Remnant Advertising- Wholesale Airtime Auction

Many small businesses today are interested in purchasing remnant advertising. The reason is pretty obvious: it is much cheaper than buying/booking the advertising well in advance via traditional purchasing methods. In order for someone to be able to buy any type of remnant advertising, two things have to occur:

  1. It has to be a type of advertising channel in which the inventory is perishable. Types of perishable advertising inventory include daily/weekly newspapers, weekly/monthly shared mail circulars, radio advertising airtime, TV advertising airtime, billboards, etc.
  2. The manufacturer or provider of the inventory has to be in a remnant advertising situation, meaning they are within a couple of weeks of publication and they have not sold out their entire inventory.

At this point, the buyer has leverage and can try to take advantage of the seller’s situation. Unfortunately, many newspaper producers and radio stations have figured out a way to spin this situation into their favor via clever sales techniques.

Here is an example of how a local radio station or a remnant advertising broker may try and use a sales trick to worsen the value of a remnant radio advertising package. Say the KAAA radio station in San Antonio, TX is offering you a remnant advertising package of commercials for $10.00 a commercial. They tell you that this is a fantastic deal because they normally sell their radio commercials for $25.00 apiece. You do some research and find out that they do normally sell their commercials for $25.00 apiece. You then call a couple of other of radio stations in town and get some price quotes. After comparing price quotes, you decide that this KAAA station is by far the cheapest quote, not to mention it is much cheaper than their normal pricing. So you decide to accept their offer and give it a try. Here is the first problem: do you know what you are buying? 90% of the companies selling advertising do not tell people what they are actually buying, and this scenario is no different. A radio commercial means nothing. Radio commercials are just air, and air is worthless. You should not pay anything for air. We all breathe it for free. Here are the following things you should know:

  1. What timeframes are the commercials going to air in? And are the timeframes being offered (for the $10.00 price) the same as the timeframes being offered for their standard $25.00 price? If a commercial at the standard price would air from 6AM–7PM and the remnant advertising commercial is going to run from 6AM–12PM, then that is not a good deal. In fact, it may be a worse deal than their standard pricing.
  2. How many people are actually going to hear the commercial each time it airs, during each different timeframe? And what is the ratio of what you are paying for each person to hear the commercial in each timeframe opposed to how much they are charging you for some magic pixie dust (i.e. a random radio commercial)? Did you know this can be calculated by Arbitron? Arbitron is the best company in the United States for keeping TV and radio stations honest. They can tell you how many people on average will hear a commercial during a specific timeframe on any given station in the U.S.. They use a formula called CPM (cost per thousand). If you want to learn more detailed information about CPM, click the hyperlink. The bottom line is, CPM creates an “apples to apples” scenario: it equalizes all stations. Instead of trying to compare worthless price quotes, you can compare what they are actually delivering: listeners, ears, eyeballs. Then you can determine if what you are looking at is just the world’s greatest sale propaganda or actually a good remnant advertising deal.

At the Wholesale Airtime Auction, our weekly fire-sale auction works exclusively off the CPM (cost per thousand) formula. We always make sure our customers know how many people (impressions) each radio station or TV channel will deliver to them on average each time their commercials air.

If would like to learn more about how buying remnant advertising could potentially help your business, please click here (Remnant Advertising – Wholesale Airtime Auction) to go to our Contact Us page.