• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 12, 2005

If there was any doubt that strategic planning now rules the media services field, it was put to rest Wednesday when one of the industry's foremost planning organizations beat out one of its top buying groups to handle one of the world's largest media buying assignments. On the surface, General Motors says its decision was driven primarily to improve operating efficiencies, meaning it would likely save on processing costs and compensation fees associated with managing two disparate planning and buying agencies, but the move has profound implications for media services overall.

The re-consolidation of GM's media planning and buying occurs at a time when there has been a rising backlash against the disintegration of media services, especially the separation of strategy and execution, whether it is the unbundling of creative and media, or the more recent trend of unbundling planning and buying.

The move raises questions for other big marketers, including the world's biggest, Procter & Gamble, which still has a somewhat unbundled approach to planning and buying. If re-integration of planning and buying is the new vision, it could put pressure on the entire media services field, which has progressively unbundled planning and buying, not so much on the client side, but on the agency side. Most big, medium and small ad agencies have unbundled buying to dedicated media shops, but maintain media planning for their accounts in-house.

But the new GM planning/buying structure goes one step beyond traditional integration. It actually manages to do something organizationally that clients and agencies have failed to do culturally for years: have their strategies drive their executions.

Even in the best of organizational structures, there has always been a disconnect between planning and buying. Planning departments may develop elegant media strategies based on sophisticated research, but the subtleties of those plans get lost when they are implemented by buyers who must react to marketplace conditions: what's available, how much it costs and a variety of negotiating tactics that can sway a deal from one decision to another.

It's not just symbolic that GM's new buying department will be called Planworks.

"The Planworks staff will be expanded to include buyers. We are not condensing the function into one," says an SMG insider, noting, "Broadcast buying, by the way, will be handled out of New York City."

By putting planning in charge of buying, GM Planworks will call all the shots, making final decisions on what to buy and what not to, based on intelligence from its New York-based buying team. That makes buying a strategic function, not a tactical one.

It's also fitting that this new structure should evolve within SMG, a media services group whose new mantra is "re-aggregation." By re-aggregation, the agency means that the future of media planning and buying will be based on re-aggregating media audience reach among consumers using much more fragmented, addressable and personalized media than ever before. But it also could be used to describe the re-aggregation of strategy and execution.

When GM General Director-Advertising and Media Operations Betsy Lazar initiated the media buying review earlier this spring, she said was to create a more streamlined and efficient unit, but one that also had a "greater focus on innovative, strategic media buying."