I’ve been pretty tight lipped out media buying up until now and I’ve decided to post more about media buying because it’s a hot topic these days that a lot of people are trying to learn more about.

With any topic that is this massive there are going to be some people that are making major mistakes.

I’m going to show you a typical problem, what I call “media buying followers” using a movie marketing campaign that I think is really interesting and should translate well for you guys.

How I Pick My Battles

Most of you probably know by now that I’m heavily involved in the movie business. I’m an actor and movie marketing consultant, in addition to my online businesses, affiliate marketing and misc. internet marketing consulting that I do. I think of myself as a true entrepreneur with a strong strategic marketing focus on most of the projects that I get involved with. In other words, I like industries such as the film industry and affiliate marketing because they have virtually no roof aka endless scalability to make obscene amounts of money.

With that said (I love that phrase, it’s so abused), It’s not just about the money for me. The other and possibly more important reason that I get involved in the things I do, is because that scalability factor that I mentioned; which also means that I have the ability to reach virtually endless amounts of people in both of my 2 favorite industries, movies and marketing.

The Problems Everyone Else Is Making

I want to tell a quick little story to set the stage here. Last week, I was at the Los Angeles premiere of the movie Fast Five at the Director’s Guild of America in Hollywood during the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. I met a few of the stars of the movie including Sung Kang and it was a great time and great networking opportunity.

I was talking to several actors, press people and people involved in production of the actual film, and I got to thinking… these guys did a tremendously good job on the marketing front. They are doing huge billboard ads all around L.A., they are doing massive social media campaigns and contests, they are all over the internet and the trailer is all over the TV. Heck, most of the was out promoting the movie so hard that they weren’t even at the L.A. premiere, they were overseas in Europe doing a publicity tour to try to expand their European reach.

What I want to focus on is the billboard campaign.

This is where the “media buying followers” problem comes in. They see a movie or campaign on a billboard or somewhere that’s using an ad for branding purposes rather than direct response or the ‘call to action’ format that us online media buyers are used to focusing on, and they wrongfully assume that’s something that they should be doing.

The typical media buyer will focus on what they see in the public media before what is actually going to work. They assume that because a movie like Fast Five is able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on generic “branding” billboards, that they should make their online media buying banners look like that.

This is very far from the truth, and this is a habit that I see way too often. I’ll see people making media buys on “make money online” sites and just branding their product without using any attention getting tactics or call to action headlines in the media itself. This is an epic waste of money!

The Billboard Branding Problem

If you drive around Hollywood for more than 10 minutes, you’re bound to see one of the following. They are great posters and all, but these are not meant to be used as banners online, they are effective as branding for the movie, not for media buyers to copy and use online. Believe it or not this happens all too often, people wrongfully copying a branding campaign and assuming it’s going to work for their online product.

Now let’s look at something that will get a direct response

Below is what I call direct response banners. These are banners that have very strong headlines, the colors are blended well with the site they are on and overall they are bound to be very effective because of their positioning and overall quality. Not to mention they are targeted extremely well, being on one of the most high traffic make money online websites in existence. They have that aggressive factor to them with the strong claims that will get people to click and possibly buy what they are selling.

Direct Response > Branding for Online Product Owners =)

If you are promoting a product and not a movie, make sure you are using strong call to actions in your media and make sure that it is speaking well to the demographic of the website that you are buying your banners on. Don’t fall into the trap of copying what branding or movie companies are doing, they have an entirely different set of rules because of the action that they are trying to get people to eventually take.

There are a lot of factors to consider when thinking about working with a Media Buying Agency.

I’ve seen two common scenarios that generally lead people to working with these agencies.

Scenario 1: You are a new media buyer and you need help.

In my opinion this is usually a bad reason to want to get involved with a media buying agency. The problem here is that you are putting a lot of trust in a company that they are going to be able to make something profitable for you. If you really think about it, if they could just make everything profitable from the get-go, why would they just be doing what you are doing and keeping 100% of the profits for them. They are in it for the fees you are going to be paying them. Even if they have a small performance supplement to what you are paying them, are they really going to be that motivated to make you a huge profit?

Scenario 2: You are an experienced media buyer and you want to scale up.

You’ve got far on your own and you feel like you need more of “you” to make more money. You are wondering if working with one of the media buying agencies is right for you. Sometimes, this might be a good option, sometimes it might not. I think this is a much more legitimate reason to get involved with an agency than Scenario 1. Although, there are potential problems as well and they are similar here, i.e. making sure you really have a company motivated to work extra hard for you.

If you can find that diamond in the rough, the media buying agency that’s going to work for you as if they were running their own campaign then I think it’s a brilliant idea.

Hiring Freelance Media Buyers.

