New Website Brings Buyers, Publications Together

A Los Angeles ad agency hopes to bring media buyers and publications together in a kind of online shopping club to bring the best value in print buys to advertisers.

MediaBuys.us was developed by a team from Chick Inc., an ad agency specializing in the entertainment industry. The service, available for free via the Web, offers discounts on ad purchases based on volume insertions.

Buyers can get even more discounts if more people buy space for a single issue. More than 90 publications are signed up already in 84 product categories, although most of the publications are so far in the entertainment industry. Chick Inc. is mostly a creative agency serving primarily small post-production companies in film and TV. It doesn’t do much media buying, or at least it hadn’t until recently. Chick Ciccarelli, the agency’s president, said he found more and more of his clients asking the agency to do its print buys.

“We were able often to get volume discounts from magazines based on our client list,” he said.

Six months ago, the ad-hoc buying service started working on a Web-based application that would allow buyers to place print ads and allow publications to offer their media kits, rates and other information.

Ciccarelli said that many small businesses don’t have the time to take calls from a lot of ad reps. With MediaBuys.us, they no longer have to, he said. Ciccarelli said the client list has doubled from the 35 firms Chick Inc. is already doing business with, and is growing all the time as word of the service spreads.

Publications are also signing up. Among the publications participating are Film & Video, The Hollywood Reporter, Medialine, Millimeter, Post Magazine, Animation World Network and Billboard Musicians Guide. MediaBuys.us is right now focusing on music, film/TV and some celebrity-news outlets, although that could change in the future. Also being discussed are additions to the service, including the ability to do spot buys and perhaps targeted buys as well.

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