• by Amit Rahav , August 10, 2011

Zagat, Yelp, and Amazon can give the best restaurant, local business or product recommendation by picking billions of brains.  Instead of doing their own research, these sites pull together and organize what we collectively know and make it easy for us to make decisions.

Conceptually, media buyers know about media placements much more than Amazon users know about books and cameras.  They buy millions of impressions and track their performance with powerful ad servers.  These ad servers yield mountains of data about each and every piece of inventory. 

While in theory this may sound plausible, in practice, many planners find themselves unable to evaluate the placement a rep is now pitching.  In many cases, the planner may not know the proportion of impressions that are served below the fold, or the likely conversion rate of that placement for his or her vertical.

In day-to-day operations, media buyers often find themselves as ill-informed as that hungry traveler browsing Yelp to find Chinese food in an unfamiliar city.  Why?

Infobesity. Yes, the information that you need does exist, but it would take you a week to get it.  What you are actually looking may be buried under a gazillion other data points that are irrelevant for your campaign.

The grim reality of planning.  Have you actually serviced an account recently?  Crazy deadlines, vendor fragmentation and painfully cumbersome tools are the norm.  Sometimes buyers consider themselves lucky to get the campaign out the door on time to rush onto the next campaign.  Extra time for research is a luxury that planners cannot afford.

Media independence.  If you expect the publisher to come to the rescue, wait.  Warren Buffet once said: Never ask your barber if you need a haircut.  Thus, asking your publisher for their performance data may not be the way to go about evaluating media.

Experience curve.  Planning teams are dynamic and commonly include relatively inexperienced team members that remain on the job for a short while. Agencies are in constant training mode facing a highly dynamic landscape.  Therefore, many media decision-makers do not have enough experience to make educated calls.

Some may argue that the entire notion of planning media by placement is obsolete, and that it is soon to be replaced by real time bidding (RTB), targeting and audience buying.  However, the more likely scenario is that media planning and RTB will co-exist and play different roles.  The main lesson to draw from the rapid ascent of RTB is that using robust data for decision-making yields better media buying results.  Media buyers should apply data-driven decision making to media planning to transform the field from experience-based, to process- and tools-based.

But aren't planning and buying tools suppose to make planners smarter? In the past, they haven't really lived up to the 'planning' bit of their promise.  Mostly, they ended up as buying workflow systems, while the media-planning decision support tools did not catch on. It is time for media planning to catch up with restaurants and e-commerce.  It's time for a new generation of planning technology, an independent Zagat of media placements.