Digital media
Digital advertising includes both online advertising, such as those via websites, and mobile advertisements. Websites can include social media sites like Facebook, large portal sites like Yahoo! or any other digital website. The larger or higher impact the site has, the more it’s going to cost you to reach that audience. Creative units can also drive ad costs — ads that are more interactive (like rich media, or the high impact units shown in lecture) cost more, because in general, they are more effective.
Digital media is bought in one of two ways. Major buys have a fixed cost. Examples include a Buzzfeed sponsored article or a Snapchat lens. Most other digital ad space, however, charges for 1,000 impressions, or cost per thousand, which we know as CPM (cost per mille). While a fixed digital cost will charge the same amount regardless of who sees your ad, advertisements that have CPM costs will also ask you how many impressions want from your post. You will need to know the size of your audience in order to make these calculations.
Keep in mind that an impression does not necessarily mean your audience will pay attention to the ad. It just means the ad will be placed in front of them. The average click-through-rate of Facebook ads, for example, is around 1 percent. This means for every 1,000 times the ad is shown, about 10 people click on it.
Fixed digital media costs
Digital media buys purchased at a fixed cost tend to be costly and specialized to reach a wide internet audience. A unit of digital media is one month or less (Snapchat filters last one day, for example), and has been assigned a flat rate for your convenience.
Twitter
Promoted Trend: $200,000 per trend (< less than a month)
Emoji: $80,000 (must be purchased in an increment of 12 units, 1 unit per month)
Buzzfeed Sponsored Article
$20,000 per month, per article
Snapchat
Filter: $500,000 per filter, per day
Snapchat Discover (top of app): $50,000 per day
Homepage Takeover
$400,000 for one week
A homepage takeover is an advertisement that covers the whole page of a website. Sometimes, this can be a wrap that covers the entire background, or an ad that covers the whole front page. Most homepage takeovers cost a flat rate of $400,000 to $450,000 per week for most major online portals (e.g., Yahoo, MSN) and online news sites (e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Variety).
Search engine marketing (SEM)
SEM is typically bought on a cost-per-click basis. These ads are bought in a rather complicated online auction, where marketers bid for key words. Marketers rarely have an endless supply of money — they usually have a set budget. SEM can be set up so that you don’t spend any more money each month that what you want — there is a spending cap. So, to keep our J345 digital ad buy simple, we assume that you will spend no more than the following amounts on SEM on each one of the major search sites.
You may buy keywords on any of the following websites; you don’t have to buy ads on all of them.
| Monthly Spending Cap per Website on Search, for a Total of 10 Keywords | |
| $50,000 | |
| Bing | $10,000 |
| Yahoo! | $5,000 |
If you purchase SEM, be sure to identify 10 keywords you would want to embed in your site.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is “free,” in that there is not a fixed or prorated expenditure on it. However, it does involve some costs, in that agencies and companies that do SEO well either are investing in part of someone’s salary to manage it, or they are paying an agency. To again keep this simple, please budget a total of $25,000 for your entire media plan year to cover the personnel costs of managing SEO.
CPM-based digital media costs
Most advertisers buy digital media, such as banner ads, based on the number of impressions. As with other digital ad buys, we will consider one CPM-digital ad “unit” as lasting one month. Therefore, if you want a video ad to appear for two months on YouTube, you will need to buy two units. If you want two different video ads to appear for two months on YouTube, you would need to buy four units.
Impressions are the number of people who will see your advertisement. The number of impressions you want will vary depending on how large of an audience you want from that site. The CPM, or cost per thousand, is the amount of money you have to pay for 1,000 people to see your advertisement.
To calculate the overall cost of one digital media advertisement, divide the overall impressions for a month by 1,000. Then, multiply with the CPM of the digital medium. For example, if a tweet has a CPM of $1.50, and you want it to reach two million people, it will cost $3,000 dollars per month.
Most websites require a minimum number of impressions you would like to purchase.
