For buyers
Turn a TV strategy into exact local dayparts, spot lengths, audience goals, and programming guidance without making the request unnecessarily rigid.
4 min readUpdated
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A useful TV RFP gives stations one market, flight, primary audience, and set of buying goals to answer. Create a separate request when the market or media type changes so each station receives the right local schedule and every response stays comparable.
The Plan budget remains buyer-side planning context. The TV RFP carries the goal lines suppliers need to price: market-local dayparts, spot lengths, weekly impression targets, goal CPM, and any programming direction that determines whether an Avail fits.
Tap presents the launch TV buckets below. The exact days and hours are resolved for the selected market and frozen into the RFP revision.
| Daypart | What to verify |
|---|---|
| Early Morning | The local morning window and whether news adjacency matters. |
| Daytime | The weekday window and acceptable program environments. |
| Early Fringe | The transition into evening viewing and local news needs. |
| Prime Access | The local access window before Prime. |
| Prime | The weekday, Saturday, and Sunday windows shown for the market. |
| Late News | Whether the request needs a news program or a broader daypart rotation. |
| Late Fringe | The cross-midnight end time and acceptable programs. |
| Overnight | Whether low-cost frequency serves the audience and objective. |
TV conventions shift by market time zone. Always review the displayed market-local window. Do not assume a Prime or Late News label has the same clock time in every market.
Use the goal grid for the buying bucket you want suppliers to answer. Use Additional notes to describe program, genre, news, sports, sponsorship, rotation, adjacency, or exclusion preferences.
Be explicit about the acceptable response shape:
An overly broad request makes comparison difficult. An overly rigid one can exclude good local inventory. The useful middle is a precise daypart and audience goal with clear programming boundaries.
Create a separate goal line for every daypart and spot length combination you want priced independently. A 15 second Prime line and a 30 second Prime line are different asks even when the audience and weeks are the same.
Choose one standard primary demographic, then set for each line:
Suppliers respond with a weekly spot rate and projected primary-audience impressions per spot. Tap uses those fields to calculate a derived CPM and, during buying, the whole-spot quantity needed to approach the weekly target.
Use Additional notes for information that changes the inventory a station should return:
Keep the request focused on the transaction. A station should be able to tell which facts determine eligibility, which shape its recommendation, and where it has room to offer an alternative.
Confirm the market and time zone, exact flight, response deadline, primary audience, selected dayparts and local schedules, spot lengths, weekly targets, goal CPMs, programming notes, and station list. The draft remains private until an authorized buyer approves Send RFP.