Today’s post is short, but the challenge task important.
You’ve spent time over the last two days gearing up for this.
Now, rubber meets road. Hammer hits nail. Probe hits Mars atmosphere.
Task: Take the information you gathered yesterday, and send email AND place a phone call to the appropriate contact at the organization, media outlet, or website (or two) that you identified as good candidates for your online advertising dollars.
In that conversation, you want to specifically inquire about two things: Remnant space and agency discounts.
“Remnant space” is an advertising term for unsold inventory. There’s actually an entire sub-industry built around buying and selling remnant ad space. Why? Because once airtime has gone unused…once a trade journal has gone to print…once a day goes by without a banner ad occupying a piece of screen real estate… It’s gone. Opportunity lost. Thus, huge discounts can be had on remnant space, including digital ad space.
“Agency discounts” are exactly that: Discounts that publishers give to ad agencies. This is incredibly common practice, and it exists to incentivize ad agencies for buying media. The ad agency pockets the discount for themselves as profit in a lot of traditional advertising situations. For companies that aren’t using an ad agency, like you and me, we are serving as our own ad agency. And that’s exactly what you tell the publisher or organization you’re dealing with: “We operate as our own in-house ad agency. What is your ad agency discount?” Boom, just saved yourself some dough.
A very typical agency discount is around 15%.
The whole point of today is for you to have one or two serious conversations with a publisher, organization, or web site to get discounted ad space in their publications, event sponsorships, or web site/email advertising. Never, ever pay “rate card” rates for advertising — hardly anybody actually does, and you shouldn’t either.
