Unlocking the Power of Media Data: A Game Changer for 2024

Where models and rate cards fail, real media data dominates. Now more than ever, digital and linear marketers need a clear and critical look into the media buying and selling space to ensure prompt and informed investment decisions in 2024.

How did your 2023 Twitter plan work out? No one missed the social media giant Twitter’s recent rebrand into X. After finalizing the acquisition, the platform’s advertising revenue is estimated to be down 54 percent from the previous year. The aftermath shook up budgets for the rest of the year. Lack of visibility into these changes plagues media buyers and sellers, and they risk quickly falling behind competitors to lost opportunities.

Gaining Visibility with Guideline Data

Guideline offers the only true view of cross-platform media intelligence, capturing all digital and traditional media (TV, radio, out-of-home advertising, and print). The database is a collection of real-life ad spend and pricing information from every major holding company and several large independents. As a result, subscribers receive all-inclusive digital and traditional advertising intelligence that spans all corners of the media landscape, allowing them to visualize market shifts, identify where spend is going, and reveal optimal CPM rates.

Simply put, access to detailed, all-inclusive ad spend and pricing intelligence is the ticket to identifying, understanding, and effectively pursuing your audience. The advanced tools Guideline offers create a comprehensive view of media data, adding unrivaled accuracy to your market predictions, estimates, and investments.

Addressing Pervasive Issues in Advertising Spend

With media trends in constant flux, Guideline is on a mission to help buy- and sell-side organizations go above and beyond in their market by offering the clearest picture of the media buying landscape to date. Decisions makers managing million and billion dollar budgets should not have to operate without it. This unmatched transparency boasts countless benefits, built to solve prevalent challenges in advertising.

1. Resource Constraints

One pervasive issue our clients face is limited resources, particularly budget constraints and lack of personnel. Companies continue to cut analytics and data science teams, but meaningful media intelligence is crucial to good performance when resources are insufficient.

A lack of talent is one of today’s most significant barriers to sufficient data management, as reported by a recent Capital One survey. According to Forbes, the survey revealed that “decision-makers do not have enough staff, in-house expertise, or collaboration between teams and tools to achieve their outcomes.” Guideline offers clean, reliable data that’s readily available in a user-friendly dashboard to help mitigate this challenge.

2. Data Processing

It's important to differentiate between raw data and actionable data with built-in intelligence. Unlike other providers, Guideline provides spend and pricing data that's ready to be put to use, rather than metrics that require extensive processing. Although business leaders certainly face challenges obtaining useful data, managing the data they have has proven a much larger hurdle.

The tedious part of accessing media intelligence is the task of aggregating, normalizing, and organizing the data to make it usable in the context of your business. Guideline does this laborious work for you, leveraging both technology and expert labor to cleanse, structure, and anonymize the vast data sets it receives from agency contributors.

3. Fast-Moving Trends

Trends in content consumption and media advertising are moving faster than ever and are arguably some of the fastest-moving in any industry. As a result, both the buy and sell sides of the media ecosystem require an on-the-pulse view. Unfortunately, assessing media spend and pricing dynamics can feel like a race against time. As soon as you get a grasp on the latest insights, volatility strikes, turning the landscape upside down.

Guideline subscribers gain access to data two weeks after a month's end, every month, without fail. With such superior timeliness, you can stay on top of trends and, ideally, anticipate them — before your competitors.

Unlock the power of precision data and confidently navigate the media landscape. Request a demo of Guideline’s data solutions. →

Advantages of Leveraging Premium Data

Reliable access to such inclusive data has quickly evolved from a strategic amenity to a standard necessity in nearly every role, no matter which side of the media equation you are on. Within the last 20 years, consider how often our preferred forms of communication are “upended by new technological developments and changing societal preferences.”

Premium advertising intelligence is the key to navigating those fluctuations, allowing for:

Improved Operational Efficiency

The advertising intelligence provided by Guideline doesn’t just inform your team; these insights work in tandem to close more RFPs, accelerate approvals, and eliminate wasted spend. Plus, with access to critical insights, agencies can better serve their clients and win new business.

More Accurate Targets and Forecasts

When forecasting for next quarter or even next year, the metrics you’re basing those predictions on should be as dependable and comprehensive as possible. The only way to ensure that is by receiving your data from a trusted provider, and validating it against your metrics.

Competitive Benchmarking Opportunities

In-depth, timely insights help media buyers and sellers better understand their market position by allowing them to clearly see how they stack up to others in their space (typically before the competitors do). In other words, they can leverage Guideline Data to unlock a new level of visibility into the industry as a whole. Media agencies and brands, for example, can access competitive intel to strengthen ad sales, optimize pricing yield, and better compete in their category.

Identifying & Addressing Data Gaps

By now, we know that this high-quality data can help media entities, consulting firms, and investors combat the obstacles discussed. But how can individual organizations select data that is genuinely beneficial to their team? In other words, how do you know what data to focus on when planning or transacting in the market?

Ask yourself the following questions to address crucial information gaps:

• Does your data provide insights on how to maximize advertising yield?
• How does it help you assess your total attainable revenue as a media seller?
• Is your data granular enough to drill down into details on what’s driving trends across verticals/product categories?
• Do you have a dynamic or static view of media type performance when making media mix investment decisions for your clients?
• What kind of competitive intelligence can you glean from it to grow your share of market?

How Guideline Can Help

There's no one-size-fits-all approach to collecting media data, which is why you need incomparable levels of granularity to create a customized plan that aligns with your business objectives. The single-sourced, cross-platform intelligence from Guideline pools relevant historical data for more informed decision-making, featuring differentiators such as:

• Unparalleled accuracy sourced from buy-side actuals
• Access to intelligence across both spend and pricing spectrums
• Cross-platform products across all media types in traditional and digital media
• Highly granular sell-side data, including publishers, digital ad types, TV programs, and multiple buy types
• 87 buy-side product categories
• Availability with superior timeliness (two weeks after month’s end)
• A growing international outlook

Forge a Better Future with Unmatched Media Intelligence

The future of media advertising urges organizations to lean into the latest technology to make smarter decisions and add value now. As channels diversify and shift in popularity, the digital advertising space will only become more nuanced and more difficult to track. Constant unpredictability makes informative, objectively truthful media intelligence a necessity and offers media entities a crucial opportunity to get ahead.

See for yourself how Guideline Data can create unlimited media trading potential for your business by scheduling a one-on-one demo with one of our specialists today.