Commentary

Planning 101 - Beyond Price and Placement

I was realizing this past week, after returning from vacation, that some of my more recent articles may not have been as sharp as I would have liked and I decided I need to get back to writing about ideas that are applicable in our every-day working lives.

As a result, I thought I would share some planning insight... take a moment to recap some of the less obvious aspects of what a strong media plan needs to consider in today's market so that that the planning side could take account of whether they are doing their jobs effectively, as well as to let the sales folks in on the secrets of what we examine when putting together a media recommendation beyond the obvious.

Today's planning environment is more sophisticated than it was 3 years ago and thankfully so. In today's market, a media recommendation needs to incorporate more into a decision than just price and placement. The following are three of the elements that need to be considered:

  1. Share of Voice
    SOV refers to the percentage of advertising available in a specific area/placement that you are purchasing. Typically it is not recommended to purchase more than 50% initially if you are to be running a DR campaign, but if you are running a branding campaign, than you may certainly look to own the area and purchase as high as 100% of the inventory that is available. From the 50% mark, you can then analyze whether you should expand and reduce your SOV based on the effectiveness of the campaign. Sales people also need to be realistic when they are pitching a placement and should consider the SOV element ahead of time and how it relates to the goals for the campaign. If you are too high on SOV parameters, then your frequency can increase and you reduce the effectiveness of your campaign very quickly.

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  2. Clutter
    When considering whether to recommend a placement, we need to consider how the ads will be viewed on the page. If the unit is large and impactful, then it will surely be recommended above a competitive placement on someone else's site that is mired in a sea of ads. On the flipside, if the ad unit is too intrusive and potentially annoys the user, then it can be detrimental to your brand and is not to be recommended. From a sales perspective, if your site has too much advertising on the page, then you may want to make a change and reduce the clutter so as to improve the effectiveness of the ads that your audience will see. You will certainly get better advertisers if you do.

  3. Recommended Creative Refresh
    This is an element that we generally take into consideration, but a sales person that shows some forethought and provides data or a recommendation as to when creative may need to be refreshed certainly wins points in my book. That demonstrates they are thinking on behalf of our clients by taking a look at when other effective advertisers felt the need to make creative changes on their sites. The sales person should know and understand the habits of their audience better than we do, so please feel free to pass along that information. If the sales folks are not passing along this information, at least the media people should be thinking about it and making these recommendations to their own creative departments. The media person knows the data better than anyone else and should be able to formulate an opinion as to when a creative refresh should occur.

    These are elements that go into the planning process, but are also elements that need to go into the analysis of a campaign. The daily or weekly analysis of key campaign metrics needs to consider these as well as other more traditional elements such as click rate, conversion rate, brand perception, awareness, etc. Each of the elements mentioned above has a profound impact on performance, whether they are DR or Brand related.

    Be sure to take these into account when planning and pitching business. If you don't, your competitors will be and they will be the ones to win all the business.

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