• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 31, 2005

On the heels of its 2004 win of Procter & Gamble's communications planning assignment, Carat has quietly picked up media planning for another account worth billions of dollars in media spending. And while the media shop won't get rich off the assignment, a pro bono account for public service advertising clearinghouse The Advertising Council, its work is likely to have a profound impact on the way some of America's largest media companies schedule PSAs.

In fact, the effort--the first media planning assignment ever awarded in the 62-year history of the Ad Council--was initiated because of management concerns at Time Warner, the world's largest media company. Time Warner executives were concerned that the millions of dollars in free ad inventory donated by the company each year were not being utilized as effectively as they would if the process were planned by media buying professionals like the team at Carat.

The initiative was sparked by Philip Kent, chairman-CEO of Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting System unit, a member of the Ad Council board, who realized the capricious nature of the process many media companies used to schedule public service ad inventory when he spotted one of Turner's ad traffickers rejecting a PSA for Amnesty International for the subjective reason that she didn't like the organization.

"The power she was wielding over public service announcements was tremendous," said an executive familiar with the incident, noting: "And there are people like her in every media company."

The episode convinced Kent that the Ad Council, and its media benefactors, needed a media planning road map to bring rigor and accountability to the process, and they turned to Carat, which is known for its strategic media planning approach and its media neutrality. Carat is not affiliated with any creative agencies producing pro bono ad campaigns distributed by the Ad Council.

Led by Carat President Charlie Rutman and Vice President-Director of Research Rob Frydlewicz, Carat assembled a team of six planners and research executives who worked en gratis for several months to develop target audience profiles for the 42 national campaigns currently being distributed by the Ad Council. The Carat team then matched the PSA target profiles with the audiences of various media outlets using syndicated research data such as Nielsen ratings to develop planning guidelines that can be used by the advertising and traffic departments of media companies.

"The challenging part for us was creating the targets," says Carat's Frydlewicz, noting that the PSA campaigns historically did not have the kind of disciplined targeting data that would be expected of a commercial advertising campaign. "Once we defined the targets, the rest was easy."

In a broader sense, the initiative speaks to the rising importance of strategic media planning and the need for media accountability. While the pro bono agencies and public service organizations may not have looked at it that way in the past, U.S. media companies have been donating the equivalent of $1.5 billion worth of commercial inventory to the Ad Council campaigns, making the organization one of the biggest advertisers in America.

"In the past, these organizations were just grateful that they were getting any media donated for their campaigns. Nobody raised the question of whether they should be targeting better," says Frydlewicz.