When a Media Buy is Like Tomato Paste

My first experience buying media was a lot like the first time I tried to buy tomato paste in the Czech Republic. Tomato paste doesn't come in the usual small can there as it does here, so I stood in the aisle of the tiny grocery store, staring at a wide range of possibilities in lots of different packages, unable to speak the language or make sense of what I was looking at.

My first media buy felt very much the same: column inches? placement above or below the fold? 2-color, 4-color, b/w? magazines, newspapers, Google ads, queens or kings on the sides of buses (that one really baffled me...)? What about billboards? Should I just strap a sandwich board to someone on staff and send them out into traffic? There were lots of possible containers, but no way to know if I'd chosen the right one until I opened it up and found "tomato paste" or some unidentifiable bit of something that had once probably been an animal.

Ok, before this analogy gets too strained, let me say that I employed the same technique in both cases: in faltering, clearly non-native speech, I asked for help. I made my needs as clear as I could to people I knew knew more than I did, listened, then jumped and hoped for tomato paste.

As you might suspect, results were mixed. Some things did quite well (traditional print ads in community newspapers), some things didn't (Google ads), some things were just terribly hard to measure (bus panels--we went with Queens--and KUOW). But I learned a lot and have felt a bit less helpless since.

One caveat to media buyers: once you make contact, be prepared for a constant onslaught of increasingly desperate contact from the sellers of advertising space. Remember Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer? Yeah, he was desperate to keep his kid, but do you remember what he did for a living? He sold advertising space. I'm just sayin'. Desperation is clearly a way of life for many of these folks.

And yes, I finally stumbled on tomato paste. In a toothpaste-like tube on a side trip to England. Apparently the Czechs don't use tomato paste, or didn't then, anyway. I'm not sure how that works in my analogy, actually....maybe something about thinking outside the can?