MediaRadar is an ad intelligence platform designed to help agencies, media & ad tech companies increase revenue.

Media planners and buyers can easily access timely and actionable cross-format advertising data, monitor clients’ competition and uncover new advertising opportunities.

See how a Media Director at a Chicago-based content marketing company that serves national brands uses MediaRadar’s advertising intelligence for their clients.

Challenges of a Media Planner

Media Planning can be an exciting role—the market moves quickly and the process of developing a competitive, data-based strategy can be thrilling for the analytically-minded.  

But those same stimulating challenges can also be stressful. Media Planners often find themselves without effective tools to navigate quickly shifting markets. At the same time, they have to manage client expectations, convince clients why their spending will be effective and manage the various moving pieces of multiple campaigns. 

In order to wisely allocate ad dollars, Media Planners need to quickly and seamlessly access industry and advertising data.

Media Planners typically depend on multiple industry newsletters, publications and internally-developed research resources, often with less than ideal results. Reading through this mix of industry insights also eats up a planner’s time and is not their primary responsibility.

When it comes to competitor data, traditional agency tools for researching multi-media ad intelligence tend to be clumsy and complicated. Many of these tools still depend on outdated spreadsheet exports and force planners to conduct time-consuming manual research on outdated and inefficient UIs. While other solutions offer expensive tools that are difficult to learn and provide data from 6-8 weeks ago—an eternity in the world of media. 

Solutions

MediaRadar offers Media Planners a fast  and intuitive advertising intelligence platform, where they can analyze a brand’s media mix across a variety of formats. Insights are available on the platform quickly, enabling the user to truly keep up with what’s happening in the market and help their clients react in near real-time.

MRMB offers:

• A Fast and Frictionless UI: Save time with presentation-ready insights
• Accurate and Up-to-Date Analysis: MediaRadar is updated daily with fresh data
• Multimedia Insights: Understand where competitors are spending, including across podcasts, specific social platforms and emerging formats
• Depth of Market: We track 10,000 categories, including the most niche markets out there, and millions of brands.

“I really like the MediaRadar system. It makes a lot more sense and it’s very visually appealing.” – Media Director at a content marketing company serving national brands

AN OVERVIEW of the media planning process:

Step One: Establish Foundation with Clients

• Media Brief
• Form Objectives
• Identify research and tools

Step Two: Assess Key Drivers

• Target Audience Strategy 
• Competitive Analysis
• Assess media marketplace

Step Three: Create

• Strategies and Tactics
• Allocate and Optimize
• Evaluate tradeoffs
• Address contingencies
• Communicate recommendations

Step Four: Measure and Learn

• Assess Performance
• Undergo Feedback LoopThis process typically happens quarterly with some variation across formats (i.e. TV takes place via Upfronts). MediaRadar is used frequently across these stages, but mostly in the initial planning stages of a campaign.

Results 

We interviewed a Media Director at a Chicago-based content marketing company serving national brands. 

This Media Director found MediaRadar to be incredibly useful for their team, especially from an integrated marketing perspective. In the beginning stages of working with a client, they could identify industry trends and the buying behaviors of competitors. 

Media Planners are able to quickly create timely and accurate reports that include:

• Competitor or product category spending overviews
• Changes in Advertising Investments (month-over-month and year-over-year)
• The distribution of ad dollars across media formats
• Creative and messaging

This Media Director told us they were able to sit down with clients and say, “this is what your competitors are spending, so you’re being overtaken in the market in pure impressions and dollars spent.” 

Understanding how much competitors are spending is the first step in making an informed media plan.

“We either want to follow them in certain channels so that we can compete with them, or we make the recommendation to go to these other channels, typically digital channels so that we can dodge them,” they explained.

Ultimately, the solution to gain more reach is to spend more ad dollars—but brands typically press their agencies to do more work with less money. With comprehensive reporting that can be quickly downloaded as a PDF, agencies can justify their budget recommendations to their clients.

