Titles matter. Calling someone a “media planner” sets up the wrong expectations about this critical role. In a world where everything is moving to segment-of-one and constant
agility, the term “planning” is a relic from a time when there was a push for an upfront plan so companies could get big buys done and just run their campaigns.
Media campaigns can no longer be managed sequentially. But they absolutely do need to be managed -- every day, relentlessly, across dozens of channels, targeted segments, performance
objectives, and changing environments. Media budgets are usually the biggest item in a marketer’s budget, and attract massive scrutiny from finance, which constantly questions whether an item is
expendable or essential.
“Media portfolio management” is what marketers need today. Taking a cue from how wealth managers stay on top of their funds, marketers
should embrace the parallels to the financial world, and rethink their strategies, operations and organizations accordingly. The parallels are not perfect, but they are many, and they are
instructive:
- From few investment choices to an almost infinite range of options
- From a constrained ability to make changes
to real-time adjustment
- From slow feedback loops to instantaneous tracking
- From a planning-execution, eventual-attribution
tracking cycle to a constant, relentless test/learn/optimize agility
Media portfolio managers have already become more than “planners,” but the job
remains unglamorous, tough, and always subject to challenge. Compensation to media agencies has been squeezed, as marketers move from commissions to mixes of retainer and performance-based measures.
And more marketers are bringing media management in-house, to get more control over data, lower costs, and increase the transparency behind their biggest expenses.
But to
succeed in today’s incredibly complex media marketplace, media portfolio managers need the tools to optimize performance across their full portfolio, track performance across it all, spot
aberrations, and constantly execute changes in real time. While advances have equipped media traders with sophisticated tools for subsets of channels (hello, Lumascape!), the same cannot be said for
portfolio management tools that help optimize and orchestrate campaigns across all media channels.
Getting the breakthrough to manage media portfolios requires AI -- focused on
bringing intelligence to radically simplify the integration, scenario modeling, transparency and actionability that fund managers would expect to have across their investments.
The biggest hedge funds and wealth managers have spent millions to build proprietary portfolio management systems. Very few media agencies or brands have the margins and talent
available to develop and maintain such a system.
But focused third parties are zeroing in on the opportunity. Instead of a fragmented set of media tools across channels, new
operating systems are emerging that stitch together data sources, intelligently surfacing the trends in cost and availability across every channel, and then presenting scenarios of how to best
optimize spend as budgets and objectives change.
This all gets especially powerful when marketers manage media in an agile manner, as a full portfolio, and build the
supporting organization and operations. One global CPG marketer is using Elsy, a media portfolio tool (disclosure -- a client) as the engine behind “media management pods” where data
scientists, strategists, and execution managers work as a unit across channels and segments, moving away from the company’s previously channel-siloed approach. It has also tightened the bond
between marketing and finance, moving investments up or down as daily models expose better possibilities.
The impact is becoming clear. Marketers who are combining AI with new
operating models are starting to achieve improvements of 30%+ in their ROI from media spend, leading to more investment going back in -- without incremental FTEs.
Segment-of-one
at scale is real, but, especially in media, you need the intelligent tools and operational capability to cost-effectively manage the explosion of complexity. Brands who are considering moving
more media work in-house, or media agencies looking to grow more efficiently, are taking the lead in adopting the media portfolio management perspective.
New platforms like
Elsy will become the backbone of future media operations. I now wonder whether this can also lead to an elevation of the “media planner” role to that of a strategic growth leader.
I’d say a universal improvement of 30% in return on media spend would go a long way toward not only improving companies’ financials, but also towards raising the stature of their
marketers.