One of the stories to appear in the first edition of Aurora in July 1998 was titled Media Buying Houses in Pakistan. The Wrong Place? The Wrong Time? The story was indicative of the disruption their entry was about to cause. Until then, media placement was situated in the heart of the agency. Not only that, the agency’s revenue model was based on the 15% commission earned by the agency for every media placement made. Resistance from the agencies was inevitable. Beyond agency resistance, a major concern was that the skillsets required to deliver the media buying function were lacking.

Media buying was about identifying the most effective advertising platform for a campaign and then negotiating the best rate with the media. By then, media choices had expanded beyond satellite and cable TV, with new options emerging in print, outdoor and below-the-line advertising. Nevertheless, the question in Aurora’s first edition was worth posing, at least in the context of local brands, although in terms of multinational brands, media buying houses were late in coming to the party in Pakistan.

The first media buying house to set up in Pakistan was Pak Mediacom, an affiliate of Mediacom Worldwide, in 1996. The company was launched by Blazon, then affiliated with Greys. In 1998, Pak Mediacom was bought out by its employees and began to pitch for independent media business. It was headed by Raihan Merchant (now founder and chairman of Z2C), who can justifiably be called the “father of Pakistan’s media agencies.” Aware of the huge skills gap, Merchant set about designing the training required – an initiative that continues today across the Z2C Group of companies. In fact, many media specialists today are the product of Merchant’s training. The second entrant was Mindshare in 1999; the third to emerge was Matrix Media in 2000.

At the start, media buying was mostly limited to “bulk” buying (securing the best discount from the media). However, with the opening up of private TV channels and FM radio in 2002, and later the advent of digital, followed by the social media revolution, media agencies came into their own, placing media as well as providing strong creative input. Media buying became the catalyst for the setting up of Peoplemeters in Pakistan. Here, it is pertinent to underscore that until then, media data was either unavailable or unreliable. Digital played the critical role in making data the centrepiece of media buying decisions.

Media agencies have come a long way since 1998, and ad agencies have had to reconcile themselves to losing the media placement function and replace their revenue model from a media placement commission to a fee model based on their creative output. The next challenge for media buying is to incorporate AI in their planning and create messaging that sticks in an increasingly ad-averse world.

From Aurora’s archives

INTERVIEW Raihan Ali Merchant, Chairman and Founder, Z2C

PROFILE Planning for Success: Benish Irshad, COO, Starcom and CEO, Publicis Media

ARTICLES Owning the Right Moment, Not the Data – Urooj Hussain