Imagine if all of your strategies, ideas and thoughts were able to be vetted and acted upon. Better yet, imagine the sense of accomplishment you’d have from taking an idea from your head all the way to production. Part of your role as a marketer is to lead the strategic vision of your company, yet often times, there just isn’t enough time or support to drive and execute your vision. You don’t want to outsource the brainstorming and strategy building as it seems impossible for an outside agency to know exactly what you are thinking… so where does that leave you? Do you dare risk outsourcing your media planning and buying? Here are a few pros and cons to consider when making that decision:
PROS
We are experts in media buying so while I can talk endlessly about the pros that come with outsourcing your media buying, I will try to avoid sounding like a sales pitch (yes, I know when I’m biased). Here we will focus on the top 3 reasons why brands come to us to execute their media buying strategy.
- Focus on the technology and the digital space.
I have an entrepreneurial personality so am constantly looking for a new way of doing things, and this industry is perfect for me as things are always changing. New technology and capabilities are evolving daily, and an outsourced agency’s ability to hyperfocus on your media buying ensures that you aren’t missing an opportunity due to time constraints or simply just not living and breathing the trades.
- Commitment to optimization and media analysis.
There is so much AI available right now and while it is tempting to “set it and forget it,” media analysis is not just providing an excel spreadsheet. It is understanding why the numbers say what they do, and how you can manage those numbers to scale. This requires a team effort to get in and dig through analytics, as no single report ever tells the entire story.
- Understanding of industry trends.
The biggest advantage to outsourcing your media buying is having access to experts who understand the advertising industry as a whole. Keeping your marketing in-house allows you to keep close tabs on it, but does not give you the holistic view of the industry. If your campaign faltered, was it something you did or was there a more significant trend in the industry? Understanding more than just your business provides you better insights to help you succeed.
CONS
Here we will focus on the two biggest cons that we have encountered; however, I truly believe that better communication can solve both of these.
- Nobody knows your business better than you know your business.
As a media agency, we pride ourselves in being experts in the media buying and execution space, just as we understand that you pride yourself in knowing your business, products and services better than anyone else. This often leads to frustrations on both ends of a “how could you not know this about us”. Communication is the most important factor in overcoming this because the reality is, you’ll never know more about media buying than we do, and we’ll never know more about your product than you do. But imagine how powerful that can be if we work together as a team!
- Coordination.
In our experience, marketing departments do not have unlimited time and resources. There is typically not enough time in a day to achieve what needs to be done, which is why they consider outsourcing to us in the first place. Yet the issue in all of this is that the more you outsource, the more time you will need to coordinate vendor partnerships – and we all know how vendors get… they want to have in-person meetings, take you out to dinner to show how likeable they are, get introduced to your C-suite in order to ensure that after your 44-month stint as a CMO ends (unless you’re in the UK – then it’s only 18 months!), they’ll still be retained. All the while your vendors have forgotten why they were hired in the first place – to save you time! While coordination of your media partners and ad agencies is a challenge in itself, we haven’t even touched on what happens when you have multiple agencies that don’t play nice in the sand box!
Ultimately, there is an efficiency that is needed in order to outsource your media buying or you will never save yourself the time like you think you’re going to. That being said, you also can’t be an expert in everything so finding a media agency that can provide you the expertise and proper analysis is priceless. It starts with rethinking how you look at media buying.
