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 Campaign 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 a response option 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 flexibility within the requested daypart. |
| 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 dayparts you want priced. Use Additional notes for program, genre, news, sports, sponsorship, adjacency, and exclusion preferences. Explain where equivalent programming is acceptable.
Current TV responses use one exact program on one calendar day with one market-local time window per option. A program airing on several days needs a separate option for each day. Suppliers do not create a new multi-day rotation or generic TV daypart option.
Older submitted revisions can still contain rotations. They remain historical records; use the current response and its orderability status when building a new buy.
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.
You can send an RFP without weekly targeted-impression goals. If you enable them, every requested line must cover every active week. Goal CPM and supplier targeted impressions per spot remain separate from an optional request target. Without targets, choose quantities manually instead of expecting a goal-based suggestion to determine the schedule.
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.