A Guide to Media Planning and Buying in 2021 www.mediatool.com 0 1 What's included? The ‘buckle up’ mantra won’t take you far in the new normal. Whether you’re an in- house marketer or an agency media planner, adapting to the new advertising climate is crucial. More than that, reinventing your digital marketing planning to be able to mirror consumers’ ever-evolving needs will be on every marketing leader’s agenda in 2021. If you’re looking for better ways to drive traffic, generate leads and deliver more ROI, start by leaving the old tactics behind. Table of contents 02 What is media planning? 03 Media planning vs. Media buying: what’s the difference? 06 The effects of COVID-19 on media planning 09 Your step by step guide to media planning 12 Media planning challenges 17 What's next? 0 2 What is media planning? Let’s get the semantics out of the way. Media planning refers to the process of identifying, assessing, and selecting media channels and platforms to reach a well-defined target audience. Media planners determine how, where, when, and why a business will share media content to boost awareness, reach, engagement, and drive ROI through paid advertising. A media planner is responsible for developing a coordinated media plan for a given advertising budget. The more that budget is optimized – or stretched, as they like to say in the media world – to reach the largest audience for the lowest cost, the more ROI can be generated. The sole purpose of media planning is to get a brand in front of the right audience at the right time and persuade them to purchase a product or service. But wait… What is a media channel? A media channel is a broad media class or medium used to deliver advertising messages to prospective customers. Traditional media channels include television, print, radio, outdoor advertising, and events. However, these days, media planners could hardly expect to run an impactful marketing campaign without covering a vast array of digital channels. Digital media channels include paid social media ads, search engine marketing, email, native advertising, audio streaming services, and more. Once the target audience is established, media planners move on to strategizing which channels would be most effective. Then, the next step is to determine which media vehicles and content types could garner the best results. 0 3 And what is a media vehicle? A media vehicle refers to a specific channel advertisers employ to reach their intended audiences. It could be a page in a local newspaper, a TV talk show, or a LinkedIn remarketing ad. Within a broader, general category of media, planners will pick out a varied mix of media vehicles to reach a target consumer group on multiple occasions and influence their perception of and interest in a product or service. So, when planners talk about ‘selecting the right mix of media vehicles’, they refer to the process of picking out the most effective combination of media – from a sponsored podcast or niche email campaign to an ad on a side of a city bus. Media planning vs. Media buying: what’s the difference? How is media planning different from media buying? Although the two processes often get lumped together, media planners and media buyers play distinctly different roles in the media advertising mechanism. Let’s look at the main differences between media planning and media buying, and how both sides work in tandem to deliver the best results. 0 4 What do media planners do? Media planners are tasked with figuring out what media will be the most effective at achieving marketing objectives. Like the name implies, media planners carry out research, identify the ripest opportunities for achieving what the client/brand wants, outline campaign goals and objectives, and allocate budgets for the chosen media mix. In short, media planners take care of all the behind-the-scenes intel required for a successful integrated marketing campaign. The key responsibilities of a media planner include: Internal market research: External market research: Uncovering and understanding the client’s Assessing the advertising landscape, brand identity, positioning, USPs and buyer competitor activities, past and current personas. campaign performance, target audience insights and the most effective media channels for the intended audience. Setting campaign goals & objectives: Determining the budgets: Ensuring campaign profitability by Based on the information uncovered allocating budgets and deciding what throughout their research, media planners percentage of the budget will be spent on bear the responsibility for setting ambitious each channel. but realistic and achievable goals for their advertising strategy. 0 5 What do media buyers do? Media buying is the other side of the advertising coin. Media buying refers to the process of securing media space – be it a time slot, ad space or an endorsement – to meet campaign objectives in the most cost-effective way. Media buyers have a very intimate understanding of the marketplace and a long list of contacts/relationships with media vendors they’ve built over the years. The key responsibilities of a media buyer include: Developing & leveraging relationships Negotiating: It’s all about who you know when it comes Media placement pricing is not set in to traditional media buying. Leveraging stone. Keep in mind that you can discuss trusted relationships within the industry and the pricing and your budget with the knowing the right people in the right places, vendors to bring the price down. Media can help media buyers drive impressive buyers are in charge of negotiating better ROIs. rates and optimising their budget to run more cost-effective campaigns. Tracking and tweaking campaigns in motion: Although media planners build out the strategy, media buyers are the ones calling the shots. Tracking campaign performance in real-time allows media buyers to make quick adjustments or instantaneous shifts While for some media planning vs media to keep the plans on track and achieve their buying is a debate, the truth is that a objectives. robust media strategy relies on both to achieve high-impact business results. In fact, with the advancement of online advertising technology, greater reach and personalization, it’s vital for media planners and buyers to work collaboratively and sync their processes in real-time. 0 6 The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on media planning The complexity of the media planning Of course, data-driven audience insights and buying process is staggering. There is nothing new in media planning. Yet the are so many moving parts involved that focus on mining real-time data is a newly managing integrated marketing rediscovered superpower. campaigns is becoming a challenge in itself. Throw a global pandemic into the Uncovering emerging trends early allows mix and you have a code red situation at marketing teams to act in time and be hand. part of the conversation. And more importantly, it provides them with dearly And while there’s no playbook for these needed context for better tailored ad unprecedented times, it seems crisis can creatives and copy. be a perception-shifting exercise, providing us with renewed clarity and direction. Without a predefined plan for how to communicate with our intended Unsurprisingly, some great examples of audiences, we’re forced to be more data- trend-led consumer campaigns came driven, collaborative and opportunistic to from Google’s own media team. Having tap into real-time consumer intent. analysed Google and YouTube search trends during the first few weeks of the Consumer trends are driving global lockdown, they identified a media plans more than ever significant uptick in “bread baking” queries and jumped on the opportunity before to promote the Google Nest Hub screens in that context. Have they ever thought The outbreak of Covid-19 put many about using bread baking references to marketing teams in a pickle. As plans advertise their smart home display went out the window, marketers needed device? Probably not. Has it worked? You to find a new framework to ground them bet. in the unprecedented moment – that’s when they turned to trends and consumer behaviour data. 0 7 Case study Soft Surroundings, a women’s clothing brand, offers another excellent example of jumping on a rising trend. At the start of the pandemic, the brand was forced to drop the original spring catalog creative featuring travel scenes and look for new ideas to showcase their products in a more relevant context. That’s when they observed a surge in loungewear- related search queries and tapped into the traffic with a new home-appropriate campaign. The initiative led to an 18% increase in Soft Surroundings’ loungewear revenue and achieved a 6.5X return on ad spend. Rediscovering the power of real-time insights will most certainly serve savvy media teams in the post- pandemic world. Teams are acting on campaign As teams tightened the feedback loop performance data faster than with more collaborative analysis and they ever thought they could focused on hitting their media goals, media planning became more grounded A newly found sense of discipline has and less concerned with gloss and been another unexpected side effect of polish. Covid-19 on media planning teams. While digital marketing has always been With strained marketing budgets and touted to enable more speed, agility and increased pressure to deliver immediate transparency, its potential had hardly results, tracking campaign performance been tapped. The pandemic left no room became a number one priority for for gut-driven strategies and over- marketing teams. While, in pre-Covid complicated decision-making processes. times, marketers might have enjoyed more wiggle room to iterate, test and In fact, decisions that used to take days experiment with optimization tactics, or even weeks to make are now being zero tolerance is now shown for made in hours.