In their past experiences, this Media Director used Kantar’s Advertising Intelligence platform and complained that it had an outdated and frustrating UI. It was so complicated that he would need to contact the business rep and threaten to cancel the contract if they didn’t directly pull the data for them. He also commented their data also lagged behind considerably, so making informed decisions was difficult in an ever changing marketplace.

They appreciated MediaRadar’s well-organized dashboard and intuitive UX, making it easy to do a “gut check” on industries and competitor spend with minimal effort. They could also dig deeper into the data as needed with no complications. 

What You Should Expect

Are you an agency looking for the most efficient way to access advertising data across product categories and brands?

With MediaRadar, you can:

• Do Your Job in a Fraction of the Time – The days of creating complex and time consuming reports are over. MediaRadar provides the information needed to make informed and strategic decisions for your clients.
• Create The Perfect Media Mix By Format For Your Clients – See where and when any brand is buying their ads in near real-time.
• Monitor Primary and Emerging Competitors in Your Market – Compare a brand’s media mix to the competition’s. Do you want to go head-to-head or buy ads with different media partners?
• Easily Determine the Right Media Partners and Vendors – Instantly see any brand’s advertising investment by month or year-over-year insights. MediaRadar will show which platforms are being used by similar brands and when those brands are buying.
• Uncover New Media Formats That Are a Good Fit -The advertising landscape is constantly evolving. MediaRadar is agile and adapts with the market to provide the most complete understanding of any advertiser’s message. 

We know you’re busy. 

We’re not in the business of giving you data you can’t use. 

What we are in the business of, is offering you actionable insights that you can deliver in client-ready formats. With our fast and easy-to-use interface, you can dig deep into the data you need to build and manage effective campaigns.

And the best part is—it’s free. 

MediaRadar is an advertising intelligence platform. This tool is used by Media planners and buyers and provides timely and actionable media data across formats. Using MediaRadar they monitor their clients’ competition and uncover new advertising opportunities.

Current MediaRadar users share how they use MediaRadar at a B2B agency.

Challenges of a Media Planner in the B2B Space

Media planning can be an exciting role—industries move quickly and the process of developing a competitive, data-based strategy can be thrilling for the analytically-minded.  

But the competitive nature of B2B advertising can also be stressful. Media planners often find themselves without effective tools to navigate complicated markets. Clients expect to achieve superior results, while adhering to strict budgets. 

In order to manage and get the most return from a budget, media planners need to easily access industry and advertising data. The problem is that there isn’t an easy-to-use tool for agencies to access detailed information on competitor ad spending across multiple formats. 

Sure, there are very large media monitoring companies, like Kantar and Nielsen, that offer a wide perspective on industries. But they tend to be expensive, hard to use and slow to update data. These tools are difficult to learn and take 6-8 weeks to upload data—which is too long in the world of media. 

Agencies don’t have a tool that offers accurate, in-depth and instant insights on over 4 million brands and their spending across multiple media formats—including premium emerging media formats, like podcasts, OTT and social channels like Facebook and Snapchat. 

Solutions

MediaRadar offers media planners a fast, free and intuitive advertising intelligence platform, where they can analyze brand media mix across a variety of formats and product categories. Insights become available on the platform quickly, enabling the user to truly keep up with what’s happening in the market and to help their clients react in near real-time.

Using MediaRadar, media directors and planners can expect:

• A fast and frictionless UI: Save time with presentation-ready insights
• Accurate and up-to-date analysis: Our platform is updated daily with fresh data
• Multimedia insights: Understand where competitors are spending, including across podcasts, specific social platforms and emerging formats
• Depth of market: We track about 10,000 categories, including the most niche markets out there, and over 4 million brands.

AN OVERVIEW the media planning process:

Step One: Establish Foundation with Clients

• Media Brief
• Form Objectives
• Identify research and tools

Step Two: Assess Key Drivers

• Target Audience Strategy
• Competitive Analysis
• Assess media marketplace

Step Three: Create

• Strategies and Tactics
• Allocate and Optimize
• Evaluate tradeoffs
• Address contingencies
• Communicate recommendations

Step Four: Measure and Learn

• Assess Performance
• Undergo Feedback Loop

This process typically happens quarterly with some variation across format (i.e. TV takes place via upfronts). The MRMB product can be used frequently across these stages, but mostly in the initial planning stages of a campaign.

