Jenny, you’ve been working in the ad agency space for 15 or so years?
That’s right.
And have you ever thought about going, “Client side.” Have you ever thought about working
in a marketing department versus an ad agency?
I think everyone from the agency said at some point in their career things.
I wonder what it would be like to just have one client to focus on?
Well, I got good news for you. Today is your lucky day. Our topic is, “In-house-ing,
you are media buying and planning for nonprofit attractions. You have just been hired as
the marketing director, the CMO, at the attraction of your dream. Congratulations.”
And you’ve been tasked with bringing some of the media buying and planning functions
in-house. So let’s walk this through. What are you doing, day one?
Yeah. So day one, I think you come from the agency world. I think of what would I do onboarding
a new client day one? So if I’m coming in-house on an client side, I’m going to think of
kind of like a very similar setup, right? So day one is really defining my business objectives
and for a nonprofit attraction who’s spending money and advertising, right? I’m not going
to take this job if they’re not spending any money in media and advertising, but for that
type of client, their focus really is, the main focus is going to be visitation, right?
We need people to come into the park and pay money so that we can support all of our
other initiatives. So I’m getting my hands on visitation data and I’m using
that to set a report card for performance for my team. Again, if coming from the agency side,
everything is performance-based. We think all day, obviously the day-to-day is so important
in managing our clients’ expectations and helping them out and supporting them, but at the
end of the day, we know our contract is not being renewed if we can’t meet certain
performance objectives. So if I’m transitioning into this marketing lead or advertising lead
for a nonprofit attraction tasked with bringing in the media in-house, I’ve got to think
through performance. And now it’s even more important because the performance is on me,
right? I can’t blame my agency for no performance. It’s on me if I’m going to take this
sell on house or the team that I’m hiring if I’m going to bring this in-house.
So you’re talking about ticketing systems, like getting visitation data?
Right. So if my working with a… You know, an ACME or some other type of ticketing
software where I can pull that data out, pull that visitation data out and actually see
it. And I think this is… Kind of sounds like so dull. Of course, does everyone have access
to the visitation data? And I think you’d be surprised at how many would say, “Well, we
have it, but we have to stitch it together.” And it goes to a different department. So I only
see it once a month or if I ask for it. And I think from a marketing, we have to be
able to justify that what we’re doing is working. And yeah, we can say, “Look how many
followers we increased and look how many people liked our content and look how many clicks
we drove to the website.” But at the end of the day, how is marketing supporting driving
visitation? I’m tasked with that now taking this role or if I take this type of role.
So yeah, I’m figuring out, “How do I get this automated? How am I seeing this on a daily
weekly cadence, whatever it is? What my goals are for that month, that event?” I mean, that’s
so, so important. And that’s what our agencies ask for us all the time, or our agencies are
asking of these clients all the time. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t. But my
role, if I came into this role as that marketing director, that would be the number one thing
I would test myself with figuring out so that I can drive better performance overall.
And I can hear some of our audience thinking, “Oh my gosh, we’ve worked with attractions
that have two, three, four different ticketing systems, point of sale systems, walk-ups,
are counted differently than online ticket sales. This is not happening or that it’s
a snap of the fingers for some attractions.” Right, some of it may be a simple saying,
“I just need to figure out how to get automated for a port.” And some of it may be a total
overhaul, and so that’s going to be my priority kind of day one.
So step one is ultimately tying together visitation to hate media.
Right, my total marketing efforts even beyond just media. Got it. Okay, step two.
So step two is ownership. And what I mean by ownership is paying my media invoices and
signing my insertion orders. So if you’re working with an agency partner, they’re likely doing
all this for you. That’s fine if we want to keep everything outsourced, but if we’re starting
to like, in-house-ing a team, this is the first piece that I would bring over.
And really that’s to get our hands around knowing and understanding where everything’s
going. I mean, I’m already probably doing some type of reconciliation with my agency partner
or, you know, with, you know, to be spending what we said we were going to spend in TV,
in radio, in digital. So I’m just taking it more of that internally, but more importantly,
I’m actually paying the invoice to the media vendor themselves.
Oh, I can hear the accounting teams already going, oh my gosh.
