Media Kit
Categories: Marketing
A new internet company, which hopes to be the finest purveyor of rectal polyp detection, wants to market itself on TV. It wants to advertise on your local ABC affiliate TV station. So...what do they do? They ask for a media kit from whoever the head of sales is at that station. The kit claims that the excellent Des Moines stations has something like 97.2% reach (unable to capture the Amish pops) and is the number one-rated station in this demographic, and that demographic, and blah blah blah. Yes...it brags. It also states its rates. A 30-second spot in prime time goes for $28,000.
So then you walk into a Casablanca Rug bazaar and ask, "How much for the Oriental rug, y'all?" And they rob you blind.
Same idea here. Nobody but nobody pays retail in media. Usually, that polyp company would go to a professional media buyer who buys TV time all day long and knows the ropes, and they'd laugh at the media kit's prices. They'd bundle that new internet company's time with 18 other companies, and in bulk pricing of 8,372 minutes over the next two years, they'd get the price down to $11,878 for a 30-second spot in prime time.
The media kit is kind of a placeholder for newbies. It's just an intro to whatever the media property is for new buyers and new people wanting to understand...something about that piece of property. We even have a media kit at Shmoop. It's around here...somewhere.