There are also some cases where you can get a freelance media buyer involved. Sometimes these types can be talked into a mostly revenue share type of deal, and you know if it’s a revenue share deal then they are going to be motivated to make you as much money as possible to in turn make themselves as much money as possible.

Have your own product? Get affiliates, instead of Media Buying.

Another strategy is to get affiliates to promote your product directly (or through an Affiliate Network). If you’ve got your own product, that is. The key here is to know what your profit margins are and be able to calculate what you can afford to pay affiliates to the leg work for you. This tends to work best in less competitive fields where you can jump right in to a new niche before an army of advertisers are doing the same thing as you on all of the affiliate networks.

Media Buying Agencies.

This is an on-going list that I plan on updating to have a list of all the best media buying agencies. The reason I’m doing this is so you know who is trusted and who you can work with without fear of any of the nasty stuff I mentioned above, such as having an unmotivated agency working for you.

Contact Us, to get your agency listed. Must go through a review process by me personally before I can recommend it to readers.

Reverse Media Buying as I will explain in the video is the art of buying media such as banners while finding websites via search engines and other means, from websites that don’t go out and solicit their own sales. Usually you can get a much better deal by doing this and approaching sites yourself, that don’t have a salesman working their banner spots.

Scaling out. This is what you do when you’ve hit your maximum potential on any given traffic source. People get bored of seeing your affiliate ads on one website everyday, which is why looking into alternative places to buy traffic is so important. Scaling out is just another way to get all your eggs out of one basket, or in other words, diversify.

So when I was a one advertising platform kind of man, I was making a killing on Facebook. But like I stated earlier, campaigns would dry up and I’d be left searching for new niches or new targets. That was a very inefficient way to go about marketing. So when I heard about PoF’s self-serve advertising platform, I was pretty excited.  I could now take the campaigns and data I had from Facebook, and pretty much translate them over to Plenty of Fish which has a very similar targeting scheme.

So what is Plenty of Fish’s advertising platform like?

PoF is a mainly demographic ally-based advertising platform, with a few psychographic targeting options built in. They serve around 100m page views per month, so there are a ton of impressions to go around (although not nearly as many as you’d come to expect from Facebook or Google).  Ad formatting is identical to Facebooks – 110 x 80 pixel images with a short ad title and caption. You also have the option to use IAB banner sizes, although the amount of impressions from those ads is lower.

It’s a very popular platform for affiliate marketers to practice CPA arbitrage – that is buy traffic on the cheap and convert it to something that makes you more money with CPA offers. And why is it so popular? The traffic is amazingly cheap. You are forced to bid CPM, but with some traffic trickling in at 15 cents, and it flowing steadily at 50 cents, you won’t be digging deep into your pockets just to test out one affiliate offer.

So what kind of advice can I give you, from being an experienced PoF advertiser?

Dating. It’s the number one niche on PoF which doesn’t come as much of a shock, but it works! Dating campaigns are very high maintenance. You have to split test multiple images and ad copies, and continuously rotate new images to keep your average CTR up. If you plan on taking this route, be prepared with tracking tools by your side. (I recommend Tracking202/Prosper202) Dating Self-help ebooks and other similar offers work great, as well!

Use the targeting options! If you are a current Facebook marketer, this will be a breeze for you, and a joy. PoF includes a lot of great targeting options that Facebook and others don’t give you because PoF collects more user data as they are a dating site. Be creative and implement it. It will cut down your target reach, but if you work hard on your campaigns like it’s an actual business and not just a hobby (which any successful affiliate treats it as), you should be able to scale campaigns out pretty heavily over the course of one day.

Don’t forget to mention user data in the ads. Targeting smokers? “Meet other smokers.” Plenty of Fish also allows you to dynamically insert user city and other data with quick tags inserted in the ad copy. It’s a great tool that you can use to direct traffic to your ad.

There are cons, of course, as there are with every traffic source.

There aren’t very many niches that connect with users. People are here to find a date for tonight, not be advertised to. Again, it isn’t surprising why only dating ads or self-help ads seem to get a lot of attention here.

There isn’t a ton of traffic to go around. You will have to set your CPM bids pretty high to get a decent bite of the cake. You can get light traffic with lower bids, but bid price also can determine traffic quality. Higher bids get priority (Facebook also uses a similar system with their ad platform).

You can’t target international demographics other than the main English speaking countries: USA, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK. While there wouldn’t be much traffic outside of this, in some cases, that traffic might be valuable to some.

So if you are looking for some extra traffic, need to scale, or have all your eggs in one basket, Plenty of Fish Ad’s is a great alternative traffic source for affiliate marketers. It’s got it’s fallbacks, but the amazing support, traffic quality, and targeting options make up for it.

