Approaching a Proactive Amplification Strategy And How to Build Scalable Sales Packages For Your Sales Team 

For publishers looking to scale their branded content business, having a proactive amplification strategy is key. However, to execute this effectively, publishers must either partner with a managed service like Avid’s amplification solution or establish internal processes that allow sales teams to easily quote deliverables and pricing. Without this, publishers may find themselves over-relying on specialists to manually forecast and scope campaigns, ultimately negating the efficiency benefits of proactive planning.

Depending on the approach you take (a partner service or doing yourself), you will want to take some extra steps to ensure that your sales team finds the process both easy and efficient to build campaigns.

The first step is to create a set of predefined packages at varying deliverable and budget levels, allowing your sales team to easily select and pitch them off the shelf. The complexity of these packages can be tailored to your specific objectives and the needs of your sales team, ensuring they are both practical and effective in-market.

Defining Package Pillars for Amplification

At Avid, we structure amplification into five distinct package Pillars, ensuring that publishers can cater to a range of advertiser needs while encouraging larger campaign investments.

Pillar	What It Is	Best For
1. Content with No or Low Amplification	Organic-only or minimal paid distribution, typically for PR-focused or SEO-driven campaigns.	PR campaigns, SEO backlinking, B2B sponsorships, and integrations into high-performing editorial content.
2. Moderate Amplification Guarantees	Typically 3,000-4,000 article views, suitable for small direct buys but often lacking scale for agencies.	Highly targeted/niche audience campaigns, small tactical activations.
3. Large Standard Guarantees & Brand Lift Study	Includes 20,000+ article views and brand lift study (BLS) measurement, leveraging two paid media channels.	Mid-sized agency campaigns, paid PR (e.g., product launches), large demographic targeting (e.g., Men 25-45).
4. Mass Guarantees, Brand Lift Study & Data Targeting	Expands deliverable guarantees across multiple audience segments, improving brand saliency.	FMCG, retail, auto, travel, telco, and finance brands needing broad or niche targeting.
5. Studio Campaigns with High-Impact Media	Multi-channel activation including video, events, and publisher endorsement.	High-impact, brand-led campaigns where publisher-created content is integral to success.

Encouraging Larger Campaign Investments

A key benefit of this structured approach is the ability to shift conversations away from minimum spend concerns when advertisers are asking “how much should I spend” or “what is your minimum spend”  towards value-driven investment decisions.  

For example, instead of responding to an advertiser inquiry with “$20,000 is our minimum spend”, Avid’s approach is: 

“If you want moderate deliverables with basic reporting, $20,000 is the minimum spend. However, at $50,000, we can significantly scale your campaign with more impressions, stronger audience targeting, and a brand lift study included (BLS) as added value.”

This shift in conversation is one example of the core aims of the Pillars, creating a scaling pricing structure and approach that incentivises advertisers to spend more per campaign, benefiting both the publisher (increased deal size) and the advertiser (greater campaign impact).

By creating 5 Pillars publishers can assess what they are selling currently and take steps to drive adoption of packages in the higher Pillars to grow spend per campaign consistently. With there being such a high sunk costs in sales costs, content creation and campaign implementation, there is a tangible incentive for both publisher and advertiser to maximise the exposure of content pieces with higher media deliverables if it aligns to the wider goals of the advertisers media campaign (and if they have the budget!) 

Is It Worth Removing Products From The Lower Pillars? 

Many publishers aspire to focus solely on larger-scale campaigns (Pillars 4 & 5) – Fewer campaigns, with large budgets economically makes for a great model, and let’s face it – publishers get to work on campaigns they find most exciting and rewarding. But is removing lower-Pillar  options the right move? The answer depends on several factors:

Organic Reach

• If a publisher generates significant organic traffic, then pricing that traffic properly so as to not lose significant revenue is crucial. 
• In these cases, removing low-cost access points (e.g., Pillar  1) and instead monetising through automated models (e.g., affiliate marketing) can be a better approach. Whilst the revenue wont be significant, providing your sales team an option to sell a very low cost article with no deliverable guarantees is likely reducing your deal size across the board and teaching agencies to spend less than they could with you. 

