Do Media Buyers Still Know How to Negotiate the Buying of Media?

In the modern era of buying digital media, the art of negotiating a media buy is quickly becoming a lost skill. Programmatic based media buying where a buyer develops open market bid and trading strategies has become the standard desired skillset across display media, video, social media, search marketing, digital audio, digital OOH and of course connected TV.

Programmatic based media buying is unto itself a unique skill blending both technology, automated algorithms, and creative human thinking to achieve the best results. But in this virtual buying environment, the single greatest traditional strength of a media buyers – the art of human interactions and interpersonal negotiations is rarely if ever required on the part of media buyers.

This is actually perfectly fine as long as a media buyer’s efforts are only focused on channels of digital media automation. Except, not all media is purely transacted in a digital only environment.

While traditional media channels such as terrestrial radio, television and cable have seen a steady decrease in both their audiences and advertiser interest in their ad inventory, these media channels remain efficient forms of both reach and scale.

Gen Z having grown up in an era of social based information are showing early signs of distrust for non-tangible information sources with recent studies pointing to far greater trust in physical sources of information such as magazines and newspapers. For both Gen Y and Gen Z, the very scarcity in print magazines has raised their interest in these mediums as they contain a certain allure.

Two thirds of OOH placements are non-digital and in many rural areas, these signs may never transition to electronic format due to the associated costs. These placements will still require human negotiations for placement and creative development.

Even in the digital world where a brand may need to work directly with influencers, develop custom content with the New York times or engaged in 3rd party promoted posts within Facebook or email promotions from local newspaper websites – all still require the art to develop and negotiate the actual media buy.

But from personal observation in managing large in-house media buying teams for brands and agencies alike, the skills required to negotiate media, find compromises with media vendors, and develop strategies for how to achieve what a brand requires at a price point that will work for the advertiser is one I rarely see now. And it is not always just in relationship to media but also the purchase of marketing technology platforms, data, content services, agency partners and the all too important areas of legal, payment and service terms.

Now I am not stating that there is some deficiency in the abilities of younger media buyers or that they lack the capacity to learn these skills, I am merely observing that they simply have not had to really do this within their current or previous roles before. In fact, when I have worked with my team members in the past to develop a negotiation strategy with a vendor and successfully executed the approach, those very team members seemed to really enjoy the experience and embraced what they learned as a new skill.

For marketers looking at hiring a full-service media agency, knowing that the agency truly possesses the ability to negotiate any form of media or marketing-based product is what makes that agency a full-service media buying agency. Programmatic knowledge and abilities will continue to remain the primary skill required of any media buying agency. But marketing is about influencing the outcome of human behaviors and sometimes, we don’t always have the luxury of doing it at scale and behind a digital wall of data.

Sometimes it must be done on a 1:1 human level.