Right, right. It’s a lot of invoices to process. I mean, obviously that less money is, really,
if you spend less money, that should be something that you’re absolutely doing because you
don’t have as many invoices to process. So ideally, you, you know, you can’t take that on,
you know, you’re spending $5 million. Maybe you have a ton of invoices to process. Like is
your accounting team set up for that? Or is that something that you need to look at,
be supporting? But I think this is something that most, most attractions couldn’t make possible
internally. Yeah, I’m thinking there’s so much attractions out there that, hey, I’ve been
working with WXYZ, the ABC local TV affiliate here since, for 20 years. And we’ve got a great
relationship and they just send me the invoices directly, but you’re talking about everything.
Right, right. So that’s our billboards, our TV and radio, our digital platform. So, you know,
Google ads account, our Facebook and Instagram accounts, TikTok, right? Chases are we probably
already have a business manager account with each of these that we’re running, like our
organic content through. So we want our paid content going through that as well. And we want
to switch that kind of ownership of that bill pay from the agency to us as the advertiser.
Okay. So how and why? Let’s just go with Google ads. Like how would you do that? How would
you take that away from your agency? Well, the first step is to tell your agency why you’re
doing and why? Because they’re going to be probably a little hesitant when, when they hear
someone say, like, hey, we want it, when they, when they hear a client say, we want to
own this, we want to transition this. Our first thought is they’re going to fire. And, you
know, at the end of the day, we’re not taking this step or I’m not recommending that you take
this step to fire agency. I’m recommending you take this step to just have greater transparency
and know, you know, more about kind of behind the scenes, what’s going on. And so you need
to let your, your agency partners know this. You know, the push back a lot of times can
come from the fact that they’re thinking, well, we set all the strategy up and we didn’t
charge you for the strategy, right? We’re just charging you an ongoing management fee, but
now we’re just giving you the entire hierarchy and setup. Right. Like there’s a lot of effort,
strategic thinking, you know, intellectual property, if you will, that goes up and goes
into setting up some more sophisticated paid search campaigns. And you’re just asking
the agency to hand it all over? Yeah. And I think 50, 50, on how nice
they’re going to play. I think this is where you need to have a good relationship with your
agency to reinforce. I’m not taking it away. We’re moving all of our, you know, invoice payment
internally. You know, one of those reasons could be, like, you just want to ensure like every
invoice is paid on time, right? Your agency is not always paying all your invoices on time
on your behalf. So it’s just, we want to reduce one of the steps in, you know, invoice payments.
Like this is not a comment. Like a lot of client agency relationships are set up this way.
I think it’s when it comes to the, you know, paying those platforms directly, those digital
platforms like Google ads and Facebook, where your, your agency partner can just get a little
concerned over what you’re doing. So ensure them, hey, we’re still going to work with you.
We have six minutes left on our contract. There’s no change. Any of that. You guys are great
strategic partners. We want you to manage this, but we want to own payment for everything
we no longer want you to be our bank. That’s not fair to you. We think we can process
these invoices faster, you know, some of your agencies might be doing reconciliation on a quarterly
basis. Maybe you need to do it faster. Like there’s some ways that you can talk to them about
speeding up this reconciliation by you taking an in-house. And I think another challenge
for the attractions that don’t already manage their own paid search, you know, Google ads,
their own paid social, the meta, Facebook, to cock platforms.
They have to like pay by credit card kind of $500 at a time. It takes a while to establish credit
with these platforms. Yeah, each one is different. This can be a little bit of a nightmare if you’re
on a credit card payment versus an invoice payment. Even with your traditional media, I mean, there’s
going to be some time to establish credit with that vendor. So this process could take a while.
This could take several months in fact. So, you know, it might be, hey, you’re paying
TV directly and everything else is transitioning over over the next few months.
