Media buying is a craft. We've practiced it since 1982.
Radio, television, cable, print, out of home, direct mail and sports marketing for consumer brands, from local businesses to Fortune 500 companies. We plan the schedule, negotiate the rates, produce the spots, and prove that what you paid for actually ran.
What we buy
Six channels, one discipline
We've bought every one of these for decades, for clients from local businesses to national brands, and each gets bought on its own terms. None of it depends on knowing a particular sales rep. Put us in a market we've never bought and the principles hold.
Radio
Where we started. Morning drive still sells the way it did in 1982. What's changed is that midday is often more efficient, and spots spread through the week catch the listener who spends less time with the station than she used to. Radio is bought on two numbers, how many people listen in any quarter hour and how many listen in a week, and the ratio between them decides how much frequency a station needs. Not how many dollars you have to throw around.
Television and cable
Spot television bought on measured ratings. Dayparts, spot length, audience limits, cost per point and make-good policy are negotiated before the first spot airs, and the post-log is read before the invoice is paid.
To the viewer it's all television. Two exposures on the local news and three on a streaming service are five exposures on one household, and we plan them that way. Connected TV is bought alongside the broadcast schedule, through partners who match audiences the privacy-compliant way, so the frequency adds up instead of overlapping. The two belong in one plan, and here they are.
Newspapers, magazines and insert programs for the brands and markets where print still pulls. Position, section, day of week and zone, negotiated and verified.
Out of home
Billboards, bus wraps and shelters, transit, airports and place-based media. Showing, location, illumination and posting dates, with proof of performance on every unit.
Direct mail
Format, paper, print, postage and in-home timing, coordinated with the mail house and the printer. We work from the file you provide and get the piece into the mail stream on the date the campaign needs it.
Sports marketing
Team and venue sponsorships, broadcast packages, signage and hospitality, negotiated as media rather than as a favor to the team. What you get, when it runs and what it's worth are written down before the handshake.
Production
Concept through final cut for radio and television, and finished art for print and out of home. We've produced enough spots to know which ones sold, so the creative gets built for response.
Post-buy verification
The part that most often gets skipped. Every schedule is reconciled line by line against the station's affidavit of performance. Under-delivery is documented and make-good weight is collected, in writing, before the next flight is placed. We ask for full delivery on broadcast and cable and as much as the market allows on radio, for every client, whether the budget is local or national. The stations know to expect it, and the schedules perform better for it. On one television buy that work returned more than a million dollars in weight the client was owed.
The principle
Reach tells. Frequency sells.
Everything we buy is built on the balance between the two, and the balance is where most schedules go wrong.
Reach was never the hard part. One spot in the Super Bowl reaches four in ten people in the market. One spot in the Oscars might reach two in ten. Once. Reaching twenty percent of the market one time is not the same as reaching one percent of it twenty times, and a summary report can't tell them apart.
Run that Super Bowl spot and then a thousand spots in programs that each reach less than one percent, and the summary says forty percent of the market reached an average of four times. Lay out the distribution and the truth is forty percent reached once and one percent reached a hundred times. Neither group is going to buy. A person reached once hasn't been reached. The schedule starts to work at about three exposures a week, and it works best when the exposures are spread across the people you want rather than piled on the few who happen to be easy to find.
So we plan to a distribution, not to an average. How we do that is our method, and it's what the five steps below are built to protect.
How we buy
Five steps, in the same order every time
- 1BriefWhat you sell, who buys it, where they are, what the budget is, and what a result looks like. One conversation, written up and agreed before anything is planned.
- 2PlanMarkets, channels, dayparts, flight dates and weight, with the reasoning beside each line. You see the plan before we talk to a single station.
- 3NegotiateRates, bonus weight, position, make-good terms and cancellation terms, negotiated directly with sales management. The terms are written down, and a station that changes its mind about delivering them has changed its place in the next buy.
- 4Traffic and airSpots, insertion orders, posting instructions and mail dates delivered on time, with confirmations on file.
- 5Verify and reportAffidavits reconciled against the order. Shortfalls collected. A plain report that says what ran, what it cost, what it should have cost, and what we recommend for the next flight.
None of this depends on a relationship with a particular rep or manager. Reps move, formats change, stations change hands. The steps don't, and they work in a market we've never bought before.
Stations sell audience. We buy results. The affidavit is where the two meet.
Broadcast and streaming
Bought together, not against each other
A person doesn't become someone else when she switches from the local news to a streaming service. Most buys treat her as two different audiences competing for the same dollar. We don't.
