock up on the items you know you’ll need. Now apply that same situation using media as the store and advertising as the inventory. The media companies are offering crazy discounts on advertising inventory – not just the unsold placements but literally all inventory (print, online, OOH, broadcast, you name it). And the discounts are not simply based on reductions in circulation or viewers, but rather reductions against the base rate resulting in a significant increase in overall value.

Case in point -- we just negotiated a six city radio buy for a client (spend under $300K) which included a “value-add” premiere event sponsorship (client’s mascot in the actual event programming). A year ago that event sponsorship alone would have sold for $80K. While we’re good negotiators, in my 20+ years in this industry I haven’t seen anything like it. So I have to scratch my head as I watch companies in all industries cutting back instead of taking advantage of the media sale of a lifetime.

Take a guess at what will happen the minute the media industry starts to see the light at the end of the tunnel? That’s right, they will increase prices based on the simple laws of supply and demand. So if you are a company that knows your target audience and advertising objectives, why wouldn’t you have your agency create next year’s media plan right now to lock in lower rates? In other words, “stock up” on the media you know you’ll need in the near future.

While I’m no CFO, I can tell you if the CMO of my company came to me and explained that by spending a small fee for planning media now, the marketing budget could decrease next year while allowing the company to market like the larger competitors, guess what I’d say?

So get planning…..