Wednesday Morning Meeting for September 15

 When CPPs are Miles Apart

In broadcast media, one of the two ways media buyers and sellers measure cost-efficiencies is by CPP or cost-per-point.  Cost-per-points are what keep buyers within their budgets.  Buyers rely on Sqad or Media Market Guide to tell them what a CPP should be in an upcoming quarter, by market, by daypart.  Both services are very reliable in their reporting.

The other cost-efficiency measurement is CPM or cost-per-thousand.  CPMs remain fairly constant across the country, however, they do vary by daypart.

When a media buyer gets an avail sheet back from a television station, for example, that is double the CPP the media buyer believes the CPP should be, it does not really sound an alarm, as the buyer knows there is always room for negotiations and the stations expect the buyers to bring the initial rate submission down.

Trouble arises when the TV station rep submits a CPP such as $238 for a daytime 9am-12noon rotator, when the buyer is looking for something in the $35 range.  Immediately, the buyer feels that the media rep is “gouging.”  If the TV rep dropped the CPP to $200, he’s still “gouging” in the buyer’s eyes.  In fact, I have, very recently, told a TV rep that we would not be negotiating, because his CPPs were waaaay too far apart from where we needed to be.  There truly was no sense in going back and forth when the gap was so wide.  Even if he cut his rate in half, he would wind up still being triple where I needed to be.  No sense in wasting either of our times.

It would have been better for the rep to delete this daypart from his avails, knowing that the CPPs would never work.  Instead, he submitted the ridiculous CPPs and wound up ruining a four-year business relationship that had worked very well in the past.