Buymedia Selected as an IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Accelerator Company

The team at Buymedia are delighted to be selected as an IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Accelerator Agency.

Why is this important?

Professional competence -To become a member of the IPA Accelerator, Advertising companies must demonstrate high levels of professional competence in the eyes of their peers, clients and suppliers.

Committed to learning and development – IPA Accelerator companies keep their skills and knowledge up to date by accessing a wide range of bespoke courses and industry qualifications through their Continuous Professional Development Programme.

Proven effectiveness – Member companies and their clients regularly sweep the boards at the annual IPA Effectiveness Awards, the world’s most rigorous effectiveness competition.

Maintain rigorous standards – All our member companies are required to uphold the industry’s legal, regulatory and ethical standards, including the IPA Rule Book and the EACA Code of Ethics.

Adhere to best practice guidelines – They champion Best Practice Guidelines on a wide range of topics.

ISBA recommended – Recognising that IPA members are leading practitioners in their field, ISBA, the voice of British advertisers, strongly recommends that advertisers only employ IPA member agencies.

Run everything through legal – Members have access to IPA legal experts so can ensure all work is legal and regulatory compliant for you.

Draw on a wealth of knowledge – Most importantly for advertisers, as a member of the IPA, our business can access a wealth of data including news, statistics and research to help you plan and execute effective advertising campaigns.

As part of our IPA Accelerator journey the IPA conducted a Q&A to get Buymedia’s views on the current state of SME Advertising. You can read excerpts below or read the full interview here.

Describe your business in no more than five words

Intelligent Media Platform for SMEs

Which piece of work are you most proud of?

The creation and development of our platform has been our biggest achievement so far. To take a highly manual, time consuming and costly process that has remained unchanged for over 100 years and automate it has taken us 50 years of experience and 5 years of technical development.

Now, having the ability to democratise data and insights and make them available to medium sized businesses is hugely rewarding for us. We believe that small and medium businesses should be given the same opportunities to plan, purchase, manage and learn from their advertising as bigger brands. We are helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses and organisations when advertising.

The exciting thing is we’re only getting started. The more advertisers that use our platform the more valuable it becomes for each business, it’s a virtuous circle.

In terms of client work, our recent work with a small regional charity that allowed them to achieve a 50:1 return on their advertising spend to raise much needed funds for medical research into heart disease is one of the campaigns that gave us the most tingles.

What’s been the most challenging/interesting campaign you have worked on?

We are working with a retailer with a large number of outlets across a wide geographic region. Their personas are diverse and the geographic range means that our platform needs to deliver a huge number of campaigns, to personas through multiple media channels and titles within each channel. The client does not have the resources or expertise to plan, purchase and manage the media plan as effectively as our platform can and therefore it has allowed them to move away from the obvious media options and explore media that they have never used before. The great thing for the client is that they can make these decisions based on data and therefore they have the confidence to allocate budget to more effective channels, reducing their exposure to risk and wastage.

What’s the most important thing to your business?

Our advertisers are the centre of everything we do. We focus everyday on research, insights, discovery and negotiations that will help our advertisers get more effective advertising campaigns. Our ultimate goal is to help businesses grow through more effective and efficient advertising. We’re also obsessed with making the advertising process easier and less stressful

What does the future of advertising look like to you?

The future of advertising from a suppliers perspective will look like a cyborg. Human and machine working together to create more effective advertising.

From a consumers perspective sales activation will become more personalised and immediate, while brands will need to become a part of their customers everyday lives rather than a spotlight that dazzles when the brand decides.

What industry issue is keeping you up at night?

The fallacy that a business can engage with a customer through digital advertising only. Our challenge is to integrate campaigns across multiple channels targeting many persons. Our holy grail is to map the customer journey from awareness to action on the advertising plan and attribute budget to each step. Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create an intelligent recommendation advertising engine for SMEs based on industry and business data.

Advertising is…

…not a cost but an investment in business growth.

Advertising can…

…ignite and invigorate SMEs and local communities by helping them compete with bigger brands at a local, national and international level.

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