How to Use Habits to Buy Advertising

Today, a common sense approach to buying advertising that nearly anyone can figure out. You can out smart the media buyers at the advertising agencies if you simply consider How to Use Habits to Buy Advertising.

I used to work with media buyers from advertising agencies that were taught how to crunch numbers from data collection and rating services and figure out the perfect number of ads to run to come up with a winning formula.

Now they don’t even have to crunch those numbers, it’s all done for them with proprietary software that does the math and spits out the formulas.

However those kinds of systems are flawed.  And many media buyers don’t know the process or they wouldn’t use the systems.

I’m going to delve into the rating systems of radio and television since that is the data I have access to.  Nearly any form of media marketing including digital, print and well, you name it have similar complicated systems that are supposed to be better than what you and I can come up.

Those systems are flawed because they put too much emphasis on questionable numbers and they would routinely tell me things like, I need to place 19 commercials between 3 and 7pm to have the same results as 2 commercials between 10am and 3pm on a certain radio station.

Bizarre stuff, really and I’m not going to bore you with the details of how the software came up with crazy stuff like that.

But I’m going to show you how to beat these systems and be smart.

We are creatures of Habit.

Think about the last few days.  You have your workday morning routine before you leave the house.  You have your workday evening routine before you doze off at night.

Pretty predictable right?

Your workday has certain routines too, I bet.  Expand this thinking about routines and you’ll see patterns of media and advertising consumption based on our habits.

The key is to understand the habits of the types of people you want to reach with your advertising and then place your advertising messages where and when those people will see or hear them.

The advertising salesperson should be able to tell you something of value about the audience or readership of their advertising medium.  Stuff like age, income, and other useful demographics to see if there is a connection between them and you.

Once you determine it could be a good fit, then you need to figure out how many ads and where exactly they should be placed.  We call this Reach and Frequency and I’ll share more about this in the future.

But for now, the take away is that you can be pretty smart about your advertising by simply thinking about the routines of your current and potential customers.  Armed with that knowledge, you can Use Habits to Buy Advertising.

Want help? Reach out to me.