Broadcast television still owns what streaming can't offer: the local newscast, the local favorites, the syndicated programs that certain audiences never miss. Connected TV reaches the household that has cut the cord and lets the schedule follow a defined audience. Bought separately by two vendors who don't talk, they overlap where it's wasteful and leave gaps where it matters. Bought together, the frequency adds up on the same household, and the local presence stays intact.
Audio works the same way. Broadcast radio carries the frequency, and streaming audio and satellite radio extend it to the listener who has moved on. The two are measured on different yardsticks, so their costs per thousand can't be compared on the rate card. On direct response clients we've measured, a station's stream has had to come in at roughly a fifth of the terrestrial cost per thousand to produce the same calls, and we carry that learning to clients who can't measure as directly.
The digital side of these plans runs through partners who match audiences the privacy-compliant way, through consented identity frameworks such as the LiveRamp ID. We don't use IP-address targeting or geofencing, which run afoul of a growing list of state privacy laws and don't reliably reach the household they claim to.
This is where a local or regional advertiser is usually underserved. The first-tier agencies that integrate broadcast and digital for national brands don't take local accounts, so the local advertiser ends up with a television buyer and a digital vendor who have never met. We plan both sides from one brief, choose dayparts to meet the customer where she is rather than where it's convenient to find her, and design the traditional buy so it reinforces what the digital partners are doing and gets reinforced by it.
After the schedule runs
What the post-log tends to show
Patterns from decades of reconciling what was ordered against what aired.
Projected ratings that didn't arrive
Stations sell on estimates. The affidavit shows delivery, and the gap between the two is weight the client is owed. We always ask for it, and we expect it. Future business with that station depends on it.
Make-good terms never negotiated
When under-delivery isn't addressed before the spots air, there's no contractual claim. Most of it can still be collected, as added weight in the next schedule, by a buyer the station expects to see again.
Spots outside the daypart they were bought in
Correct on the invoice, invisible on the summary, and found only line by line. This is the one that pays for the reconciliation.
Bonus weight that never posted
Promised in the negotiation, missing from the affidavit. It comes back when someone checks and stays gone when nobody does.
One medium bought with another's habits
Television bought like radio, or radio bought like print, delivers the wrong audience at a fair price. Radio today reaches most adults in a week and holds fewer of them in any quarter hour, so it needs more frequency than it used to, bought without overpaying for it. The buy has to fit the medium as it is now.
Broadcast dismissed in favor of streaming
Buyers moving the whole television budget to connected TV give up the local presence that broadcast still delivers, and often pay more per household for it. The two belong in the same plan.
Radio dismissed before it was tried properly
Unloved and underpriced. Built from nothing, with creative written for response rather than for the reel, it has grown past television budgets more than once.
Who we are
Two people who have bought a great deal of media
Ilaria Bonalumi
Chief Media Strategist
Ilaria has bought and audited media for more than twenty-five years, in the top Nielsen markets and in small unrated ones, for national brands and for the local businesses next to them. A native of Milan, she began at Young & Rubicam in Italy and has worked at MQ&C since 1998, apart from a brief hiatus in the early 2010s.
She runs the post-buy reconciliation, station by station. If a schedule under-delivered, she will find it, document it and collect it.
Ben Morris
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Ben's first job was an overnight shift at an FM radio station at fifteen. He spent eight years on the air before founding MQ&C with two partners in 1982. Radio commercials were the first product. Media buying became the business once it was clear that was where the money was.
Since then he has negotiated radio, television, cable, print and out of home for clients from local retailers to regional chains and Fortune 500 brands, and he does it to this day. He holds a degree from the University of Texas at Austin in film theory and criticism. He also founded Kristalytics, a separate company that does marketing analytics and measurement. The two work together when a client wants both, and separately when they don't.
Contact
Reaching us
Most of the people who work with us were referred by clients. Most, not all. If you have a buy worth doing well, the door is open. Email us with the type of business you run, the markets you're in, a rough sense of media spend and what you'd like to happen. We'll reply and set a time to talk.
We buy consumer advertising for a living and don't buy any for ourselves. That isn't a contradiction. Selling a media buying service is a business to business sale, and it happens the way those sales happen, one referral at a time.
ilaria@mq-c.cominfo@mq-c.com
MQ&C ADV INC
1108 Lavaca, Suite 110333
Austin, TX 78701
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