You know, but get started on it so that kind of as you go in your contract negotiations,
your renewals, you’ll have everything set. And this could also be a good time to say like,
that’s the anticipated date to switch over, you know, Google ads account or Facebook accounts because
now you’re going to tell the agency like, hey, we’re going to renew you for 12 more months,
but we have to have access to all these platforms. You’re new and I tell you why your agency at that
point is going to be like, okay. So why? It sounds like a big headache, more invoices, clunky credit card
system. Why are you doing why are you taking this effort on? Well, maybe you can talk just on the
traditional side and then the digital side. We’ll start with this episode is about enhancing
the media. So if I can’t say my media voice is I can’t bring media in house. So I think that’s
kind of the the real reason behind why we’re doing this. But as a few other things, so one,
you know, just building those closer relationships with our reps. So getting for thinking about
traditional, you know, broadcasts or, you know, our local media reps, they probably they might have
a relationship with you already. But at the end of the day, whoever’s signing that I own,
paying them in voice, like that’s who they’re, you know, they want to be the closest to. So it’ll
just, you know, bring that relationship even, you know, tired or with you in that sales rep.
But it’s also, you know, there’s a lot of things that they might put in front of your agency
partner that you never see. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, you might be thinking like,
well, you know, I trust my agency partner to vet all of these opportunities and bring me only
the really good ideas. But again, if we’re talking about bringing in house, like you probably want
to see some of these ideas that are out there, or maybe your agency says no to it because there’s no
budget, but you actually know that you have budget left over from another department that you could
bring over to support this idea. So you will start getting, you know, more opportunities put in front
of you when you’re actually the one paying those, those invoices. I like that. And then on the digital
side, why should, why would you want to own your own platforms? You want to own the data. So if
you were to make a change with an agency, you know, maybe you don’t have a great relationship of that
agency and you’re looking for a new one, like what happens when you change agency? You start over
in a lot of cases. Ooh, and that’s, that’s bad. We know, you know, these platforms rely on machine
learning. It takes time for these platforms to kind of auto optimize on the by themselves.
If you have to start from scratch, you’re losing all that historical data, all that machine learning.
Yeah. And, you know, I think with a new team coming in, they’re going to say, well, we’re going to have
our own strategy and we’re going to change it up anyways. And that’s fine. But you’re still going to
lose the data on what worked, what didn’t. Like you’re starting from, you know, zero versus at least
being able to say, hey, we tech, like great idea new team. But we actually already tested all those
things and you can see all that data in the platform itself. So you want to own it. You don’t want
to lose it and you don’t want to have to fire agency for it, you know, all the time. No, I had this
not to say that all agencies do this, but there are some bad actors out there where we talk about
maybe bearing in extra fees or extra commissions by having these digital platforms live in a black
box. They live at the agency. You just get the bill as the attraction for X amount of dollars per
month. There’s that opportunity for these agencies to maybe not be as transparent as they should be
in terms of fees and extra costs. Yeah. And listen, it’s hard work. They should all get paid for it.
The problem is some of them don’t know how to tell you that they want to charge for it or they’re
scared to have that conversation with you. Or maybe you’ve told them, no, I’m not paying for that.
So they figured out a way to get paid for it. But I think, you know, this is a great example of where
you’re going to just develop them, but you’re going to take all of those questions out of,
you know, out of the mix by paying all these invoices, right? Because you’re going to have full trust
for the agency because all you do is pay your agency the actual fees to manage all of this media.
You don’t, you know, there’s no opportunity for them to bury any costs in there so you can bill
better trust with that partnership. I like it. All right. So step one, getting the visitation data
in a place that you can see it. Step two, you’re owning all of the media invoices, you’re paying your
own bills. And basically, if you have an agency, the only thing that you’re paying them is for their fees.
Right. Yeah. And what I notice here is any attraction can do this, whether you’re spending $100,000
a year, $5 million a year, whatever your media budget is, these are two steps that any agent or any
attraction can go do. Yeah. And another thing with that too is, so if I’m paying my agency fees,
right, versus like I’m paying them a commission, they bill me and then they, you know, put 85%
towards the media and 15, which is 15% of standard commission, 15 towards their fees, right?
What happens when you pay them that way is not they incorporate all that into their reporting.
And so your reporting has this commission on it. Now that agency has more work to add that
commission on top of the reports that they’re doing, if they’re hiding commission, they have
even more work to do to do all this. And when I’m paying that agency base of a fee,
all of a sudden, all that goes away in my reporting is simpler and faster and easier.