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Justin Dupre is an affiliate marketer, blogger and Internet marketing consultant. You can read his blog for more affiliate marketing tips and case studies at http://justindupre.com, or join his forums for more personal 1-on-1 advices.

When you do marketing, and yes, I’m going to give you the most boring cliché ever, but YOU HAVE TO “think outside of the box.” Be creative, do something others aren’t doing.

So I asked them, “Did you try any other paid traffic sources?” And the answer was: “Are there others?” This shows how little business owners know, even though they think they’re experts, because they read an article on PPC or Facebook marketing. Being an expert doesn’t mean you know the technical terms, it means that you’ve spent 10 000 hours doing something.

Long story short, they agreed to try some other traffic sources, although I can guarantee if they would let me try AdWords, I would make that campaign way more successful than what they did, but they won’t let me, because they “lost all confidence in AdWords at the moment.”

I signed an NDA, so I can’t show you guys their product or service, but I’ll keep you updated on how everything goes. Here are a couple of things they have agreed to try:

1. A press release and distribution – I always do this, and I use PRWeb (not an affiliate link). There are hundreds of similar sites, but I just like that one the best.
2. Improving their presence online, start blogging, social bookmarking and utilizing Facebook and LinkedIn, since that’s where their target demographic hangs out.
3. I’ve had some great success with niche products and buying traffic from StumbleUpon, and I’m going to give it a try for these guys. Some great content will be created for a free giveaway, and then the subscribers will be contacted by the sales people.
4. This is a product/service that just might work for a CPA network, so if we put it on one and it takes off, we’re golden.
5. Media Buying. Those big scary words. I’ve found some potential sites and I’m having some great banners designed, and I think this will be the most scalable solution if it works.

If you’ve run out of ideas, I suggest you take a look at the “Top 50 Ad Networks To Explore”, and find out where they advertise and how. There are a million other sources, but you gotta start somewhere. I’ll keep you updated, and I’ll try to post more “real life scenarios” from my clients. Perhaps even get permission to do an open case study, we’ll see.

Until next time!

First and foremost, I find it easier to deal with someone that you know or have had some sort of past communication with.

The first tactic that you can employ would be to simply ask for a discount. Often times, if you have had some sort of past communication they will offer you a good rate right off the bat, negotiation over.

But, if you don’t get your desired rate right off the bat then it’s time to use some additional tactics.

• Approach them as a new company that is looking to experiment with some ad placements and has a limited budget. Tell them right up front “what you can afford” , making sure that it’s actually 50% below what you can actually afford to risk.

Don’t be afraid to make a counter offer if you don’t feel that you’ve been given a good or optimal deal.

• Even if the price is listed right on the site or agency site, don’t be so quick to just assume that they won’t be flexible.

Tell them your situation and be honest about it that you are taking a big risk trying your banners on their site/network and you’ll need to get it for $X price.

A typical conversation might take 5+ emails or several phone calls to negotiate a price. Don’t assume that they are going to budge on the first try.

• Phone is generally “better” than email for negotiating a price, if you are making a multi thousand dollar deal (or relatively large deal for that site or network.)

Using the phone you “put them on the spot” and human nature kicks in and they may take a worse deal than they would have by sending emails back and forth where they have time to “think about it” and come up with excuse or justification as to why that price is no good.

Let’s look at a little scenario.

Company XYZ charges $9 CPM with a minimum $2,500 spend, as listed on their website.

I would approach them as a first time buyer (asking for a special deal as a new buyer on their network/site.) If my target goal was $7 CPM, I would ask for somewhere around $4.50 and a $1,250 spend. Exactly half of what they are offering.

• By approaching a company and making a counter offer to their listed rates with odd numbers like “$4.50″ and $1,250″ it makes it seem like you have thought out your pricing, more-so than if you were to ask for $5 and $1,500.”

I almost always counter offer with odd numbers to give that impression that I have thought out my needs (and I always do think out my needs for low pricing.)

If you are dealing with a “monthly placement” and the price is really low (less than a few hundred) , often times that website owner or network has decided that they are pricing it to sell. If it’s a reasonable number, you may find success in offering multiple months payment up front. For example, on Daily Conversions you can pick up a $75/month 125×125 on the right side. And, if someone were to offer me $65, I would probably just say that it’s not worth it for me (and it isn’t, since I have advertisers willing to pay $75 and more–>meaning I should be raising the price) on a placement that is probably already extremely under-priced. However, if someone were to come to me and say that they’d give me $65/month with 6 months paid up front, I might be more likely to say yes.

If it’s a high price point CPM deal with required buy-in, you usually have more room to negotiate than a lower priced monthly deal. But, always try to either offer multiple months for a monthly placement up front (if you can afford it) or offer less money than their listed rate if a CPM deal using odd numbers.

Be persistent, and use the old sales rule that you need 3 NO’s before they actually mean it