Results 

Recently, We interviewed a MediaRadar user. She is a director at a marketing agency that serves B2B brands. 

This media director eagerly shared how this tool was always open in her browser, as it helps her easily keep tabs on the media buying behaviors of her clients’ competitors. “The things I’m able to do and see—we’re really impressing our clients,” she said.

By offering her clients a competitive intelligence offering, she was able to demonstrate her commitment to building data-based campaigns. 

In a time when B2B industries were going through a digital shift, her clients particularly needed to know how much their competitors are adjusting spending, where they were pouring ad dollars and what opportunities there were to outshine them. 

Using MediaRadar she can tell her clients that their competitors are now spending $2 million in OTT, and they now need to create a strategy to combat them head-to-head or to choose an alternate format to capture attention. 

Previously to MediaRadar, this media director was doing research by pulling from different sources and compiling the data in Excel sheets. What used to take her two days, now takes her one hour.

“We were doing all of this manually – literally by hand. We’re able to save so much time and be so much more efficient, and honestly we get even more information than we were before,” she explained.

“It’s been a game-changer for us! It’s an awesome tool, there’s definitely a lot of power behind it. I get excited to share this information with our clients because of how much they enjoy it.” – Media director at a B2B marketing agency

Media planners can quickly pull timely and accurate reports on competitors that include:

• Competitor spending
• Spending changes (month-over-month and year-over-year)
• Product Category advertising investment analysis
• The distribution of ad dollars across media formats
• Creative and messaging

By understanding how much competitors are spending, agencies can efficiently build optimal strategies to increase their clients’ reach in the most suitable spaces and for the right price.

What You Should Expect

Are you an agency looking for more efficient ways to access advertising data across industries and brands?

With MediaRadar, you’ll be able to:

• Create the best media mix for your clients: Understand competitors before deciding to outspend them directly in a particular format or to divert dollars elsewhere.

• Monitor primary and emerging competitors in your clients’ markets: Use product category analysis to get inspiration from campaigns in your space, identify shifts in spend and identify new campaigns in your space.
• Uncover media formats that would be a strong fit for clients: Find areas where competitors aren’t spending heavily and view creative running in that medium.

We know you’re busy. 

That’s why we’re not in the business of spitting out data you can’t use. 

We offer you actionable insights that you can quickly access in client-ready formats. With our fast and easy-to-use interface, you can get the deep insights that your clients need to build and manage effective campaigns.

And the best part is—it’s free. 

Internet Brands is a fully integrated online media and client services organization based in El Segundo, California. Their focus is primarily on Automotive, Health, Legal, and Home/Travel. Internet Brands was originally launched in 1998 as CarsDirect.com from renowned startup incubator, Idealab. The company invented a consumer-advocacy approach to car sales, gaining worldwide recognition within only a few years of inception. In 2005, the company changed its name to Internet Brands, and has since continued to grow. Alongside CarsDirect.com, their brands include Autodata Solutions, Martindale-Hubbell, WeddingBee, iMatrix, WebMD Health Corp, and many more. Internet Brands’ websites serve more than 100 million visitors every month.

Challenge

The Internet Brands sales team was having a hard time finding up-to-date information regarding tech platforms, and up-to-date contact information for the programmatic side of advertising.

Many brands advertise across multiple mediums, and thus work with different agencies for different media types. Determining who to contact can be very difficult for media companies. Internet Brands had trouble finding the right contacts to suit their offering, and had trouble determining the size and budget of prospect companies. With a small marketing/sales support team, their sales reps found themselves doing most of the research, taking up tons of time, leaving them little time to actually sell.

Solution

Snookie Stoddard, Director of Sales and Marketing, found that MediaRadar was the first to offer the correct set of tools to do the research, create pitches, and understand brand advertising strategies the way Internet Brands’ sales team had always desired. Internet Brands has always sought the best information for their sales team, and after using several competitor’s products, Stoddard said that MediaRadar is, “far above the best tool,” that Internet Brands’ sales team has ever used.