Relative Margin Comparison

• Pillars 3 & 4 are often higher-margin, as they involve repeatable, standard products compared to bespoke Pillar  5 studio campaigns, which require more customisation and resources to execute.
• High-competition RFPs for Pillar  5 campaigns may drive lower margins due to competitive pricing pressures in order to secure the revenue. This combination of margin reduction and additional resources at times means that the smaller campaigns will generate higher returns/profit. 
• Having a mix of these campaigns ultimately benefits your bottom line and helps manage resources as well. 

Test Budgets To Grow Advertiser Spend

• Providing entry-level options (Pillars 1 & 2) helps establish advertiser relationships and an understanding of entry points to working with you. 
• Ensuring these options have clear measurement and goals to assess success, allowing publishers to upsell larger packages in future campaigns to these onboarded advertisers. 
• For this to work effectively, publishers must ensure pricing clearly communicates how advertisers can increase deliverables as they invest more. With this it is crucial to demonstrate what advertisers can more of in addition to increased deliverables – such as access to unique formats, more of your audience, or more SOV of key editorial content or moments. 
• Having this clearly considered in your product pricing allows you to democratise that thinking to your whole sales team who can then explain how a client might expand their spend after their initial test

Steps To Set Up Your New Products Per Pillar  

Step 1: Identify the product(s)

This is important because you may want to build multiple different content products out into the Pillars – eg video or interactive formats.

Step 2: Identify product availability per pillar

For instance, for an article you might choose to remove a product with no deliverables and remove it from pillar 5 and sell it in Pillars 2-4 only- it’ll be hard to do a mass media campaign with a single article!

Step 2: Scope the following for each pillar

• What the rate card cost and baseline cost of the product is (this might reduce per Pillar  to provide more value for the larger Pillar )
• What inclusions you want to add onto these products; such as email newsletter, app notification, homepage tile, facebook post. These are all owned inclusions that you would add at their baseline cost or added value, that don’t have paid media behind them
• Set the Amplification margin targets; e.g, if you aim for 50% margin, you will be spending $0.50 of every $1 you charge the advertiser on amplification. Note: Be conscious of any agreed discounts and sales rebates you may have be applied to these products when considering all of these prices
• Decide what budget you will look to charge the client for the campaign? Note: you can change this in the next section as you optimise your plans, for now opt for what you feel fits your business model and is likely to set you up for success against competitors
• Define the expected CPM and CPAV (Cost Per Article View) for transparency in pricing. If unsure you can use Avid’s managed service calculator to understand what these prices would be supplied by Avid Collective.

Example For a Standard Article

Ok so that was a lot of information. Let’s bring it to life with an example.

Chosen Pillars:

Pillar 2: Campaigns with moderate guarantees

Pillar 3: Campaigns with larger standard guarantees & Brand Lift Study

Pillar 4. Campaigns with mass guarantees, Brand Lift Study and data targeting

Data Point	Pillar 2: Campaigns with Moderate Guarantees	Pillar 3: Campaigns with Larger Standard Guarantees & BLS	Pillar 3: Campaigns with Mass Guarantees, BLS & Data Targeting
Product Rate Card	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000
Product Cost	$5,000	$4,000	$3,000
Add-On Inclusions
Add-On Inclusions Rate Card
Add-On Inclusions Costs
Amplification Budget Charged to Client
Margin for Publisher	50%	45%	40%
Budget for Amplification Spend
Expected CPM
Impressions from Add-Ons
Impressions from Amplification
Total Impressions
Campaign CPM
Expected CPAV
Impressions from Add-Ons
Impressions from Article Views
Total Article Views
Campaign CPAV

Where rows in italics represent formulae built into the sheet.

*We’ve reduced our product price across the Pillars to increase the budget pushed into deliverables with a stronger CPM and CPAV. This will help scale the deliverables of the larger packages and given we are charging for a bigger package we are earning great margin as well!

**If you want to use the above table and formula download this link here from Avid which even includes some broader benchmarks of the Australian market for consideration.

Now that you’ve created your first recreated product packages you’ve got the opportunity to optimise these to maximise your conversion rates. We look at this alongside media plans in the next article.