In the discussion of obtainable digital revenue, it’s the sliver of local ad spending that’s in play for media companies (not just radio). It’s a critical number with an overall forecast and market-specific figures.
It’s been part of the benchmarking report on radio digital sales as a sign of opportunity. According to this year’s report, local U.S. advertisers spent $104.4 billion on digital. Most of it (85%) left the market, as businesses spent it on direct platforms, including Google and Meta. What was left (15%) stayed in market.
While radio has been competing with and often outperforming fellow media companies (TV and print), there’s a question of whether any direct platform buys could transition to radio’s bucket.
It’s not impossible, and there are several weak spots you can capitalize on to take back that spend.
Competing with Direct-to-Platform to Grow Digital Revenue
Direct-to-platform buying by advertisers usually describes their internal ad operations. They may have specialists who manage SEM (search engine marketing), social media advertising and potentially programmatic.
There’s a cost that comes with this in terms of salaries. There’s also the time it takes to execute these ad buys. Local businesses are most likely doing a lot of this manually. They may also falter when it comes to monitoring the campaign and optimizing it, creating a lot of ad waste.
There could also be gaps around what’s changing on these direct-to-platform options. Google, Meta and others are constantly adjusting things like targeting and ad goals, which impact how the ad gets set up and its eventual performance.
Understanding these pain points could be a turning point.
Emphasize Reducing Burdens for Internal Staff
Those managing direct ad buys wear many hats. All the ops work required to launch an effective campaign can be grueling. Those employees would bring more value to their organization if they could focus on strategy and the creative.
Companies may also be operating with a leaner staff. Your role is to help them offload some of the work. As a local media seller, you can manage the ad ops. You can be their partner in defining the right tactics, targeting, budgeting and more. They get to be creative and strategic while you facilitate the mechanics.
Discuss Optimization
Once an ad launches, it’s not the end of the story. If it’s a long or continuous ad run, there must be checks and balances for optimization. It happens a lot in SEM campaigns that many just set and forget, but conversion-based optimization in SEM is critical for performance. The model behind it is maximizing ad spend for the best return. It allocates budget to the keywords and text ads that deliver the best results.
Explain Flighting and Creative Scheduling
If you’re using a third-party digital ad platform, you should have flighting and creative scheduling features. These capabilities allow you to set up long runs for programmatic, wherein you can define a “flight,” which is a timeframe, and what creative runs during it.
You can set this up from the beginning and make edits as necessary. It eliminates the need to configure multiple campaigns for the same audience targeting and goals. If advertisers are doing this on-platform, they would not have these options.
It’s another way to save time and optimize. It’s an optimizing win because of the control of the creative and when, so it’s most relevant to the audience.
Make Note of How Your Ad Tech Is Up-to-Date with Changes
There are rules for programmatic, SEM and social media advertising. These can change at any time. Usually, these relate to restrictions or limitations associated with targeting by demographics or geography.
Any brand must follow these guidelines. Failure to do so could result in account suspension. Let advertisers know that the DSP you use is compliant and that other checks within the platform identify issues before campaigns launch.
Expanding Your Obtainable Digital Revenue
Digital will be the main engine for revenue growth for radio. There are lots of dollars that you can compete for, but don’t discount local companies using direct platforms. With these approaches, you could make a real play to return those dollars to the local media market.
Check your market’s obtainable digital revenue by downloading the benchmarking report.