MediaRadar made Internet Brands’ initial conversations with prospects much easier. They found that all of the information they were getting from MediaRadar was up-to-date, and kept pace with current industry trends. Data across digital and print allowed them to know what brands were adjusting their strategies, and what brands were staying put.

Acast is a data-driven company pioneering the next generation of digital audio and voice technology. Its goal is not only to connect creators, listeners, and brands on a one-stop shop platform, powering audio all over the world, but also to build and change perceptions with key agency stakeholders and brands alike, both educating them about who Acast is and what sets the company apart in the nascent podcast landscape.

Challenge

Nick Southwell-Keely, Director of Brand Partnerships at Acast, noted that, as a start-up and one with a longer history in other markets and other regions throughout the world, Acast’s brand awareness and brand equity are limitations in the early stages of the evolution of his company.

Solution

MediaRadar is the primary sales leads and contacts tool that Acast uses to analyze what market spend and activity and messaging has been undertaken as well as to ensure that it’s in communication with the appropriate contacts. With so much churn in agency land in particular, MediaRadar is a handy tool. It ensures that Acast focuses on key stakeholders and arms itself with requisite market landscape knowledge of its client’s goals and objectives, as well as directional activity.

One of the chief reasons Acast uses MediaRadar is because of the contacts feature. MediaRadar has proven to be useful in identifying contacts at agencies where Acast has gaps. MediaRadar helped improve the accuracy of these contacts, ensuring that they were as current as possible. The “easy to use and clean user-experience” is another reason why Acast would recommend MediaRadar to others.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) is a federation of motor clubs throughout North America. It is a non-profit member service organization comprised of 42 individual, regional clubs. AAA currently has over 58 million members in the United States and Canada.

AAA Northeast is a regional portion of the company, serving territories in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York state, and New Jersey. AAA Northeast serves a print and digital publication entitled “Your AAA” to it’s network members, featuring automotive news, travel ideas, and much more.

Challenge

John LaMarca, Healthcare Advertising Sales Director at AAA Northeast, saw that his team was spending an enormous amount of time researching ad sales opportunities, but were not breaking as much new business as they would have liked.

Furthermore, due to some cases of advertiser exclusivity, it was becoming difficult for LaMarca and AAA to find advertisers in new markets and in new brand categories to advertise within AAA Northeast’s publication. LaMarca was in search for a way to more efficiently find new business and expand AAA’s ad sales into new markets.

Solution

LaMarca saw MediaRadar as a great way for AAA Northeast to find and pursue new business across a number of different categories – notably, the healthcare industry. AAA Northeast was able to add a great deal of new healthcare advertisers, using MediaRadar for their research.

With MediaRadar’s prospecting reports and recommendations, contact information, and digital and native insights, AAA Northeast is now able to see where and how much advertisers are spending, as well as which prospects in their desired markets are ready to buy ad space across digital and print.

LaMarca says that MediaRadar, “is the #1 tool in the media and advertising space. I use MediaRadar on a daily basis, and it has helped me immensely in my mission to reap new business for AAA Northeast.”

ZOOM Active Lifestyle Marketing is an international media and marketing company reaching over 29 million active lifestyle consumers across 4,450 + health clubs in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The network engages high-value influencers through Nielsen-measured TV, digital, mobile, & custom promotions. ZOOM is where digital, out-of-home, mobile, & TV connect to the Active Lifestyle. Some of Zoom’s partner health clubs include LA Fitness, New York Sports Clubs, Gold’s Gym and Planet Fitness.

CHALLENGE

Zoom Media needed an integrated solution to help them prospect for new business by region or territory and gain insight into ad spending by platform. They found their current solutions with MRI and Nielsen lacked total landscape data, audience measurement, and a thorough perspective. Zoom wanted to have more focused, intelligent conversations with clients without spending additional time on man power to research.