And what true, and more true, right? Because it’s the actual money that I’m spending on on media
versus like, oh, wow, we actually, you know, the cost increase or decrease or the performance
increase or decrease because maybe we had an adjustment in our fee or commission structure or
something. So all that can be taken out of it as well. And I’m telling you come someone who came
from the agency side where we had a blend of these two things, right? Sound more fee-based and
complete in that media and reporting on that media and some more commission-based,
fully transparent commission, but the commission was then included in reporting.
The nightmare of checking everything to ensure that not only was the data right coming on the
platform, but the commission was right going into the report. There’s not an agency that will tell
you that is just easy PC. I mean, it is, it’s just an extra step. And so you’re actually removing
just this headache from your agency, like the partnership with your agency and you’re speeding
things up, you’re like, it’s happier people working on your account because there’s
less things to worry about when it comes to the reporting. Got it. So let’s recap the benefits here.
Number one, I have the flexibility to bring in the best team, whether that’s an agency and I know
we’re going to get to this, maybe consultants or freelancers, like I’m going to own the car,
whether that’s the Google ads account, whether that’s the relationship with the local broadcast
outfits, I’m going to own the car and I’m going to get the best driver to come in and drive that car
on my behalf, whether that’s in-house, whether that’s outside.
100 percent. Number two, I’m going to have full transparency to where my dollars are going,
and you kind of talked about adding a commission on from agencies and such, but I’m going to eliminate
the idea that agencies can kind of bury fees, you know, be able to sleep a little bit better at night
knowing that nothing shady is going on. And then number three, I’ve got that report card
for performance and this is what we’re talking about bringing in that visitation,
marrying better that paid media budget to my visitation and understanding my performance.
Yep, exactly.
You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how non-profit
attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing.
Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. Attend Media is a media planning
and buying agency specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information,
please visit Attend.Media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny.
Alright, so step number three, what are we doing next?
So now that we’ve got kind of a lot of the baseline in place for building this team in-house,
we’ve got to hire someone, right? If we’re going to build an in-house, we need to hire people to
build an in-house. So when you think about who I would hire and if first or what I would do first,
it would really be kind of some type of media coordinator, marketing coordinator, an agency
we’re calling the coordinator, they’re handling a lot of the kind of day-to-day management of the buys.
And I think this is important because now that we’ve brought these invoices in-house,
we need someone who can help with reconciliation, did we spend, did we move money around, maybe
they’re managing our plan some, they’re potentially managing things like, you know, make goods,
if those are coming through from like buys that we’ve got put in place, traffic, that’s a big one,
right? If we’re changing out creative, we’re not relying on our agency to have to change
in every single channel internally, maybe we can do that. We might still rely on our agency.
In some channels like Digital because of tracking that needs to be put into place, but I want to swap my
spot out for the three TV stations that I’m running, like my coordinator can do this for me now instead
of my agency. Okay, so your first hire internally to be primarily focused on media is going to be
what you’re calling a media coordinator. I got to pay salary for this. It doesn’t sound like
this is going to save my department money, but it sounds like it’s going to save me time and headache.
Yeah, so you could be kind of just moving that over from like an hourly fee to a salary internally.
And it could be that you have someone internally who can take on this work already. It really
kind of goes back to the budget and how much you’re managing and processing, right? But it’s not always,
I think really kind of with some of those initial hires, you’re not necessarily saving money,
you’re moving money from one place to another, but you’re saving yourself headache,
with this internal hire, you’re able to prioritize their day, whereas an agency, you can’t really
prioritize their day. So you’re kind of, you know, stuck to their turnaround times. I think,
a lot of agencies can be great about working faster than those turnaround times, but at the end of
the day, like it’s going to be hard, maybe for me to say, no, I need it now right now today, drop
everything. Some agencies might be able to drop everything and do it, but some might say, okay,
great. That’s a rush fee to do that, right? So maybe you can work on dying, right?
Right. And it’s only it’s a bad thing that they do that they’ve got to get paid for that work too,
but I think if this is more as a, this, this role becomes more of a headache saver than a cost
saver, you know, in most cases. And in your perfect world, you’re the marketing director.
You’ve got the FTE in place. That person is doing great. Are you giving them some more buying?
Like, are they a media buyer? What are they doing in terms of actually executing media plans?
