It appears that your current budget for media buys is around $250K. If given the opportunity to work together, we’d engage in a collaborative media planning process and recommend the following steps:

1. We’d look at any available historic data to try to determine what has worked and what hasn’t. We’ll want to look at past focus group research, what ads have run, their placement and frequency, what metric was used to evaluate the success of a placement, and who has visited Waco based on those media buys. We would do a deep-dive into any relevant reports, such as the 187-page report of inquiries by city and analyze them according to DMA. 

2. We’d look at any available partner data to help us further clarify who visited Waco, where they came from, how long they stayed, what they visited while here. We’d look at booking windows, hotel need periods, plus competitive spending and creative.

3. We’d also turn to secondary research on travel from resources like Meredith Knows Women 2017 Travel Study and MNI Target Meda 2017 Travel Industry Factbook to help fill in gaps in your existing data.

4. You already have data on how Wacoans perceive Waco, but we don’t know if there’s any data on outsider’s experiences and perceptions of the city, particularly during these last few years of positive press. If we don’t have an up-to-date understanding of this, we would run focus groups or conduct surveys with people who have visited Waco to fully clarify the target audience.

5. Right now, the target audience is defined as primarily women, 24-65 years old, who are attracted to the Magnolia brand. They are fashion forward, family and home oriented, and make travel decisions for the family.

That’s a very broad target audience – young professional women to recently retired grandmothers – and it’s highly unlikely that they consume the same media or spend the same time engaged with any media. It may be better to further refine the target audience to primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences, so that we could make stronger choices with our media buys.

6. Within the newly defined demographics, we would look at what types of travel we’d like to push—say, a girls’ getaway for 25-35 year-old singles or family roadtrips with younger children. Then, we’d consider what types of creative and what mix of placement (print, online, billboard, TV) make the most sense for those specific goals. We’d use print, for instance, as an inspirational tool to prospective visitors. Few people will see a tourism ad in a magazine and then book a trip. Seeing a print ad can, though, plant the seed for a visit. As you know, the lead time for booking travel continues to shrink, and online ads can quickly translate a whim—“let’s get away next weekend”—into an immediate booking, preferably in Waco. We want to have those online ads in the right place, at the right time, targeted to the ideal visitors, and all for the most economical, effective option possible.

Based on our previous CVB experience, we might recommend shifting some of the ad dollars away from print and possibly putting more toward online. We might further refine the online ad buys to take more advantage of sites that would let us geotarget and hyperlocal target the exact demographic or campaign (like girlfriend getaways). These sites have a much lower CPM than the current buys with statesman.com, dallasnews.com, chronicle.com, and mysanantonio.com.

7. Ultimately, we’ll develop a comprehensive media plan that addresses these items:

a. target audience (demographics/psychographics)
b. geography
c. timing/scheduling
d. reach/frequency
e. media usage habits of the target audience (time spent and cross channel attribution)

8. We’ll develop a media strategy with a recommended allocation of media resources based on your budget. We recommend the strategy be flexible and dynamic, with the ability to shift as the target audience’s media usage changes.

9. We’ll establish measurable, actionable, reasonable objectives, and we’ll look for much more relevant data than simply click-through rates. 

10.  Once the media plan is approved, we would handle the media buys through an RFP process to the media partners. We would do an in-depth of analysis of possible print options using a verified circulation audit plus other criteria such as delivery of the target audience, preferred positioning, editorial environment, and rate. Broadcast buys would be evaluated based on audience estimates, CPM (cost-per-thousand, the cost to reach 1,000 in the target audience), and delivery guarantees.

As requested, here are the :30 planning rates for HGTV’s Fixer Upper. The figures on the left are first run prices; the figures on the right are re-run prices.  The price for :60 is double. 

       8p-9p FIRST RUN  |  7p-8p ReAIR
Austin                     $625  -  $420
Corpus Christi        $175  -  $105
Dallas                   $1,500  -   $1,250
Houston              $1,500  -  $1,200
Odessa-Midland      $80  -  $70
Oklahoma City       $675  -  $575
San Antonio          $700  -  $500
Shreveport            $225  -  $165
Tyler                        $65  -  $45