They lacked a software that easily managed prospect information and identified specific pitching opportunities such as time of year to pitch, type of platforms placed on, direct vs. programmatic, recent creative, and integrated ad formats across digital properties.

SOLUTION

Zoom media was looking for an all-in-one solution with an easy-to-use dashboard. From prospecting by territory to preparing digital mock-ups using real-time data, Zoom was able to have well-informed, smart conversations with clients. Using Account Review and Perfect Pitch, Zoom quickly pulled campaign data, creative messaging, key channels prospects placed with and print vs. online spend ratio. These precise insights enabled Zoom sales reps to demonstrate prospect knowledge and close more sales.

Ease of use was the main selling point. MediaRadar empowered the sales and research teams to quickly pull complex reports with vast prospecting information, easily organized into advertising categories by ad activity, new product lines, optimizations, ad formats running and peak spending months.

MediaRadar became an invaluable prospecting tool for sales and also an effective intelligence tool to create captivating pitches.

Elite Traveler is a luxury magazine targeting ultra-high-net-worth consumers who enjoy the global jet-setting lifestyle. It curates the latest offerings in international travel destinations, apparel, vehicles, jewelry, watches, and dining. Each month, the magazine’s website receives over 500,000 visitors.

CHALLENGE

“In a media landscape that changes constantly, marketers have more and more choices when it comes to deciding how to spend their ad dollars. Their total budgets are not increasing, even though their choices have multiplied,” explains Norman Miller, the Publisher of Elite Traveler. Elite Traveler needed an integrated set of tools to help them figure out how to best target advertisers in this new day and age. They wanted to be knowledgeable about their prospective clients and engage in intelligent, focused conversations when it came time to make the pitch. Yet they knew they didn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate the extra hours of preparation needed to research their competitors, dive into client histories, or review tearsheets.

SOLUTION

Enter MediaRadar. Now that the Elite Traveler sales team has adopted MediaRadar’s ad sales intelligence, they can access comprehensive client reports instantly. Before making a sales call, their reps can pull the Big Picture View for a prospective client and become aware of that brand’s advertising: Where are they placing ads? Do they buy high CPM units? Their questions could finally be answered. MediaRadar allows each sales rep to examine their prospect’s history and create a savvy pitch. “MediaRadar enables my team to know everything about a client or prospect’s positioning, strategy, and timing,” says Miller. “ While I don’t want to mention specific names, we recently won new jewelry/watch, travel, and fashion business after doing our homework with MediaRadar.”

AgWeb is the digital branch of Farm Journal Media, which seeks to engage farmers with editors they trust and the content they crave. The website covers everything from machinery to weather. It’s a one-stop-shop for farmers and others in the agricultural industry to keep track of commodity prices and stay ahead of the latest developments.

CHALLENGE

As a B2B website focusing on agriculture, AgWeb is challenged to drive ad sales revenues through its known traffic sources. Easier said than done. AgWeb’s sales team lost precious time trying to understand their prospects’ buying behavior, digging through piles of data, and looking up competitors. As James Arnold, VP of Sales & Operations at AgWeb.com, explains, “Before MediaRadar, we were attempting to do much of the counting by hand. We missed huge numbers of campaigns, and this process took a great deal of resources and time to complete.”.

SOLUTION

Now MediaRadar is AgWeb’s go-to sales tool. “MediaRadar is helping us surface campaigns in our niche industry,” Arnold says. “it’s the best way to track competitive sites we’ve found.” AgWeb uses MediaRadar’s site comparison stats to understand the direct-sold inventory. “We can easily see who is buying display ads in our space,” Arnold explains.

The sales team at AgWeb is also using MediaRadar to better service their clients and prepare the best pitch possible for prospects and upsells. By using MediaRadar’s Recommendations and Perfect Pitch Tools, they are determining who they should prospect first and what they should say to land the business. “We use MediaRadar’s powerful sales tool to look up our current client base and see where they are advertising, it also helps us find new customers and new pockets of money in the market. We are so happy the old days of labor-intensive research are over!”