Media Plan Build With Rate Cards Compared Net of Fees

A publisher rate card CPM of AUD 25 lands in your finance report at roughly AUD 31 once DSP fee, data, verification and ad serving are counted, and those four vendors almost never appear on the same document. The plan we build shows both numbers on every line, so the choice between a direct portal buy and a programmatic route is made on delivered cost rather than on rate card. What you receive: A working model, not a deck. One tab of assumptions that every other number references. One tab per channel and publisher carrying gross rate, negotiated rate, fee stack and delivered cost. A flighting tab. And a single page at the front stating what we would buy and, more usefully, what we would cut first if the budget fell thirty percent. You can open it after we have gone, change a rate, and watch the plan re-rank itself. Building it as a model rather than a document is the whole point. How rate cards get compared: Every rate is normalised to delivered cost per thousand in-view impressions, using each publisher's own measured viewability from the last quarter rather than an industry average. On property portals the spread between a search results unit and a listing detail unit is wide enough to reverse the ranking, so the average is not a shortcut, it is a wrong answer. Where a publisher will not provide measured viewability, the line is marked unverified and stays unverified in the final document. Where a rate is quoted in another currency we fix it at the forward rate on the plan date and note it. Flighting: Australian property demand is not flat and neither is the inventory behind it. Listing volumes and portal traffic build through September to November, again from February, and fall away from mid-December. A plan that spends evenly across twelve months is overpaying in January for attention that is not there. For marketplaces we flight against the client's own category volume rather than the calendar, and we ask for two years of it before planning anything. What we will not put in a plan: Reach and frequency numbers from a single vendor's planning tool without a second source. Any publisher who will not put a rate in writing. A line item whose measurement we cannot describe in one sentence. And a plan built backwards to justify a budget already committed, which is the most common version of this brief and the one we decline most often. Who is in the room: We present to the person who signs for the plan, with the assumptions open, and we expect to be argued with. If the plan is going to be relayed second-hand from a channel manager to a finance director, we would rather not build it. The assumptions are where the real argument sits and they do not survive the relay. Not included: We do not buy or traffic what the plan describes. We do not produce creative. We do not build the measurement stack, though the plan states what each line needs in order to be measurable and says plainly where it cannot be. Where a plan is not what you need: If you already have a plan and what you actually need is someone to hold the publishers to it, buy the contract and insertion order work instead. If you have never run this channel and the budget is under roughly three hundred thousand a year, buy two direct deals, run them for a quarter and come back with your own numbers. A plan built with no first-party evidence is a plan built on vendor averages, and we would be charging you to formalise someone else's guesses.