• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, September 25, 2024

It’s 2024, and a media planner’s best friend, and most utilized tool, is still Microsoft Excel?

Yes, that is a mind-boggling fact.  I was at the MediaPost Planning & Buying Insider Summit last week, and Editor In Chief Joe Mandese showed a slide that rocked my world, showing that as much as 85% of all media plans are still being created in Excel.   In an industry dominated by talk of AI, automation and programmatic media, how is it that media planners are still doing so much manual planning?

When you unpack that idea, it’s surprising and not surprising at the same time.  On one side of things, Excel is still very easy to manipulate and build out whatever form and layout you’re looking to plan.  It’s flexible, fast, and lends itself to collaboration in in an agency environment, where most of the planning still happens.

One more consideration: The landscape of media opportunities is vast, and constantly growing, adding more channels, formats and opportunities to reach a target audience.  The role of a media planner is complex, and a simple tool is probably best.

On the flip side, most ad dollars are spent in a few primary channels with a few large companies within each channel, and the fragmentation element can easily be laid out with fields to be manually manipulated, while aggregating a litany of publicly available data from various planning tools and platforms.

There’s an opportunity here for someone to launch a rather simple planning tool that would encompass 70%-75% of the basic channels and leave the rest to be manually updated, potentially even benefiting from the wisdom of the crowds with transparency around packages being purchased by advertisers.  Wouldn’t this radically simplify the planning and buying process?

Now I know I’m inviting myself to see a bunch of “What about our tool?” posts in the comments, and to some extent I welcome that -- because if you do have a platform like this, planners will want to know about it.

All that said, any company that posts in the comments below should be asked the simple question, “What’s holding you back?”  If you have a tool that’s easy to use as well as comprehensive enough to provide agencies with what they need to put together basic media plans across primary spending channels, you’re probably not marketing yourself enough.

I can envision a free service for the industry that has everything we need, but which also provides a viable community for advertising, events and more.  In other words, this is a VERY simple entrepreneurial idea, and I still wonder why nobody has done it yet.

I started my career as a media planner back in the day at long-gone DeWitt Media.  Many of my colleagues are still in the business, and we all have fond memories of those early days when the Internet was a brand-new channel catering to a few million people, rivaling CD-ROM advertising inserts in magazines.  It was easier then, and it’s much more difficult now, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be simplified for a free tool.  After all, with all the AI we have, can’t we figure this out, too?