The evolution of media planning: why it became so complicated and what you can do about it.
Media planners at brands and agencies used to have it good. Cast your mind back 15 years or so to a simpler time for brands and agencies. A time before signal loss and its implications for targeting-precision and ad effectiveness. A time before the fragmentation of the media ecosystem. And a time before the internet became so creepy for consumers, who pay the price for using the internet with their data and privacy.
Planners could spend their budget more freely, with less accountability or scrutiny. And there was a blissfully compact couple of traditional media channels to choose from, essentially comprising radio and television.
And then it all changed.
Media planning in a multi-channel era
Fast-forward to today and traditional channels have been joined by display advertising, social media (in all its stripes) and search marketing. Radio ads have expanded and diversified with the explosion of podcasts and music streaming. Then there are emerging channels such as connected TV, fueled by the march of streaming over the last decade, and digital out-of-home advertising where screens are the new billboards.
Today, effective media planning means determining which of these many channels and platforms will maximize return on investment. It means accurately measuring ad performance across a landscape that’s growing ever-more complex. It means wrangling insights to help optimize audience targeting and ad spend across traditional, digital, and programmatic media-buying platforms.
Demand-side platforms (DSPs), designed to automate the bidding involved in media buying, have added to the complexity. The retail media network boom has changed the job even more. As more retailers monetize their digital storefronts as advertising space for third-party brands, the search for the holy grail of media measurement – a directly attributable transaction point – might finally seem within reach. Except in practice every retailer measures and sets up media networks differently.
All this new complexity amplifies all the uncertainty for media planners around budget allocation, proving a return on ad spend, optimizing the channel mix, and creating a seamless omnichannel experience that drives conversions.
Media planning spreadsheets are NOT the answer
The humble spreadsheet was once the solution of choice for manually recording and analyzing data on everything from media targeting, reach and impressions, to ad spend, budget allocation and ROI.
But as the list of players, channels, business models, and media types grew, it became increasingly obvious that the spreadsheet status quo couldn’t support an efficient, scalable, and profitable ad operation. Disparate spreadsheets and siloed insights across media planning teams made it nigh on impossible to get a high-level view of how digital marketing performance was meeting strategic goals. The same goes for budgetary transparency.
Some brands and agencies – whisper it – still rely on spreadsheets and legacy systems today, but it’s no longer possible to plan and optimize an omnichannel media campaign manually. And with media-planning solutions available, it’s no longer necessary either.
So how can brands and agencies cut through the complexity and become as good at buying ad media as publishers are at selling it?
Along came the solution(s) for media planners
Aggregated media planning solutions have emerged to streamline management and measurement. But for too many media planners, they haven’t succeeded in reducing the endless complexity. As a result, optimizing omnichannel campaigns, streamlining activation, and gaining financial oversight is beyond even the most talented and organized media planners.
A platform like Placements’ MarketerOS, on the other hand, consolidates all the channels a media planner might need to consider as part of a digital campaign. Campaign set-up and optimization is automated with cross-channel coordination, integrated workflow management, and real-time performance monitoring. Advanced analytics and reporting centralize data from critical sources of your media tech stack. And the platform also looks after financial management and reconciliation.
In short? A lifeline in the age of omnichannel campaigns and retail media.
The next frontier in the fight against media fragmentation
Solutions like MarketerOS are now using AI to bring new levels of simplicity to media planning. Intelligent sidekicks can help navigate the increasingly complicated media landscape, so brands and agencies can plan and optimize campaigns more efficiently.
Applying end-to-end intelligence can elevate media-buying tools beyond monitoring cross-channel performance and centralizing data. AI can help media planners strategize, making recommendations on audience segmentation, targeting, and suppression. And AI-powered functionality can rapidly identify underperforming campaigns, then leverage millions of datapoints to improve ad effectiveness.
More adtech and intermediaries may be complicating the picture, but this intelligence layer will increasingly emerge as today’s differentiator for brands and agencies. The media planning landscape might be more complex every day, but an AI-powered ad-buying platform helps digital advertisers make better, more optimized decisions. In the second half of the 2020s, media planners can still have it good.
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