Over the past five years I have been down in the trenches working like a dog to monetize new media content. While I have had significant success with a number of companies, every month I leave 10’s of millions of new media impressions on the table unsold. This is not from a lack of trying that is for sure, but one thing that continues to haunt new media, is that most of the companies spending money in the digital advertising space aka the media buyers are ignoring opportunities to reach audience that have largely shifted away from mainstream content.
In reality if the media buyers that were selling to Radio and Television were allowed to sell into the digital new media space all of 10’s of millions of inventory not sold each month would be sold out for the next couple of years. While Digital buyers have claimed us, they don’t understand how to execute buys that are more closer to TV and Radio deals.
If I take our gaming category over at Blubrry.com, there are 336 shows that are reaching several million hard-core gaming consumers each month. Yet when we reach out to companies that would be a sure fit for that category, they seem to not have an interest in those shows, yet they will not flinch at buying an ad in a print magazine, that they will spend a small fortune on. But when you propose a reasonably priced ad deal, that would run 90 days and guarantee reaching those several million hard core gaming consumers they refuse to break out the check book.
When media buyers do bring and ad deal to us, they want to spend generally less than $10k and want us to deliver a $100k worth of inventory. While we do get a higher CPM than what they are paying for at YouTube, I am also guaranteeing that we will be hitting 100% of the exact audience they want to reach.
Frankly I don’t yet fully get it. I think most media buyers have a stack of insertion orders that they just re-date quarter after quarter, year after year and they simply tweak the dollar spends. I think most media buyers which are typically younger are scared to try something new or present something to their managers that their managers don’t understand. On a recent ad buy that we executed for a new client, the media buyers, manager told me they were blown away by the response they were getting and could not understand how we were able to deliver the ROI that we were delivering and said something else must have influenced the response.
If I had a crystal ball I sure would like to know how long it is before digital media buyers start putting a small portion of their budgets on new media and give this largely untapped advertising space a try. Frankly I would have thought with the economy, their would have been some significant pressure to spend ad dollars more wisely. Honestly I think part of it is that most of the media buyers are so overworked that re-dating the insertion orders is safe and lot less work and so long as the clients are happy, most media buyers are with a company less than 2 years and the media buyers want to get their time in without taking any risk and move on to the next job.
So if you have a crystal ball, when will the media buyers stop ignoring new media. If you are a new media buyer and want to talk to me about the 6500 new media creators I represent at RawVoice drop me a line and let’s talk. After all as Om Malik says it’s not really new media it’s new consumption and we have been delivering it by the tanker load for the past five years and it’s reaching millions.