Media buying platform for TV, radio and DOOH

A media buying platform is the system an agency or an in-house team uses to plan and buy media across sellers: every seller's rate card and availability in one place, the plan with its GRP, CPP and reach, the booking, and the post-buy that shows what was actually delivered. Buy-side software has existed for decades; what a platform adds is the seller's live inventory on the other side of the screen, so a plan is checked against availability and prices as it is built and becomes a booking without an email. OpenMediaLogic is a media buying platform of this kind for TV, radio and DOOH, deployable in any market and live today in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.

What a buyer gets

One view of the market — the rate cards, availability and terms of every channel, station and screen network on the platform, current rather than as last emailed
Planning without spreadsheets — GRP, wGRP, CPP, reach and frequency calculated by the system from the market's audience currency, with channel and seller compared on the real cost of a slot rather than an averaged price list
Booking — the approved plan becomes booked spots in the seller's schedule; a change is agreed in the same record
Post-buy on actual spots — delivered against planned, from the broadcast certificate, in days rather than a month later
Client reporting — plan, delivery and cost per client and brand, exported in one click
Commitments and terms — agency deals, discounts and volume commitments tracked by the system across the year
Audit — who approved what and when, for the client and for the auditor

The buying cycle, and where it loses time

Every classical media buy runs the same nine steps, and in a market that works by email six of them are waiting.

Brief — audience, dates, budget, what to include and what to avoid
Avails request — sent to every seller on the list; the answers arrive over days, in whatever format each seller keeps
Plan — the avails normalised into one comparison and built into a schedule with its GRP, CPP and reach
Approval — the client's, and any internal one
Order — the plan sent back to each seller, who re-enters it into their own system
Traffic — creative, versions and instructions delivered to each seller separately
Pacing — delivery read against plan while the flight runs, if the data exists to read it
Post-buy — what was booked against what aired, from each seller's certificate
Reconciliation and billing — the two sides' numbers made to agree, then invoiced

Three of those steps are where budget is lost rather than time. Avails go stale between request and approval, so a plan approved on Thursday is partly unbookable on Friday, and the replacements are chosen under deadline rather than on merit. The order is retyped at the seller's end, which is where the discrepancy that surfaces in reconciliation is usually born. And pacing is invisible until post-buy in most markets, so under-delivery is discovered when the only remedy left is a makegood out of whatever inventory is still unsold.

A marketplace does not make the nine steps shorter. It removes the retyping from step five and the waiting from steps two and eight, which is most of the elapsed time in the cycle, and it makes step seven possible at all.

How OpenMediaLogic does it

The agency page describes the workflow: every seller's rate card in one place, GRP and CPP without spreadsheets, airtime booking, and post-buy against actual spots instead of a month's wait. The platform is cross-media, so a plan spans TV, radio and DOOH in one document; and it is a marketplace, so the seller works in the same record — the sales house page shows that side. Beeline Kazakhstan, one of the country's largest advertisers, moved off manual planning this way: 11 TV channels, radio and DOOH in one workflow, −32% media costs in nine months — case study.

Where it differs from agency software

Mediaocean and, for smaller agencies, Bionic are buy-side systems: they live inside the agency and manage its plans, orders, invoices and finance across every medium it buys, including digital. They do not hold the seller's live inventory; the booking still travels to the seller by insertion order. OpenMediaLogic holds the inventory, which is why it is the faster way for a market to move off spreadsheets, and why in a market where the agencies already run Mediaocean it is a marketplace they connect to rather than a replacement. The alternatives page sets this out vendor by vendor.

Deployment outside the current markets

The platform runs in any market: billing in local currency, data stored in the country, interface in 16 languages, the market's audience currency connected through the API. The UK, Australia and Philippines pages describe what deployment would mean for an agency there, in that market's trading terms.

Request a demo with your own plan. Related: TV advertising software, what CPP is, what post-buy is.