BY THOMAS HAIRE
Response’s Editorial Advisory Board and other
media experts clash over the role and influence of
media brokers in today’s DRTV marketplace.
cumbency basis. Few agencies or brokers are willing
to surrender their rights to time periods that have
proven successful for either their own shows or those
of other agencies, which buy the time on a second-hand basis.
Toni Knight, WorldLink: I’m not aware of media brokering expanding, and, in fact, over the years, WorldLink has gained a number of our accounts as a rep
firm specifically because media operators have become increasingly aware that brokering limits their
ability to retain 100 percent of the revenue generated by their own inventory. Control and accountability are of great importance to media platforms
and networks are better off if they know who exactly
is buying their time.
Peter Koeppel, Koeppel Direct: Brokers and buyers are essentially competing for the same time. This bidding
by both the buyers and the brokers gives the stations
the false impression that there is more demand for
their time in the marketplace than there actually is.
Fern Lee, 25-year DRTV Expert: The biggest challenge
with brokering media is uneducated marketers.
When a marketer allows multiple agencies to buy for them without
any parameters, it causes rates to increase.
More brokers are buying up inventory without
having a client to assign the media time to.
Rob Medved, Cannella Response TV: The number of brokers and the number of avails sold through brokers
has been in decline for the past decade. What has
happened is the emergence of many small agencies,
each vying to manage a piece of a marketer’s budget.
Many of those agencies evolved from brokering.
Richard Stacey, Northern Response Intl. Ltd.: In the Canadian marketplace, brokering is less common. Some
American clients will use brokers when they want
to air in Canada, often requiring a premium to preempt an existing agency to air a specific timeslot.
What are the positives and negatives of broker influence
for clients, stations and the industry itself? Does
brokering create an artificial demand that forces rates
to increase, and does it harm the value proposition of the
media time itself?
