Ronda Wilson
Sr Media Buyer/Planner at Ronda Wilson
Website Address: www.linkedin.com/in/ronda-b-wilson
Each week on “5 Minutes With,” our host Susan St.Denis talks to experts in the marketing industry. Today she sits down with Ronda Wilson.
What do you think an effective media plan needs to include?
Well, first of all, your media plan needs to cover your media objectives, your strategy, and how you’re going to implement it. And then it needs to have defined goals: the media vehicles that you’re going to use, how are you going to do them, frequency, how often, flighting, the whole ball of wax. Basically the who, what, where, and how you’re going to effectively implement a media strategy.
How would you go about figuring out competitive spending?
Competitive spending. There are softwares and services that you can contract with that will allow you to pull competitive spending. And then there’s always your reps and the local stations. They also carry all that information. And so you just pull reports from everywhere, and it’s not always going to be an exact but it shows you where they’re spending and it gives you an idea of how much they’re spending.
So when you are planning, what is the checklist that you run through? What is an effective checklist for media planning?
Well again, it’s the who, what, when, and where. Make sure you’ve got all those covered. Make sure you’re reaching the target correctly and efficiently; you’re hitting them where they are, you don’t want to utilize a media vehicle that they’re not even listening to or watching or using. And then, all your dots are in a line and all your T’s are crossed, you’re at your budget, you’ve got efficient cost per points. You don’t want to have cost per points too low that you won’t be able to afford to buy anything and so you’re just buying whatever you can buy; you want to have a full, effective, well-rounded schedule. So I mean, yeah, just so you’re answering the who, what, when, and where the best way that you can.
How do you feel about companies cutting ad budgets during this time period of the pandemic, and honestly, during recessions in general?
Really, it’s a tough call especially if you’re a retailer. At the beginning of the shut down, no one was going to retail so unless you were a big consumer brand, you really didn’t have that inflow of cash that you could support an advertising campaign. So I would probably scale back some, but you still want to have that media presence because when everything comes back, you’re going to have that recall that you were on the air and they’re going to remember who you were and you’re going to be top of mind versus having to start all over from scratch. But really for the smaller companies, it’s really hard to muster through when you have no sales happening.
What are your tips for an effective media negotiation?
First of all, be nice and courteous. You’re not going to get very far if you’re never a pleasant person to work with. That’s how I’ve gotten most of my relationships built is just treating your counterparts like people, listen, and then always take a meeting. But then when you’re actually into the negotiation, I try to really not hold anything back. I don’t try to hide anything. I tell them as much information that I can give them without giving away everything so they’ve got enough information that they can go to task and do the best that they can. And then always I always trying to get everybody to give me the best price up front that way it saves us all a step and saves the second round of negotiations for tweaking and bettering their share if they can.
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