• by Lisa Seward , July 14, 2009

Call it crappy-economy-inspired paranoia, but lately I've been feeling increasingly concerned that media planners and buyers could become extinct. My worry is not that the people themselves will die out (although enough years in the ad trenches can have that effect), but that the positions they work in today will be outsourced, downsized and flat-out eliminated.

The bad guys in my imagined future aren't people in faraway countries who will do our jobs for less money, or corporate executives who will trim the rank-and-file to protect their own cushy existences. In fact, they aren't "guys" at all. They are technologies - computer programs and models and algorithms - which, through their sheer efficacy and brilliance of design, will make our very humanness a quaint anachronism of advertising days gone by. The only remaining need for so-called media people will be for a handful of technogeeks to keep the machines running, and maybe someone to translate all that's happening into layperson-friendly language for the boardroom.

Remember when people used to make these recommendations?" marketing executives will muse, chuckling at the notion of a mere human attempting to assess the best way to invest advertising budgets. Whirring behind them will be their MIRTA-bot (Marketing Investment Real-Time Analysis Robot), which will simultaneously assess the performance of current active budgets across the entire marketing mix, weigh alternatives, shift monies from one channel to another, bid on placements to assure the lowest market price, customize creative messages to achieve the strongest performance in every placement, and notify inventory systems of changes in product demand based on sales results. What used to be known as media planning will be a much more data-reliant mathematical puzzle, one too complex and multilayered for the relatively simple (not to mention entirely too emotional) human mind to decipher.

Obviously, fully functioning data operations like I'm describing won't be up and running tomorrow across all markets, but consider how today's largest direct-marketing and search-marketing operations work and you'll realize they're really not all that different. Computer models such as Google's make as many or more decisions as the marketers or media people themselves. Ultimately this will be the norm, and then there will be no escaping the truth: Machines can outperform people at the fact-based, multivariate decision-making game with one proverbial arm tied behind their back.

Because I'm a strident promoter of creativity in advertising, it might surprise you that I genuinely embrace this development toward data-driven marketing investment decisions. But I do, absolutely. First, it allows marketing budgets to accomplish more, which is supposed to be the reason we all do this work in the first place. Second, and almost more important at a time when those budgets are under such intense scrutiny, it allows marketers to prove that marketing does indeed work. Third, I choose to believe it's possible to allow facts about what and how advertising works to enhance creativity rather than stifle it. How cool would it be to know where to focus our thinking instead of stabbing blindly all over a blank white page in search of ideas?

But there's one more reason I look forward to the evolution of media planning into a technology-led enterprise: It will force those who work in our field to find more valuable ways to contribute. There are some supremely talented people working in media today, and to think that they will have to move beyond flowchart building and price negotiations to prove their worth makes me happy. In the near- to mid-term, there will be plenty of work designing and building these sophisticated databases, as well as conducting the incredible amounts of research necessary to populate them with initial data sets. As some shops have already figured out, there's also a fertile opportunity to sell any manner of communication-planning capabilities in the interim, while clients are not quite fully planted in the Land of Objectivity, but surely want to suggest they are. Best of all, from this author's viewpoint, a ceding of fact-juggling duties to machines frees us up to contribute what we humans still do best: invent ideas. We will create marketing upside not by boosting GRPs or trimming CPMs but by coming up with attractive, sticky brand engagements that work harder.

There's no end to the opportunities the great minds of media can create once forced to do so. It might take exactly that - force - to push our industry to new heights.