Validated pricing intelligence across every channel.
Negotiated pricing intelligence built on 40+ years of actual transaction data — across linear TV, local TV, cable, radio, out-of-home, and now CTV, streaming audio, and podcasting. The market pricing benchmark agencies, broadcasters, and investors use to know what inventory is genuinely trading for.
THE PROBLEM
Media pricing is fragmented. Across every channel.
Linear and local TV pricing varies by daypart, market, season, and audience. CTV pricing varies by content category, ad length, and audience target. Streaming audio and podcasting pricing varies by publisher and inventory type. Without a normalised benchmark across all of it, buying teams negotiate on instinct and planning teams budget on rate cards that aren't real.
No reliable benchmark across channels
Rate cards reflect what's listed, not what's transacted. And what gets transacted varies wildly — across daypart, market, audience, format, and content category. Real prices live in actual buys, not published rates.
Negotiation without leverage
Without a validated benchmark, buying teams negotiate from a position of asymmetry. The seller knows the market — the daypart, the upfront commitments, the inflation pressure. The buyer often doesn't.
Cross-channel comparisons break
Comparing a $40 CPM on CTV to a $30 CPP on local TV to a $25 CPM on podcasting only makes sense if the data is normalised — same audience target, same ad length, same like-for-like methodology. Most pricing data isn't normalised.
THE SQADCOSTS PORTFOLIO
Three layers of pricing intelligence. One normalised benchmark.
National TV. Local media. And — as of 2026 — locally targeted digital, streaming audio, and podcasting. Each with its own validated transaction history, all rolling up to a single normalised pricing layer.
01
SQADCosts National
National linear TV pricing intelligence. Negotiated CPMs across networks, genres, and programs. Upfront vs scatter pricing. Demographic and daypart granularity. The pricing benchmark for national TV buying.
02
SQADCosts Local
Local-market pricing intelligence across local TV, cable, Hispanic TV, radio, and out-of-home. Market, daypart, demo, and station-level benchmarking — the pricing layer for local media buying.
03
NEW
Local Digital Extension
The 2026 extension of SQADCosts Local into geo-targeted digital. CPM benchmarks for locally targeted CTV, streaming audio, podcasting, and digital video — normalised into the same like-for-like methodology that powers Linear and Local.
THE METHODOLOGY
Not one price.
A negotiation range.
Every SQADCosts benchmark is published as three tiers — Average, Low, and High. Not a single market CPM, but the realistic envelope of what's being transacted. Buyers see leverage. Sellers see positioning. Planners see budgeting ranges. The framework has become an industry-standard reference for how pricing intelligence is consumed. Because pricing doesn't work as a point estimate — it works as a negotiation envelope.
WHAT IT DOES
Transaction-level pricing intelligence. Normalised across the market.
Validated transaction data
Built from 40+ years of actual ad buys — across linear TV, local media, and now digital. Not survey data. Not modelled estimates. The price points that show up in SQADCosts are the price points the market is genuinely paying.
Negotiation without leverage
Normalised benchmarks across every channel and market — same audience target, same ad length, same content category. Cross-channel and cross-market comparisons that genuinely add up, not approximations that compound error.
Embedded at plan creation
SQADCosts data is built into MediaTools and Lumina natively. Planning teams see validated benchmarks as they build the plan — not after it's been submitted to finance, and not as a lookup in a separate tool.
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The pricing benchmark the market actually transacts on.
See how SQADCosts changes the way your team plans, buys, negotiates, and audits — across every channel and every market.
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