Well, depending, you know, in this scenario, me, myself, I come from 15 years of media agency experience,
so I can provide some media direction. If I don’t have any of that, you know, I have more to kind of
just marketing as a whole, but maybe not media buying experience, then anything that becomes a
little bit harder because who’s this junior person going to learn from? If I can’t give them the
direction and I can’t train them, how are they going to learn? But let’s say in this scenario,
I have the media experience, I have background, you know, maybe maybe you came from a media agency or
at some, some point in your career where it’s in there. So maybe there are things that this coordinator
can start to take on, like maybe managing some of your out of home buys, right? So you guys are
in the local market and maybe you can provide as the director direction to that buyer or that
coordinator. You know, maybe it’s some of the prints, you know, you maybe do some local print buys,
you know, to help support the PR initiatives. So maybe those types of things they can take on
versus your agency having to do. And then I think there’s even some opportunity probably in some of
your digital channels, maybe not managing any search campaigns, but we think of social,
especially if this this role is kind of already doing some of your organic posting in content,
you know, maybe they’re able to do something boosted posts, or even, you know, if, you know, run a few
app, you know, pay ads through the platforms, you know, for like a small campaign or small event,
that’s separate from maybe the bigger initiatives that your agency partners might handle for you.
Okay. So let’s say you’re at attraction with a sizable budget. Are you hiring a, you know,
dedicated full-time experience media buyer? I think what we forget is that a sizable budget doesn’t
always mean a sizable budget in every single channel. And we want to hire, we want experts within
these channels. I mean, media has become so fragmented to find someone who’s going to be your expert TV
buyer and also knows how to manage Facebook campaigns and also is up to speed on Tate. I can’t,
like it’s just not going to happen. I think they call that a unicorn. I’ve, I’ve never seen this
unicorn. You’re coming from, and I’m coming from a space where like there’s a lot of people who
knew how to do a lot of things, but that’s, that’s one I’ve yet to see. So I think, you know,
what each of these are created is being able to put together a team of four to five individuals
who are experts with their platforms to put the best buys and the best campaign management together.
You know, for, for your, you know, initiatives. And I think what happens a lot of times when we
look at how an in-house team is built is a lot of generalists are hired. And I don’t think, you know,
a generalist is always a bad idea, but if you have a team of four, you know, well, let’s say three
generalists versus five specialists, like I’d argue your five specialists are going to be better,
but they’re going to be so much more expensive. So the way I would look at it is, you know,
is there way maybe, you know, for some of those more kind of day to day management roles like
the coordinator that I have us FTE, but my specialists are now looking at maybe hiring a contractor
or a freelancer, because I don’t, maybe I don’t need a TV buyer year round, right? Maybe I need a
TV buyer for two big campaigns. They put the strategy and the buy together. But now my coordinator
that I’ve hired is actually managing the buy, they’re reconciling the invoices, they’re, you know,
they’re proving or maybe I’m approving because of my background make goods or maybe I’m buying just
a bucket of hours from that freelancer or contractor to be able to handle, you know, some of that
throughout the year or throughout that campaign. So I think there’s, you know, if I’m, if I’m really
in a hire for five FTEs, why would I not be willing to manage, you know, four or five freelancers or
contractors? And I think for some of our audience this might sound a little different or odd or
unconventional, but if we think about the recruitment challenges of hiring another FTE, right?
You know, the retention challenges we’ve got somebody in house, they know our attraction, they believe
our mission, they share our values, they live in our market, they come into work every day,
and then 18 months later, they leave for a better pay or for whatever reason. Now we got to start
all over, right? So I like what you said, if I’m willing to hire three, four, five FTEs to be in my
marketing department, we’ll just shift that mentality to hiring three, four, five specialists,
contractors, freelancers. Right. And remember, you know, your budgets aren’t just unlimited, right? So
you probably don’t have the budget to go in and hire these really expensive experts in these channels.
And I think that’s where it’s like you’re, you know, you don’t need them full time. So you can hire
the expert on a part-time basis, not like part-time employee, but for a freelance standpoint.
