As a Brand Advertiser or Media Strategist, Why Should You Care About Unwired Media?
Unwired Media can be a strategically important solution for advertisers and media buyers. It provides the ability to reach audiences at scale while shrewdly optimizing media budgets. It can also provide the ability to target media buys in interesting ways to meet strategic aims that other types of media buys designed for reach can’t match.
What is Unwired Media?
Most advertisers and media buyers looking to build brands on a large regional or national scale assume that they need to work with the major broadcasting companies. However, if you take a closer look at the opportunities to buy media at scale, you realize that there are vast audiences that are tuned in to specific programming or local broadcasters or even watching online videos.
What if it were possible to aggregate a large number of smaller media buys into one large buy? At first glance, the amount of work to execute all of these media buys might seem prohibitive. That’s where “Unwired Media” solutions providers like AudienceXpress come in.
Unwired Media is a media buying methodology wherein a large number of local publishers and broadcasters are bought as a unit in order to simulate a large regional or national media buy. Having an aggregated inventory supply across a large number of different outlets creates ease of execution for agencies and advertisers to transact Unwired Media buys across different entities through a single partner.
This makes executing an Unwired Media strategy not only possible but easy.
The AudienceXpress solution provides the pipes to place linear TV ads across MVPDs (Multichannel Video Programming Distributors), a term that includes Cable TV providers like Spectrum and Comcast as well as satellite companies such as DISH and DirecTV, and Telco companies like Verizon and AT&T. FreeWheel also brings direct relationships with a vast network of owned and operated TV groups as well as local TV broadcasters, making it easy to bundle these audiences with an Unwired Media buying strategy.
When this is combined with the ability to efficiently place OTT with direct integrations at media publishers, you begin to see how an Unwired Media strategy can provide enormous scale while creating flexibility to map a media buy to specific strategic goals that isn’t possible with a single large TV advertising buy.
What Advantages does an Unwired Media Buying Strategy Have over a Traditional Media Buying Strategy?
With every strategy, there are of course drawbacks. By not having direct relationships with national broadcasters, you may miss the opportunity to get access to sponsorship opportunities.
However, by avoiding going to TV Networks directly, Unwired Media buying avoids the time constraints and pricing power limitations of traditional media buying. A TV network might hold an advertiser to a commitment that spans an entire quarter vs the flexibility of a 10 business day cancellation. This lets you get into and out of advertising inventory more quickly, leading to an iterative approach that lets you follow the audience rather than assuming that a full broadcast across enormous audiences will meet your business objectives. Being broadcaster agnostic lets you step back and look at business goals and determine how measurement, attribution, and testing across discrete elements of a media buy can eliminate waste and can lead to an optimized strategy for you in the end.
With an Unwired Media strategy, you are not competing head-to-head with leading brands with deep pockets. This allows somewhat smaller advertising budgets to “punch above their weight” and still meet business goals.
Unbundling broadcast and publisher media and then building back up a well-defined audience set provides strategic opportunities that large national media buys miss. An easy approach to Unwired Media buying execution might eliminate expensive markets in order to meet a CPM goal. However, with the right tech stack and relationships, it is possible to build a true representation of a large regional or national footprint while gaining economies that a national media buy can’t match.
The AudienceXpress Unwired Media solution includes the technology stack and the relationship footprint to execute Unwired Media easily and at scale. Our support, which includes strategy, planning, automated execution, attribution, and optimization gives you the right audience at the best price while making execution easy. You get maximum brand impact with minimum workflows so that you can get back to working while your media execution is running smoothly in the background.