Media Planning

Media Planning Rev. (olution) 2002
(Part 1 of 5)

Five years/six reasons

Things have changed in the last five years. Media planning in the US is done differently now. The new process doesn't resemble the old way and in many cases even different people do the work. Most of the changes that brought about this revolution constitute today's Best Practices in Strategic Media Planning.

There are six major reasons why change has happened so suddenly.

1-The dotcom economy, followed by the dotgone economy
fostered a continuous planning cycle. The old ritual of working off an annual plan is no longer practiced. The dotcoms created a frenzy of speculative money and activity that conditioned us to the daily entrepreneurial plan, while the dotgone economy has fostered enough anxiety to re-examine plans daily for purely monetary reasons. VCs make people anxious, so does a recession.

2- Media management services are dominant and here to stay. Media has assumed a stature equal to creative and in fact gets more press these days. Once agencies realized they could turn a profit with a media management service and in fact had to create one to be competitive, they supplied these services with unique tools of their own. Tools to compete against one another to win
big business.

3- Agency and media service consolidation fostered even more consolidation in media planning and buying among clients. In a never ending quest for clout and the latest competitive edge in the "smart" media approach, advertisers appointed more agencies of record (AORs). Of course, they also did this because they had to avoid conflicts among the newly consolidated agencies and media services. These consolidated units created mega-brand planning groups, where a smart strategic move could save more than the old negotiation for a slightly lower CPM.

4- Media consultants became more popular among advertisers, who sought the guidance of outside counsel, not just to find another advertising or media agency, but also to find a smarter way to plan media. The third party consultant in turn pushed the planning agency to act on its own to preempt criticism.

5-Digital technology gave birth to a host of quick calculating systems and more refined sampling techniques, which in turn gave birth to more sophisticated measurements of the consumer's media and product consumption patterns.

6- STAS (short term advertising measurements) from Nielsen and IRI most notably, encouraged advertisers to look at the immediate effect of advertising on sales. This created the understanding that advertising can have a measurable effect on sales right away and in fact, media ought to be planned accordingly (recency).

The amazing thing is that all of this happened in a period of about five years. It was as if the major innovations in media panning technique were nurtured for decades to be harvested at the introduction of the 21st century.

Tipping points

This observer can point to two triggering events that happened in1997 and birthed the revolution. They tipped the scales from evolution to revolution.

First, while searching for a television agency of record (AOR), P&G requested that their buying agents use optimizers. This led to a frenzy in the development of optimizers here in the US. Of course, the tool had been used in Europe for years, but there didn't seem to be a need here, nor did the chaotic nature of US media and markets seem to lend itself to be optimized. However, in very short order, P&G agencies and others who followed, either purchased existing optimizers and gave them a few wrinkles or they devised their own systems. This was the first major technological departure from the old school of planning and buying.

Second, Carat won the Pfizer business by presenting themselves not just as an agency that could buy cheaper, but one that could plan and buy smarter. They demonstrated this well enough in their new business presentation, increased the value and prestige of their Media Research capability and walked off with several hundred million dollars worth of business. Suddenly, everyone wanted "smarter" and Research Directors became positive celebrity forces.

Smarter

Smarter meant getting to know the nature of things. The old way had a Media Research Director looking at secondary research and basically reporting to the planners and buyers what the trunk or leg of the elephant looked like. They did not see or even try to understand the whole animal, nor were they equipped to get to know the nature of the beast. Physicist, Richard Feynman used to say that you could get to know the name of something, but that's all you really knew. You really did not know the basic nature of the thing or how it would be likely to act. In fact the name changed with different languages, but how the creature would act, did not. Its nature was the same in any language, unknown, unless explored. The same principle is operating in advertising now. Smart Media Research Directors became heads of strategic planning and assumed the role of CEO in charge of understanding media.

Essentially, the second half of the 1990s brought account planning to media. The same disciplines that European account planners brought to sophisticated agencies here in the US, after Chiat Day introduced them, were brought in to ply their trade in media planning.

Over the next four months, through October, Media Directors Ink will be devoted to the subject of Best Practices in US Strategic Media Planning. These papers are a condensation of a presentation on the subject, which is to be given to a media conference this October in Stockholm.