The Craft of Media Buying

Media buyers never have the same day twice. In an interview with Monique Lupkes, Media Buyer at Craft and Associates, I learned exactly (or rather inexactly) how she spends her day.

Craft and Associates, located in Sioux Falls, SD, does advertising, marketing and web design. Its clients are based around the country, and the firm handles direct mail, television, radio, newspaper and yellow pages.

Lupkes, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, only had one media buying class in college. Today, her clients are colleges and technical schools, mainly from the West Coast and Ohio. Because she cannot meet any of her clients in person, she communicates by phone, fax and email.

Although Lupkes is not a typical media buyer, she had valuable advice for students looking to get into her field: prepare yourself to not have the same day everyday. Once a month, she goes over a campaign’s progress and changes ad sizes, television stations, or radio frequency accordingly. In addition to researching new markets and updating files, she takes care of make-goods, monitors traffic, and confirms the right spots are running at the right times.

There is a lot to keep up with, and Lupkes admits she works under high stress situations. Working quickly under pressure is another skill she applauds because deadlines are usually yesterday.

Finally, a media buyer must be confident in her choices, but willing to change if the original plan isn’t working out. The most important strength of a media buyer, Lupkes says, is being able to justify why you chose one medium over another.

Insight on Harolds’ Marketing Director

What exactly does a marketing director do? Are they the ‘top dog’ in the company? My interview with Harold's Marketing Director Erin von Holdt helped me answer all these questions.

Erin von Holdt, a 1997 graduate of SDSU in Graphic Design, gets to wear a lot of ‘different hats’ at her job and loves it. She, along with the CEO and Operations Director, get to make all of the day to day decisions. Without them the company would not run. While at SDSU, Erin took a few Ad/Media classes and said that “My ad campaigns class (MCOM 442) was the best class I ever took.”

Once in the professional world, she quickly discovered that a person couldn’t make much money only doing design work. She hopped between doing design jobs and working at web firms. While it didn’t look the best on a resume she gained a lot of experience. At age 24, she was hired on at Harold’s for the position of Marketing Director and has been there since.

While media planning/buying is a part of her job, it only accounts for a small portion of her workload. Other parts include graphic design, advertising, layouts, web management, staff management, in-store sales literature, copy writing, displays, signage, promotions, sales event planning, develop packing materials, trade show exhibits and much more.This is beneficial to the company because they don’t need to invest in many separate people. Harold’s does, however, have an in-house designer and a web person, whom she manages.

To help with TV and radio buying, they turn to HenkinSchultz (http://www.henkinschultz.com) in Sioux Falls. Erin handles newspaper, magazine, online/web and print media for Harold's four market areas (Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Brookings and Yankton).

They recently got involved in Google Pay Per Click Advertising. Erin said “We launched a new web site called www.paper-moments.com last year. The site sells photo greeting cards nationwide, and the only media source we use for promotion is Google. That’s the only affordable way we can gain a national audience. The first year in sales we did $100,000 – so we thought that went quite well. Now we are branching into Facebook and Twitter as well.”

For anyone looking at getting a job in media planning Erin suggests getting as much experience in other areas that relate to media as possible, as well as getting a good internship.

A Marketing Director’s job is very diverse, stressful, fun and something that anyone interested in the full spectrum of advertising and dabbing in it all should look at.