Banner ad on website
Banner ads are one of the easiest ways to promote yourself on a website. Banner ads are calculated by CPM, and there are two types. The first are untargeted banner ads. Untargeted banner ads can be shown in front of anyone. On the other hand, targeted ads can be placed in front of the audience you are interested in, based on demographics that you provide. Keep in mind that if you are using targeted ads, you must explain the audience you are seeking (based on demographic information).
| Cost of one ad per month | |||
| Untargeted | Targeted | Minimum impressions | |
| MSN.com | $7 | $10 | 100,000 |
| New York Times | $7 | $10 | 100,000 |
| ESPN | $6 | $10 | 100,000 |
| Weather.com | $6 | $10 | 100,000 |
| $5 | $10 | 10,000 | |
| Yahoo! | $5 | $10 | 10,000 |
| Pandora | $5 | $7 | 100,000 |
| N/A* | $6 | 10,000 | |
| Local sites | $2 | $3 | 10,000 |
* All Facebook advertisements are targeted
Twitter promoted tweet
One way you can boost your tweets is to have Twitter promote it. This means your tweet will appear in timelines and search results. For the purposes of this class, promoted tweets have a CPM of $1.30, with no minimum.
Streaming TV and audio
Like other forms of advertising, streaming ads are bought based on impressions. There is a wide variety of ad formats available on Hulu and YouTube, which can also drive engagement. Such advertising is one of the more expensive digital media formats out there today. Streaming video advertisements can appear before, during or after a video.
| CPM | Minimum impressions | |
| YouTube in-stream video | $10 | 100,000 |
| YouTube unstoppable video | $20 | 10,000 |
| Hulu | $30 | 10,000 |
| Facebook video (30 seconds) | $8 | 10,000 |
| Pandora audio | $10 | 10,000 |
| Pandora video | $20 | 10,000 |
| Spotify audio | $10 | 1,250,000 |
| Spotify audio | $10 | 1,250,000 |
| Local site | $5 | 10,000 |
Social Media (CPM)
Mobile advertisements are ads specifically placed when people use an app or website online. There are four main types of mobile ads:
- Native ads are sponsored content pieces embedded directly into a feed on a mobile app. Apps with feeds, such as social media sites, are most likely to have native ads.
- Banner ads appear at the bottom or top of an app or website. These are the cheapest ads, but have much less success than other ads.
- Interstitial ads cover the entire mobile screen and must be “x’ed” out. These are still images.
- Video ads are no more than 30 seconds, and must often be viewed to the end before a smartphone user “closes” the ad. These are generally the most expensive ads.
Banner, interstitial and video ads can be placed in a variety of apps and social media accounts.
| CPM | |
| Facebook native ad | $7 |
| Facebook banner ad | $3 |
| Instagram ad (all are native) | $4 |
| TikTok native, sponsored, or challenge ad ($500 min.) | $10 |
| Typical banner on app | $1 |
| Typical interstitials on app | $4 |
| Typical video ad on app | $8 |
Mobile native advertisements can only be purchased for social media available on smartphones.
Owned social media
This is the “free” kind of social media — you’ll want to consider including branded content on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat as part of your social & pubic relations strategies.
Podcasts
Depending on the size of the audience for the podcast you choose, you’ll need to purchase CPM in certain increments. For a top-tier podcast (+100,000 listeners), you’ll need to buy in units of 25,000, for a mid-tier podcast (10,000-99,999 listeners), you’ll need to buy in units of 5,000, and for low-tier podcasts (below 9,999 listeners), you’ll buy in units of 1,000. (So, if you’re buying an audience of 50,000 on a top-tier podcast for a 30-second post-roll, you’d pay 25,000 units x 2 = 50,000/1,000 = 50 x $10 = $500 for one ad on one episode. If you plan to employ this tactic for multiple episodes – say, three months on a podcast series that releases 1 episode per week – do the math to learn how much a longer-term engagement will cost)
| CPM | |
| 15-second pre-roll (prerecorded, airs at beginning of show) | $18 |
| 30-second post-roll (prerecorded, airs at end of show) | $10 |
| 60-second midroll (host talks about product in middle of show) | $25 |