Discover Ad Sales Terms and Processes

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Define the common terms used in media advertising.
Describe the media-planning process.
Explain how advertisers measure the success of their campaigns.

Common Terms, Products, Processes, and Practices

Before going into the details of advertising sales management, let’s be sure we’re all speaking the same language.

An illustration of a hand writing terms on a board with chalk.

Check out these common media terminology definitions.

Media Sales and Service Process

The media industry is in a constant state of flux. Ad sales, a crucial group, must adapt to continuously evolving sales and service processes. Both media companies and ad sales can monetize their customer bases with advertising.

Take a peek at the high-level media sales and service process.

A component diagram of media sales and service process.

Agencies and Buyers: Agencies and buyers represent brands wanting to purchase advertising to market their products and services, which creative groups help produce. This group can be an in-house advertising department within a publisher company or an independent entity that offers services to external brands.
Data Brokers: Data brokers, as the name implies, supply data and insights to both buyers and sellers. They ensure that ads target the right audience, and they support price negotiation with suppliers.
Media Cloud and the ASM Application: Media Cloud with the ASM application provides a seamless interface for managing the process of selling ads, including analytics, plus sales and campaign optimization tools for sellers, such as publishers and content owners.
Publishers: Publishers can be an internal group with direct access to an audience representing a company's publishing side, as with a buyer company.

The idea of marketing products through advertisements seems simple enough, but in reality, not so much! Companies need to adapt to new ways of working and take advantage of technological advances to market their brands with a higher degree of customization and control.

Let’s take a quick look at the different types of ads that companies can use today.

Digital: Digital advertising refers to marketing through online channels such as websites, apps, streaming services, and more. This can be an easy way to reach a broad audience and provides control over the entire process. Ideally, it’s powered by relevant customer data.
Linear: Linear ads are commercials delivered through television and radio and can reach large audiences at a national or local level. You can target ads based on content or demographics.
Print: Print ads are an old-school way of marketing that has stood the test of time. These include newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and direct mail marketing, such as catalogs, newsletters, leaflets, coupons, and mail. Billboards, grocery store endcaps, and directories for B2B marketing fall into the category of print ads.
Out-of-Home: Out-of-home ads are those people see while away from home. These can be billboards and bus stop benches or even digital boards at gas stations and grocery stores.

It all comes down to different groups, companies, independent agencies, and service providers with a defined set of roles working together toward a successful ad campaign.

This collaboration, depending on the number of teams and their internal workflows, can be challenging and prone to failure. To be successful, media companies need to increase transparency for departments and teams, enable them with up-to-date information, and streamline workflows. Here’s where media planning is crucial.

Media Planning

Media planning brings together the key people, determines the optimal advertising approaches, and creates the best strategy to market a product and make the most impact on the target audience. Without the right system, the media-planning process can be highly inefficient and fall short of meeting ad campaign objectives.

To get to know media planning, let’s look at the key stages.

Stage	Description	Ad Campaign Goals
Awareness	Build awareness about products and services with specific audiences.	Increase brand awareness, reach, gross rating points (GRP), target rating points (TRP), traffic to websites, physical stores or events, video views, and viewability.
Interest	Engage with the audience and build interest.	Use social media, newsletters, Q&A events, and more, to create engagement. Understand audience preferences, and create excitement through marketing solutions.
Desire	Deepen the relationship with the audience, and create a desire for the products or services.	Use prospecting, distinct messaging, and positioning of the product or service with the target audience while increasing audience consideration.
Action	Convert the desire into action.	Retarget certain audiences and convert their desire to action. This means store visits, sales, installs, subscriptions, and other actions.
Loyalty	Stay connected after a customer has made a commitment or purchase.	Offer promotions, rebates, perks, renewals, and paid subscriptions that current customers can redeem or activate.

Media companies can adapt these stages as required. The end goal, however, remains the same, converting an audience into active customers. A key insight for advertisers here is to know how the ad campaign is performing. How do you gain performance insight?

Key Performance Indicators

Depending on the media-planning stage, you can assess customer engagement using the following key performance indicators (KPIs).

KPI	Description
Cost Per Action (CPA)	What a buyer pays for each action. An action might be downloading a white paper, signing up for a newsletter, or buying something on the advertiser's website. A subset of CPA is CPI or the cost per install. You can measure costs in several ways. Cost per click (CPC): What a buyer pays for each ad click Cost per mile (CPM): What a buyer pays for each thousand impressions Cost per view (CPV): What a buyer pays for each ad view Cost per completed view (CPCV): What a buyer pays for each completed view of an online video On-target CPM: Cost for each thousand qualified impressions where they are guaranteed to have been delivered to the desired target audience only
Click-through Rate (CTR)	Number of clicks divided by number of impressions.
Conversion Rate (CVR)	Number of conversions divided by number of impressions.
Delivery	Delivery of all contracted impressions.
Gross Rating Points (GRP)	A measure of reach times frequency, which is used to measure linear (television and radio) ad campaigns.
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)	The total conversion value divided by advertising costs.
Search Lift	Rise in the number of search queries, branded and unbranded, after the campaign, as opposed to the baseline number of queries before the campaign.
Unique Reach	The number of unique users reached with the ad campaign.

Measurement and Validation

Now that you know what the goals are, it’s time to look at how to measure if they’re met. Measurement and validation vendors, like Nielsen and Comscore, evaluate the following factors to help publishers and advertisers understand how their campaigns are working.

Factor	Description
Attribution	The process of determining the user actions that led to the desired outcome between the impression and the conversion. If you generated a sign-up, attribution is about retracing your new lead’s steps with tools to figure out where they came from.
Audience Reach	The number of different people or households exposed, at least once, to an ad during a given period.
Brand Lift	An increase in interaction between a lead and a brand due to an advertising campaign. It can indicate a positive shift in customer awareness, attitude, recall, favorability, or intent.
Brand Safety	A set of measures designed to protect the image and reputation of a brand from the negative or damaging influence of questionable or inappropriate content when advertising online. For example, a restaurant ad should not be placed next to breaking news of food poisoning.
Sales Lift	The incremental increase in sales that happens immediately after a promotion, as opposed to baseline sales during the same time period without the promotion. Advertisers use sales lift to measure the effectiveness of their ads and promotions.
Lift in Foot Traffic	The incremental increase in customers that enter a location as a result of an ad campaign, as opposed to baseline foot traffic during the same time period without the ad campaign. As with sales lift, advertisers use lift in foot traffic to measure the effectiveness of a campaign.
Tune In	The number of customers or households that listen to or view a program because of an ad campaign.
Delivery Tracking	Delivery tracking is how impressions are tracked so advertisers can compare what was delivered against what was purchased.
Viewability	Ad viewability is how visible an ad is to users, such as on a website or mobile app. At least 50% of the banner or creative must display on screen for more than one second for an ad to be considered viewed.
Marketing Mix Modelling	How advertisers measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by analyzing data and determining how much success comes from ads and promotions, as opposed to other uncontrollable drivers of success.

Those were quite a few common terms, products, and processes, weren’t they? Not to worry. Think of this unit as your own personal dictionary about the ad sales aspect of the media industry.

You’ve waited long enough! Now that you’ve covered all the bases, it’s time to meet the ASM application.