We’ve all been there, the client brief lands, and among the usual asks comes that dreaded line: “Tell us why you should be on the plan.” Even for the most experienced media sales team, it can trigger a familiar scramble to pull together yet another persuasive response.
The go-to answers are well-rehearsed: the power of your channel, the scale of your reach, the premium nature of your audience. These are tried-and-tested pillars of the media sales toolkit, and for good reason.
But things are shifting. More and more, media owners are being asked to go beyond the standard pitch and back up their value with something deeper: data. Not just any data – data that shows that you don’t just know your own audience, but that you understand the client’s world too. Their goals. Their pressures. And most importantly, their target customers.
Let’s be clear, using data to sell media isn’t a new concept.
It’s been part of the conversation for years. But finding the right data, and more importantly, knowing how to make sense of it, is where things often get tricky.
In an industry fuelled by acronyms and obsessed with consumer touchpoints, there’s no shortage of data sets scattered across the ecosystem. But evaluating which ones are relevant to your inventory – and investing in the right ones – can feel like navigating a minefield. And that’s before you factor in the added complexity (and cost) when one data set simply isn’t enough.
Even once you’ve identified the best-fit data, another challenge kicks in: resourcing. For many media owners, especially those who are smaller or independent, there isn’t a dedicated analyst on hand, an insights team to lean on, or even someone with enough time to dig into the indexes, penetrations and percentages to translate them into something meaningful.
And there’s the final hurdle: turning that data into a compelling story. Raw numbers, without a strong narrative to back them up, rarely sell, especially not to marketers or agencies under pressure to justify every pound of spend. They want confidence. They want relevance. They want proof that their campaign will reach the right people, in the right place, with the right context.
That’s a tall order when you’re juggling multiple briefs, tight deadlines, and limited time to interrogate audience behaviour beyond your own first-party insights. The result? Missed opportunities to demonstrate just how powerfully your platform can connect brands to the people who matter most.
At this point, you might be thinking: “Alright, we get it. What’s the solution to all these brilliantly drawn-out challenges we’ve known about for years?”
The truth? There’s no silver bullet. Data is complex. It won’t sell your inventory for you. And yes, it comes with a cost.
But over the past two years, we’ve been working closely with media owners to help find a solution that meaningfully addresses these all-too-familiar challenges, without requiring huge internal resources or sky-high investment.
That solution is Starcount Connect
Connect offers media owners a smarter, simpler way to enhance their sales strategy with data. We’ve already done the heavy lifting – evaluating, sourcing and combining some of the most powerful data sets on the market. This includes social media interest data, open banking spend behaviours, telco movement patterns, search-level intent signals and demographic overlays.
The result? A single, unified view that helps you understand more about your own audiences, the client’s target consumers and showcase why you should be on plan.
Where Connect really shines is in helping media owners go beyond the obvious to identify and sell in non-endemic audiences that clients might not have previously considered. By tapping into rich behavioural signals like consumer mindsets, real-world movement, and spending patterns, Connect can uncover audience overlaps that aren’t immediately visible through traditional planning tools.
For example, your platform might not be the natural home for a luxury fashion brand, but Connect could reveal that a surprising segment of their target audience is highly engaged with your environment, either through shared interests, spending behaviours, or physical presence. That’s the kind of insight that shifts a media owner from ‘consideration’ to ‘must-have’ on a plan.
Using First Party Data
We also know how valuable your own first-party data is and with Connect, you don’t have to choose between your data and external insight. Our platform allows you to enrich your first-party audience understanding by layering on additional behavioural data. That means stronger storytelling, better targeting, and more compelling sales narratives grounded in real-world evidence.
Importantly, Connect has been built with media owner workflows in mind. We know that sales teams are often time-poor and juggling multiple briefs, so the platform is designed to be intuitive, fast, and flexible. Whether you’re responding to a pitch, building a proactive proposal, or tailoring a response to a specific brief, Connect helps you surface relevant insights quickly, without needing a data team in the background.
You can search by audience, sector, or specific advertiser profiles to understand who their customers really are and how your media can connect with them meaningfully. The outputs are easy to use, client-ready, and designed to support stronger sales conversations from first response to final presentation.
But don’t just take our word for it…
‘’Starcount Connect has genuinely transformed the way we respond to briefs and go after new business. In OOH, we’ve always known the power of location and context, but clients increasingly want proof that our sites target the right audiences, not just large numbers of people. That’s where Starcount Connect has made a real difference at Open Media.
It has helped us move beyond generic audience claims and demonstrate real alignment between our locations and a client’s target audience, using the rich data sets that Connect provides. It’s made our responses relevant, more detailed, and has also allowed us to create stories with the data, ultimately helping us win business that we might not have in the past’’
– Anna Hunter, Data Strategist, Open Media
“Starcount’s connect platform supports us not just in providing our clients with a robust response to briefs, but also aids us in proactive work when approaching new brands who initially might not have considered the towns and cities we operate in as relevant for their audiences. The easy-to-use nature of the platform further enhances our sales team’s in-depth knowledge of the regional areas, with robust and accountable data to upsell our inventory”
– Tom Bew, Sales Director, MediaCo
If you’re looking to sharpen your sales story, uncover new audience opportunities, or simply make better use of the data already at your fingertips, Starcount Connect could be the tool that helps you get there faster.
We’d love to show you how it works in practice, feel free to get in touch for a walkthrough, or let us know the next brief you’re working on, and we’ll show you what Connect can unlock.