And they might be with you for five, 10, 15 years because, you know, they’re able to take on other
jobs that keep them learning and growing and making more money versus, you know, a job that might be
capped in an industry where they can’t maybe grow quite as much as they want to grow. So I think there’s,
there’s other challenges that we have as like nonprofit attractions to be able to try this type of talent.
And one of those is also, you know, this idea that we’ve got to hire local when we go to a
freelancer or a contrar, we probably don’t have quite as many kind of geographical restrictions on
where we can hire from. Talk to me about the big picture stuff. I’m talking in strategic planning,
putting together your annual media strategy, your buy, your plan, how you gonna handle that?
So I think this can be, you know, maybe it’s some, what of a hybrid? I think kind of going into it,
let’s just say year one, I’d want a partner to come in, a consultant, a strategist to come in,
who has the research tools that I probably can’t buy internally at the H&C side, right?
So we talk about media research tools, that meaning, to be anything from like an MRI or local Scarborough media,
which are research tools that, you know, based off of your target audience tell you which media channels
they’re spending their time with. That sounds expensive. Very expensive. So for the cost of buying those tools
alone, I could really just pay an agency to use those tools and put my entire media strategy together
versus great, now I just have the tools and I still have to go do the strategy myself. But with that,
I would say make sure you’re hiring an agency or a consultant who has these tools, right? So
there’s not just going off of guts to build a media strategy. But it could be other tools as well too,
right? So maybe it’s some type of visitation data that the agency has access to that you haven’t been
able to buy, you know, place or AI is a big one now that, you know, a lot of attractions are working with.
So maybe that agency has it so you don’t have to go out and buy yourself. Or maybe, you know,
I would be looking at the data that I need that can influence a lot of other decisions versus media
only in-house and then looking at partnering with an agency or consultant who has maybe some of those
really niche research tools that are just for media that can help enhance my strategy or playing
overall. Yeah, I’m thinking if I’m overseeing a million, two million, three million dollars in,
you know, sometimes government funded donation money, ticket revenue, I’m a steward of that budget.
And if I had a three million dollars in my retirement account, I’m going in for my annual financial
checkup to say, Hey, am I going down the right path? Am I too conservative here? Am I too exposed
over here? Are you going to do that for your own personal finances? You have to do that for the
attractions finances for that budget. Right. It’s like the gut check. And maybe you don’t know
what every year, maybe it’s every other year, you know, again, a lot of this has to depend, depends
upon how much experience you actually have in media. Well, you don’t know what you don’t know.
And you keep on saying how fast media is moving. I’m thinking if I’m looking for some outside help,
I want some fresh ideas. Right. And I think it’s one of the biggest complaints that clients can have
of agencies is like, I don’t get new ideas. And at the end of the day, I think what we want to do is
we want us to wear internally, we’re handling the mundane, basing boring. Boring. And then externally,
we’ve got the fresh thinking and new ideas coming from agency partners, consultants, you know, people
who are outside of our world and experts of these channels that are really hard to be experts at,
you know, to bring the fresh thinking to the table. All right. So let’s recap this. Step one.
Get my hands on that visitation data and get it reported daily, weekly. I see it in my share
with my team. So for some attractions, that’s going to take about an hour. For some attractions,
that’s going to take about a year. Yeah. Just depends on where you’re at. Yep. And then step two.
Step two is owning, you know, no longer using agencies as a bank. I’m paying my media
invoices, signing and managing a responsible for all of my insertion orders. And we want to do that
to in order to build the best team to have somebody drive the car to kind of kill that analogy.
But if we were to transition away from an agency, you can’t do that until you own the bills, right?
It has to be step one. Yeah. And then step three, you’re bringing in a media coordinator. If you have
if the budgets allow it, bringing in the day to day stuff, the things that we could turn around faster,
you know, trafficking, you know, us insert shorters, management, reconciliation, all that day to day stuff.
But you’re always looking for some outside help, some outside thinking on that strategic plan.
Correct. The strategic plan and the strategic buying within platforms. And it’s all together,
you’re using your visitation data as your report card. Our is what we’re doing is how we’re spending
our money is our team moving the needle, so to speak, in terms of visitation. Yep, exactly. Jenny,
thanks. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. If you have a
suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show, please visit our website at Marketing
AttractionsPodcast.com.
