How do you hire someone
to join your team? Every industry and place of employment has to determine what
will make an ideal candidate for an available position; media planning and
buying agencies are no different.
Currently, our agency is
looking for a person who can fill our coordinator job position. Because media
planning and buying is typically not the main focus of advertising curriculum
at universities, a lot of the interviewing process is effectively explaining to
college graduates what media planners and buyers do.
For those college
graduates who are excited to join the advertising world, first of all, welcome.
Secondly, here is a quick true/false list about our job here at Ruth Burke
& Associates:
Truth: You need to understand math. Media planning and
buying largely consists of balancing budgets, negotiating rates with vendors,
updating flowcharts and formulas, dealing with gross budgets, net costs, and
calculating client commission rates. Therefore, your brain, a calculator, and Excel
are going to be utilized constantly.
False: You quit working every Friday at 4:30p to drink. While we like to have
fun and celebrate with agency outings, pizza Fridays, summer hours, holidays,
birthday parties, etc., we are here to work. Some other agencies like to
advertise the fun atmosphere of the office with “Beer Thirty” on Fridays, which
is fun, but it comes from the “work hard, play harder” mentality. Meaning,
while it’s fun to stop work on Fridays early, it’s expected to work past the
5pm quitting time all other days of the week. We like to work hard and enjoy
life.
Truth: You will get free tickets to concerts and events. This is not a guarantee,
but because media planners and buyers constantly work with sales reps from all
media, free tickets become available. A lot of the time, the tickets are sent
to clients as a “Thank you” for working with us. However, there are times where
you can enjoy a concert or show that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to
see.
False: You never travel or get out of the office… hello
cubicle! We’ll
be honest, the majority of the time, you will be in your office conducting work
via email and phone. A large portion of our time is coordinating between the
vendor and the client and making sure everything runs smoothly. However, there
are times when we get to be social and interact with the media community in a non-work
capacity. Also, a good portion of our clients are not local to the Kansas City
area. So, occasional market visits can come up. And for those clients who are
in Kansas City, we get to go to different areas of town that may not be in our
comfort zone.
False: Every media buy is the same, so it’s easy to be a
buyer/planner. Every
client has a different set of goals when advertising. Budgets are different as
are geographic and demographic target parameters. If trying to reach a woman
25-49 in northern Kansas City, it wouldn’t make sense to advertise in a
magazine that is distributed only in southern Kansas City. Each media platform
has to be evaluated to determine what makes the most sense for the client and
the campaign.
Truth: If you like solving puzzles, you might be a planner. A lot of what we do is
problem solve. Whether it’s picking up tickets for radio promotion for the
client, updating a flowchart and campaign to account for the $20,000 cut in the
budget and still keeping the majority of the media unchanged, or determining if
a makegood meets the criteria needed to be approved, media planners and buyers
ultimately make decisions that affect a lot of different outcomes.
Overall, we look for
team members who are willing to lead projects, be the supportive role for other
employees when needed, be engaged in the clients’ needs, rein in big ideas and
implement them in a real-life way.
One way to best
summarize a media planner/buyer’s job objective is to organize the chaos.
