Building a Direct Rate Card Your Sales Team Can Defend

Direct pricing is only defensible when it starts from what the same inventory already clears programmatically. We price direct at roughly three to five times trailing 90-day clearing for that slot, geography and device, which on Brazilian run-of-site display usually means a card rate of R$15 to R$25 against R$2 to R$6 clearing. The multiple is a negotiating range, not an assertion about your audience, and nothing about run-of-site display supports the R$60 card rate somebody will eventually suggest you print. What the card is built from: Your ad server, not a media kit. Ninety days of clearing by placement, geography, device and viewability band. Ad Manager forecasting for every product, so a seller can answer an availability question without guessing and you stop overselling January. And a session-level audience read from GA4 with the counting method written on the page. If the card claims two million monthly users, the sheet says which tool counted them and over what window. Buyers at the agencies worth selling to check. Products, not just prices: A list of five banner sizes is not a sales tool. We design the product set against what your editorial team can actually produce: fixed-position sponsorship priced on share of voice rather than CPM, category exclusivity as a priced add-on, newsletter placements priced on delivered opens, sponsored series with the editorial firewall stated in the terms, and a seasonal calendar built for your market. Enrollment windows in January and July for education inventory, the Black Friday and Copa run-ups for food and drink, and separate commercial terms for crypto advertisers, whose category risk and payment behaviour do not belong on the same page as a supermarket chain. The commercial mechanics your seller will need: Brazilian agency buying still runs on the CENP normas-padrão, so the 20 percent agency commission belongs inside the card before you quote and not as a deduction discovered afterwards. Payment terms, nota fiscal handling and who carries credit risk on a 60-day insertion order are written down. So is the discount ladder, with the threshold at which a discount stops being the seller's call and becomes yours, and the make-good policy for underdelivery, which is the clause that decides whether an agency comes back next quarter. Protecting the card from your own programmatic stack: Unified pricing rules in Ad Manager set so open market demand cannot clear beneath the direct rate on the same slot, and priority tiers ordered so a direct campaign is not losing to a house line item nobody remembers creating. A card that sales cannot hold, because the open market undercuts it in the same session, is worse than no card. We will not: Sell for you. This is pricing and product work, not a sales house, and the first thing a real sales house would tell you is that outsourced direct sales on a single title rarely covers its own cost. Quote your audience from a panel estimate you cannot reproduce in your own analytics. Or write a sponsorship product your newsroom has no capacity to deliver, which is the most common way a new rate card damages a client relationship in its first quarter. Not included: The programmatic stack itself, refresh policy, adblock work. Contract templates are for your lawyer. We write the commercial terms; we do not write the legal ones. Who should not buy this: Publishers with nobody whose job is selling. The card is an instrument, not a salesperson. Publishers already earning more than half their revenue direct, who need a sales operations review rather than a price list. And anyone hoping a card will produce a number the market has declined to pay them programmatically. It will produce a defensible number, which is a different and more useful thing.